The Hacker Manifesto by The Mentor
Summary:
The Hacker Manifesto is a short, but very clear and meaningful statement of the place of the hacker culture in our society, and the frequent mislabeling of hackers. It tells us that a hacker is not necessarily someone that spends their nights breaking into your computer and stealing your identity. While this is something that some people that fall under the definition of a hacker do occasionally do, hackers are generally people that simply change things in a system in order to make them suit their needs or just to make them work better. They are the people that define their lives by the computer and what they can do with them. They are generally the people writing the software that we take for granted and use daily. They were the people that our schools rejected and misunderstood, but now they are some of the people that we most depend on.
The author, “The Mentor”, or Loyd Blankenship is presumably a hacker that is explaining very concisely who it is that become “hackers”. Being someone who has found this article in the past, I would think that his intended audience is the person who is interested in hacker culture, and is mildly knowledgeable with computers. His stake in making these statements is to address the psychology and general societal misunderstanding of hackers and their motives. He wrote this manifesto after being arrested, so I assume it was in protest of this.
Inquiry:
My personal view of a hacker is not one of accusation or suspicion but something more along the line of reverence. I consider myself of fair intelligence, but the complexity of the systems that hackers understand, manipulate, and live for is sometimes mind-boggling to me. One of the most impressive things is that the best of them do it for fun, doing as a hobby things that are nowhere near the comprehension of the vast majority of the population. And even with all of the social stigma that comes with the term “hacker”, they are one of the unseen cornerstones of our digital society, often being the ones developing our computer software. In this respect I totally agree with The Hacker Manifesto when it says that hackers are misunderstood because they are above the social norms and limitations.
Questions:
1) What is your take on the term “hacker”? Do you personally assign it a negative connotation? Why or why not? When you think of a “hacker” what mental image comes to mind?
2) At the end of the Manifesto, it mentions using services without paying because it is run by “profiteering gluttons” (i.e. downloading software, music). Do you think that actions like this should be considered criminal? As Stallman also pushed for; should people be allowed to limit the distribution of intellectual property like software?
3) The Manifesto mentions that hackers are all alike. What is your take on this position? Do you see hacker culture as a sea of anonymous nerds all working independently towards a similar goal like The Mentor does, or a defocused group of digital delinquents?
3 comments:
I apply the term “hacker” to someone who looks to break code, whether it is legal or not. There are a lot of people out there, however, who do this for fun, of whom this article is speaking. I believe that the best hackers are the ones that do not do it professionally. I imagine most of them receive little to no income and live with family members. This is because they did not perform well in school because of their, dare I say it, advanced intelligence but find a challenge in reading code and finding ways to break it. Some hackers do it because they are mad at the big corporations, but some just love the challenge. Most hackers are not “bad” people, they just have a passion that requires undoing somebody else’s design.
A hacker, in my mind, has always been someone who uses their computer skills to their own advantage, making the personal decision if taking the advantage means breaking the law or not. To be honest the term did have a somewhat negative connotation in my mind until I read some of the readings over the semester and based on the discussions we have had in class. Now I realize that this negative connotation comes mostly from the media vilification and popular culture glorifying and romanticizing hackers today. They are shown as an overall group of lawbreakers and people who cheat the system to escape hard work to improve their lives. I do not place a negative connotation on the word anymore and take it for what it is without bias. As far as the mental image “hacker” evokes, previously it would have been teenage to mid-30s, pale, awkward, geeky, most likely male person who spends their entire day reading and learning code. Now however I realize that the term hacker, especially in an age of advanced technology, can be applied to every gender, body type and rank in the social hierarchy as it were.
I agree with Lauren that Hackers are romanticized, whether they are uber-villains or hip hackers working against the Man. However I when I think of hackers, I overlook the many individuals that just manipulate code as a simple hobby. Such as hacking that better improves a search tool on a browser such as https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb or like my friend Dan that bought an old video machine and hacked into it so that it performed different functions.
Also, I don't really agree with you Karl, when you said "I believe that the best hackers are the ones that do not do it professionally." I think many hackers hone their skills as hobby and do so with passion... but i don't think their persistnce and performance is relative to whether they do so professionally or not.
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