What
is a Hacker?
In one sense it's silly to argue about the ``true''
meaning of a word. A word means whatever people use it to mean. I am not the
Academie Française; I can't force Newsweek to use the word ``hacker''
according to my official definition.
Still, understanding the etymological history of the
word ``hacker'' may help in understanding the current social situation.
The concept of hacking entered the computer culture
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. Popular opinion at
MIT posited that there are two kinds of students, tools and hackers. A ``tool''
is someone who attends class regularly, is always to be found in the library
when no class is meeting, and gets straight As. A ``hacker'' is the opposite:
someone who never goes to class, who in fact sleeps all day, and who spends the
night pursuing recreational activities rather than studying. There was thought
to be no middle ground.
What does this have to do with computers? Originally,
nothing. But there are standards for success as a hacker, just as grades form a
standard for success as a tool. The true hacker can't just sit around all
night; he must pursue some hobby with dedication and flair. It can be telephones,
or railroads (model, real, or both), or science fiction fandom, or ham radio,
or broadcast radio. It can be more than one of these. Or it can be computers.
[In 1986, the word ``hacker'' is generally used among MIT students to refer not
to computer hackers but to building hackers, people who explore roofs and
tunnels where they're not supposed to be.]
A ``computer hacker,'' then, is someone who lives and
breathes computers, who knows all about computers, who can get a computer to do
anything. Equally important, though, is the hacker's attitude. Computer
programming must be a hobby, something done for fun, not out of a sense of
duty or for the money. (It's okay to make money, but that can't be the reason
for hacking.)
A hacker is an aesthete.
There are specialties within computer hacking. An
algorithm hacker knows all about the best algorithm for any problem. A system
hacker knows about designing and maintaining operating systems. And a
``password hacker'' knows how to find out someone else's password. That's what Newsweek should
be calling them.
Someone who sets out to crack the security of a
system for financial gain is not a hacker at all. It's not that a hacker can't
be a thief, but a hacker can't be a professional thief. A hacker must
be fundamentally an amateur, even though hackers can get paid for their
expertise. A password hacker whose primary interest is in learning how the
system works doesn't therefore necessarily refrain from stealing information or
services, but someone whose primary interest is in stealing isn't a hacker.
It's a matter of emphasis.
Ethics and Aesthetics
Throughout most of the history of the human race,
right and wrong were relatively easy concepts. Each person was born into a
particular social role, in a particular society, and what to do in any
situation was part of the traditional meaning of the role. This social destiny
was backed up by the authority of church or state.
This simple view of ethics was destroyed about 200
years ago, most notably by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant is in many ways the
inventor of the 20th Century. He rejected the ethical force of tradition, and
created the modern idea of autonomy. Along with this radical idea, he
introduced the centrality of rational thought as both the glory and the
obligation of human beings. There is a paradox in Kant: Each person makes free,
autonomous choices, unfettered by outside authority, and yet each person is
compelled by the demands of rationality to accept Kant's ethical principle, the
Categorical Imperative. This principle is based on the idea that what is
ethical for an individual must be generalizable to everyone.
Modern cognitive psychology is based on Kant's ideas.
Central to the functioning of the mind, most people now believe, is information
processing and rational argument. Even emotions, for many psychologists, are a
kind of theorem based on reasoning from data. Kohlberg's theory of moral
development interprets moral weakness as cognitive weakness, the inability to
understand sophisticated moral reasoning, rather than as a failure of will.
Disputed questions of ethics, like abortion, are debated as if they were
questions of fact, subject to rational proof.
Since Kant, many philosophers have refined his work,
and many others have disagreed with it. For our purpose, understanding what a
hacker is, we must consider one of the latter, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855). A
Christian who hated the established churches, Kierkegaard accepted Kant's
radical idea of personal autonomy. But he rejected Kant's conclusion that a rational
person is necessarily compelled to follow ethical principles. In the book Either-Or he
presents a dialogue between two people. One of them accepts Kant's ethical
point of view. The other takes an aesthetic point of view: what's important in
life is immediate experience.
The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is
not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose
in terms of good and evil. At the heart of the aesthetic way of life, as
Kierkegaard characterises it, is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy
of present experience. The paradigm of aesthetic expression is the romantic
lover who is immersed in his own passion. By contrast the paradigm of the
ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time, in
which the present is bound by the past and to the future. Each of the two ways
of life is informed by different concepts, incompatible attitudes, rival
premises. [MacIntyre, p. 39]
Kierkegaard's point is that no rational argument can
convince us to follow the ethical path. That decision is a radically free
choice. He is not, himself, neutral about it; he wants us to choose the
ethical. But he wants us to understand that we do have a real choice to make.
The basis of his own choice, of course, was Christian faith. That's why he sees
a need for religious conviction even in the post-Kantian world. But the ethical
choice can also be based on a secular humanist faith.
A lesson on the history of philosophy may seem out of
place in a position paper by a computer scientist about a pragmatic problem.
But Kierkegaard, who lived a century before the electronic computer, gave us
the most profound understanding of what a hacker is. A hacker is an aesthete.
The life of a true hacker is episodic, rather than
planned. Hackers create ``hacks.'' A hack can be anything from a practical joke
to a brilliant new computer program. (VisiCalc was a great hack. Its imitators
are not hacks.) But whatever it is, a good hack must be aesthetically perfect.
If it's a joke, it must be a complete one. If you decide to turn someone's dorm
room upside-down, it's not enough to epoxy the furniture to the ceiling. You
must also epoxy the pieces of paper to the desk.
Steven Levy, in the book Hackers, talks at
length about what he calls the ``hacker ethic.'' This phrase is very
misleading. What he has discovered is the Hacker Aesthetic, the standards for
art criticism of hacks. For example, when Richard Stallman says that
information should be given out freely, his opinion is not based on a notion of
property as theft, which (right or wrong) would be an ethical position. His
argument is that keeping information secret is inefficient; it leads to
unaesthetic duplication of effort.
The original hackers at MIT-AI were mostly
undergraduates, in their late teens or early twenties. The aesthetic viewpoint
is quite appropriate to people of that age. An epic tale of passionate love
between 20-year-olds can be very moving. A tale of passionate love between
40-year-olds is more likely to be comic. To embrace the aesthetic life is not to
embrace evil; hackers need not be enemies of society. They are young and
immature, and should be protected for their own sake as well as ours.
In practical terms, the problem of providing moral
education to hackers is the same as the problem of moral education in general.
Real people are not wholly ethical or wholly aesthetic; they shift from one
viewpoint to another. (They may not recognize the shifts. That's why Levy says
``ethic'' when talking about an aesthetic.) Some tasks in moral education are
to raise the self-awareness of the young, to encourage their developing ethical
viewpoint, and to point out gently and lovingly the situations in which their
aesthetic impulses work against their ethical standards.
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