To define my “hacker”, I picked up a copy of Pekka Himanen’s “The Hacker Ethic.” I wanted to know who my hacker is and how I could bound the definition. The book is a beautiful description of the relationship between the hacker culture that rose out of the early sixties (Torvalds, Wozniak, Raymond, et. al) and the Protestant ethic described in Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Himanen takes us through the origin of the Protestant ethic as an evolution from a promise of “Sunday,” where Heaven is “a paradise of life without doing anything,” to striving for “Friday,” when we celebrate our hard, pain-filled work from the week. He concludes that hackers are more drawn to “Sunday” than to “Friday”, except that paradise is realizing the hacker’s passion while recognizing that this passion “may not be sheer joyful play in all its aspects.”
“The Hacker Ethic” was written in 2001, following on the heels of Manuel Castells’s “The Information Age” that described the new information economy and network society. I wonder how Himanen would write the book any differently today. Would he break hackers into categories beyond “crackers” and “hackers,” perhaps distinguishing gamers or quantified self followers? Or are these all ultimately just hackers, with a common ethic? And is the line between crackers and hackers so thick today? Is Julian Assange a cracker or a hacker?
What does the hacker ethic look like across the globe? While it is possible that the Protestant ethic and its baggage was shipped with the personal computer, it is more likely that local mentality adapted the personal computer to its own rich heritage of ethics. How are hackers different in Seoul, in Lagos, in Sao Paolo?
What impact does the hacker ethic have on the relationship between hackers and their market and the actors involved in delivering an innovation to that market? Why do we see so few hackers succeed in the business world? What distinguishes those who do? Is their success determined by the alignment of their passion with their product and the market’s desire? In other words, does this spark of innovation happen only when the hacker’s passion matches the desire of the market? What is the relationship between hackers and entrepreneurs – are entrepreneurs in fact hackers? Or are the hacker’s desire to spread innovation freely and the entrepreneur’s desire to capitalize on it perpetually in conflict?
I plan to continue exploring the sociology of the hacker through literature and conversations with hackers and hacker experts.
