CSE 40842: Hackers in the Bazaar
Jeongseok Suh
Reading 08: The Noosphere
Throughout ESR’s essay on “Homesteading the Noosphere”, he talks about the culture of open source and the various customs that it generated along the course of its life time. In one section, he talks about the various forms of societies that have existed throughout the world currently as well as in the past. He outlines three distinctive forms of these societies.
The first is of the command hierarchy. This form of society is one that is formed when “scarce goods are allocated by one central authority and backed up by force”. Examples of this type of social structure can be seen in various social circles today, including organizations such as government, military, and organized crime. The second is of the exchange economy. This is when “allocation of scarce goods is done in a decentralized way through trade and voluntary cooperation”. However, the open source society is different from these forms of society. There is not a scarcity of goods, and instead, code, and – by relation – time and energy, is shared between people freely. This is due to the open source society being a member of a third form of society: the gift culture.
In a gift culture, social status is determined “not by what you control, but rather based on what you give away”. Examples of this can be seen by rich people, when they throw massive parties for their peers, or when they engage in philanthropy. Status is determined by the amount you can give out to others. Because of this, I can see people who are attracted to gaining social status via writing code that other people can use becoming attracted to the idea of open source. Through code, they can rise in the ranks of a society, fulfilling the basic desire of social status that humans share.
I can also see the appeal for open source for passion projects, or to find new areas of computer science to be passionate about. Following my own experiences, I have always been interested in game development, but never really new where to start. I didn’t want to build my own game from scratch as my first project, since I knew what I could personally do would be limited, and it wouldn’t come out to a quality that I would be satisfied with had I just started learning and started trying to code up a game myself. However, I recently found a game that is being developed via open source, which I am pretty psyched about. This way, I’m able to start learning more about game dev in a low risk environment, where I am immediately exposed to getting real progress done on a game.
I believe that the taboos present in the open source community are not only good but also necessary. I think that it really goes to show some character traits of the type of people who come to work in open source. For the most part, these are people who have a passion for open source, or at the very least a respect for it. I’m not sure why this analogy came to mind but it’s almost like if there was a communistic grocery store. If people all work hard to bring their own produce to this store, and every other person takes just whatever they need, the communistic grocery store works. Forking is almost like a person coming in, taking all the produce, and setting up their own grocery store. Distributing changes to a project without the cooperation of the moderators is like donating a dirty shoe to the grocery store. Removing a person’s name from a project’s history is like kicking out a donator from the grocery store, and keeping their produce.
I can definitely personally see the appeal in open source. I think if there were some technology that i utilized often, I would definitely consider taking on some tasks that needed to be done, in order to enhance my own experience.
Reading 06: Wealth Creation
I want to start off by saying I think Paul Graham is full of it. In these readings in particular, he seems extremely disassociated from real life, and takes on a savior complex type of dialogue. It was frustrating to read how he tries to justify millionaires and billionaires deserving to live in luxury, while the majority of the human race is struggling to find their next meal.
Going on now to the questions, I personally used to be entranced with the idea of starting a startup. Coming into college, I was full of ambition and had several ideas in mind that I wanted to try. I even went to the IDEA center and started an idea going through the IDEA pipeline, but never ended up following up on it. Another time, during sophomore summer, I was a part of a program called “Race2Revenue” at the IDEA center that gave me funding to create a startup of my own, in an incubator kind of format.
After these two experiences, I realized that a lot of that energy and excitement that I used to have towards trying to make a startup has died down. I learned more about myself through these two experiences, and learned that I personally am not enticed to the idea of creating a startup, necessarily, as much as I’m enticed to loving to make things. I enjoy the idea of startups, because you literally build an idea into fruition, and you have full control over everything that goes on in the project. However, there exists another side to startups that needs to raise money, give pitches, maintain good connections with potential stakeholders, and other business-side aspects that I’m personally not a fan of.
Saying all of this, I still think I would love to be a part of a startup, but I don’t want to be the main guy in the startup. I would gladly take the position of CTO, but CEO is a different story. However, I have tasted how difficult and stressful it can be, albeit in an extremely miniaturized form, and got a bit burnt out at the idea of startups. Perhaps sometime in the future, I’ll find the drive I had freshman year to build again.
I think Paul Graham’s justification for income inequality is complete BS. He sounds so detached from reality, it’s insane. Paul Graham is speaking from the point of view of someone who was able to buy a computer before most other people were able to afford it, and has never had to worry about where his next meal is coming from in his life. He talks about how the existence of rich people has made the overall quality of life better for humanity, because new technology results in a higher absolute quality of life for the general populace. However, what good is a car going to do when people can’t put food on their plate? Meanwhile, these billionaires sit on mounds of money, preventing it from being circulated in the economy, and use it to accrue more and more wealth.
While the game of wealth might not be a zero-sum game for the wealthy, for the general populace, it is. The more money that millionaires accrue, the less money that exists for the rest of the population.
I think the next big technological platform will be VR, as soon as better technology becomes available for it.
Reading 04: Nerds as Hackers
Paul Graham offers a much more human version of a hacker as compared to the ones described by Steven Levy. If we recall Steven Levy’s description of what a hacker was, these were all extremely technical individuals, who’s sole purpose in life was to program and develop out the field of computing. He even goes as far as to give a separate label to the “true hackers”, who were distinguished from the other types of hackers by the fact that these hackers truly lived and breathed solely to code. It seems that Steven Levy’s idea of a hacker were individuals who sought only to push forward the field of computing.
However, Paul Graham differs from this ideology heavily. He persists that a hacker is not simply an individual who dedicates their life to coding. He raises his nose at the term of “Computer Scientist”, claiming that the label boxes in a demographic that does not actually belong. He points out that although certain individuals, such as mathematicians and researchers, may not have an issue with the label of “Computer Scientist”, as taking on such a name comes with the added bonuses of scientific grants and funding. However, he makes the point that it also lumps in creators, makers, and hackers into this same umbrella term, which can have the negative consequence of making them feel as though there is something inherently wrong with the aspects of coding that they enjoy. He finds that these people, although coders, are more akin to painters and creatives.
This is the difference in image of what a hacker is between Levy and Graham. Levy’s description of the nerdy, geeky, hacker is replaced by the image of the creative painter by Graham.
I personally related to Paul Graham’s literature about why nerds are unpopular very compelling, and I agreed with many points that he raised. It was a perspective that I never really thought too much about, but now that I’ve read it, I completely agree with it. However, I do think that the idea of being a nerd is becoming more accepted by society, although I’m not sure if that’s just a byproduct of not being in high school anymore, or if American high school culture really is shifting to be more accepting of intelligence.
I personally identify much more with the kind of person that Paul Graham describes. The idea that hackers can be creatives, and not just coding machines that live, serve, and worship code sits well with me, and I can see myself in the shoes of a creative much better than I can of someone who codes all day. Although there is an appeal to Levy’s description of a hacker, I think that Graham’s description is much more practical and a real description of what hackers are like today.
Reading 03: Game Hackers
The game hackers were a generation where computers started to get popularized to the point of mass commercialization. The people buying computers were no longer the geeks and the weirdos, but rather the masses who had no intention on using computers to program them, but rather to utilize software that other people had created. With this surge in demand, naturally a surge in commercialization occurred. People saw an opportunity to capitalize on software, which led to a natural progression to commercialization.
These game hackers were different from the two preceding generations of hackers in a few major ways. We now see programmers being born not primarily from the love of programming, but rather primarily from the pursuit of economic gain. For example, Roberta Williams became hooked to computers after being introduced to a game. From here, she and her husband Ken started work on a new game, which they immediately turned around and tried to commercialize after it had completed. In previous generations, games such as the one they made would have been freely circulated around to the various hackers, to show off what they did. Instead, here we see a vast commercialization of software products that brought in more business-savvy people to the tech field.
In addition to this, I think this is one of the first times that we begin to see real specialization in the field of computer science. Prior to this point, it seems like people had been interested in a variety of topics, but games had always been a kind of side project that individuals would work on. Now we see entire companies being created solely focused on developing games for people to play.
I think that the game hackers contrast heavily with the true hackers, and slightly with the hardware hackers. These game hackers may initially be curious about computing for the love of computing, but are primarily motivated by the money. From the hardware hackers, we see many more similarities, but still we can see a divide in the motivation between the hardware hackers and the game hackers.
I believe that the idea that “now that there was a marketplace, [and] the real world had changed hackerism” to the point that Ken Williams “was convinced that hackers should be stifled; what’s needed is to guess what the marketplace wants, access to distribution channels, money, gimmicks, market promotion.” was a natural progression in the way that hacking was headed to. This free-spirited way of hacking is directly orthogonal to a business setting. In order to coordinate people and ensure a business runs smoothly, hitting deadlines and making sure that it runs at an appropriate pace, there has to be some level of organization. The true hackers hacked to have fun, while the game hackers hacked to make money. I think there are inherent differences in these two mentalities, and one of them had to give a little for the other to progress.
Addressing Steven Levy’s questions, I do think people benefit from their computers even if they didn’t program it. The increase in productivity from using computers is proven, and has spread across all fields, even outside of computer science. I think this kind of mentality no longer fits, as people no longer buy computers to program, but rather to work. I also think that if a company owns a piece of software that is not accessible to the public, but then the public goes on to benefit from that company, then the public has benefited from that software. Even if it can’t be physically used by the public, the software can still be of use to the public. I don’t think that the hackers could grab the ring and not be corrupted. I think that if people see an economic opportunity, they will take it and try to make money off of it.
Reading 02: Hardware Hackers
The True Hackers and the Hardware Hackers seem to be fundamentally different from each other. The True Hackers seemed to hack and develop out of the love of computing. They wanted to explore and be curious, and that drove them to extensive lengths to the point where some hackers would forego hygiene in order to keep on working on a hack. The Hardware Hackers were a bit different from this. Although many of them seem to have begun to hack out of a love for hacking, they seem to be more business minded and less communist on their approach to computers.
Here in the generation of the Hardware Hackers, we see the idea of a “hacker” begin to change. No longer are they nerds and geeks holed up in computer rooms, not interacting with anyone. We see a transformation into business-minded people, who may still be nerds and geeks, but want to commercialize what they are doing, although they may still have a love for hacking. We also see a much wider conglomerate of people, who are beginning to form communities to share ideas and projects with each other.
The largest difference between the Hardware Hackers and the True Hackers is on their ideology on how free computing should be. The True Hackers tended to believe that computing should be accessible to everyone. No one should be barred from accessing a computer and writing programs, and those programs that have been written should also be available to anyone for them to improve as they see fit. However, likely due to the increase in the Hacker movement, the Hardware Hackers tended to be more protective of the software they wrote. They even began to attempt to commercialize their software, with minds such as Gates, Jobs, and Wozniak all attempting to sell their products.
The Hardware Hackers were also innately different from the True Hackers because of their inclusivity. The True Hackers were, for the most part, small groups of people which were exclusive to people who were deeply intertwined with computers already. The Hardware Hackers tended to include new people and were willing to allow other people to join their meetings. In this way they tried to dissipate the “aura of elitism, and even mysticism, that surrounds the world of technology.”
As the Hacker Ethic started to spread through the commercialization of computers, there was a natural tension that started to form from the difference in ideology between the True Hackers and the Hardware Hackers. As some people tried to commercialize their products, there was pushback from the True Hackers in the form of replicating and distributing the products that had been sold to other people for free.
I tend to agree with Lee Felsenstein that technology can be a force for good. We can see all the good that it has had on society already, in that technology is now embedded in every facet of our livelihood. Already it has permeated so many aspects of our life, and will only continue to become more and more deeply embedded with human culture.
Reading 01: True Hackers
Steven Levy’s description of a “True Hacker” encompasses the group of pioneers in the field of computation who led the attack to develop and spread the influence of computers. These true hackers were a very particular type of individual mostly stemming from established institutions, particularly MIT and Stanford. He describes these true hackers as devoted geeks who were especially intelligent and did not do much other than hack. They would devote their entire livelihood to optimizing and creating computers. So much so that it wasn’t uncommon for hackers to forego general sanitation and personal hygiene, and many were also very antisocial.
Levy points to some examples of pioneer hackers and their descriptions in order to demonstrate what a true hacker was. Ricky Greenblatt was one of these pioneers. According to Levy, Greenblatt was an incredibly intellectual child, growing up building out electrical circuits and playing chess from a young age. However, after making it into MIT, he flunked out in his sophomore year as he was spending too much time hacking relay circuits at the TMRC and programming for the PDP-1 instead of concentrating on his studies. He was also known for being unhygienic. He also points to Bill Gosper, who was a math genius who managed to graduate on a Navy scholarship but worked to pay off his loans as he didn’t want to join the navy due to their culture of denying access to computers to programmers.
This portrayal of a “True Hacker” aligns pretty well with what I initially imagined. Although I didn’t imagine the portrayal of these hackers to be quite so antisocial, the first image that came to my mind was one of nerdy students hunched over their computers in a dark basement somewhere with dirty plates that still have bits of food residue on them. I imagined that these hackers would be slightly antisocial, and would rather be inside coding rather than outside with others.
My personal reaction to this depiction of “True Hackers” is, for some reason, a bit inspirational and as weird as it might sound, maybe even slightly romantic. I’m imagining almost a Dead Poet’s Society type of scenario, where these students are being pioneers for something that will turn much bigger than anyone else imagines. They devoted their lives to a cause that they believed in and loved, and nothing else mattered compared to what they were building. Although unhygienic, antisocial, and maybe even gross, they were able to start the push for computation which has transformed what our daily lives look like in almost every way, and our world today is a result of the actions they took.
To me, a “True Hacker” is somebody who advances the field of computation in ways that nobody else has before. These people are at the forefront of computation and are completely devoted to the cause of pushing the line where our knowledge ends. They are researchers, developers, students, and professors who are looking for answers that we don’t have yet, and constantly searching for ways to optimize, speed up, and build.
This being said, I think that I would love to be a “True Hacker”. This romantic idea of exploring uncharted terrain in computation makes me aspire to be a better developer. It inspires me to work harder to understand more in my field in order to help build out new technologies. I would like to leave my mark on computation as many other hackers have also done, and leave the field knowing a bit more than we knew before.
CSE 40842 