Hunting the wild hacker

Day 2: I walk past the sysadmin's desk, and see streams of code cascading across one of the two monitor screens flanked around him. "I'm looking at the code for KDE 2.0," he tells me, which he is painstakingly setting up. He's grumbling a little. The KDE 2.0 installation has been fraught with setbacks and unexplained crashes, and is very poorly documented. "I'm finding this difficult," says the sysadmin, fully aware of the implication that if this is tricky for him to master, then it would be well nigh impossible for the average person. He mutters about how he should write a script to automate the process. We discuss the possibility that someone has already written that script and uploaded it to the Web. We go a step further -- maybe he should write the script and get Freshmeat to link to it. He's pleased by the idea, but later, after inspecting Freshmeat's new redesign and deciding he doesn't like it, he puts the idea aside.

A few hours later, another sysadmin drops by the cube to discuss some weird memory issues that are cropping up on one of our internal network servers. I listen in on their conversation -- even though they quickly leave behind the realm in which I can fake comprehension, there's still always a chance that I can pick up some good jargon with which to impress other people. But after watching them for a little while, I am bemused by their body language instead of their words.

As they discuss a list of possibilities for what could be going wrong, one sysadmin goes through a sequence of Wing Tsun kung fu moves, aiming kicks and karatelike chops at his counterpart, who ignores the gesticulations while proposing various theories as to what has gone wrong.

Is this the hacker ethic in action? Without doubt, there is a playfulness to their interaction. It's not work in the old button-down, "let's have a meeting" 9-to-5 paradigm. But is it enough evidence upon which to construct an argument that the information age is ushering in a whole new way people interact with their work? And is their model transferable? In other words, could we all become hackers, sleeping in when we want, working when we want, on whatever we want?

Even better, could we all be sharing the fruits of our labors with our fellow humans? Because that's another part of the hacker ethic -- the idea that information should be shared, that software should be free, or at least freely copyable. Hackers, Himanen tells us, have a different relationship to money than normal folks do. They are not ruled by it; they don't do what they do out of a desire for money. They program because programming is intrinsically fascinating, and they share because sharing is righteous.

Much as I find certain aspects of the free-software ideology admirable, and even though I know plenty of hackers who fit into the categories Himanen describes (and plenty who do not), I'm not entirely convinced by Himanen's thesis. Hackers share because they can. And they set their own hours, whenever possible, because they can get away with it. The rest of us cannot.

One reason free software is able to flourish is that most hackers are able to earn their livelihood relatively easily, with enough leisure time to hack for the public good. The hours that they do spend working for the Man are well enough compensated to allow them to construct the rest of their lives in whatever fashion they might desire. A McDonald's cashier or a taxi driver is not so lucky. Free software is built on the reality that programmers are an elite class of worker, both indispensable and relatively rare. The hacker ethic, then, is a luxury.

Neither Torvalds' trivial foreword nor Castells' dense and jargony afterword dwell on the issue of the programmer's privileged place in the information society. Nor does Himanen zero in on the problem. He does have an excuse -- his book is not so much an anthropology or history of hackers as it is an essay attempting to formalize the value system that has grown up among hackers.

But it's a point worth contemplating, particularly in the current "dot-com downturn" era. Of all the various classes of people getting laid off right now, programmers have the least to fear, and demonstrate the least anxiety. Their skills will always be in demand -- no matter how bad the economy gets, technological progress will not stop. "The Hacker Ethic" is engagingly written and provocative, and indubitably commendable in its vision of a transformation of how all of us relate to our working life, but without rigorously examining the paradox of how it is that hackers are able not to care about money, it is significantly flawed.

Next Page: Riffing on a guitar when you should be debugging code

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