Hacker Ethic

Hacker Ethic = the new work ethic based on the values and practices of the original hackers and open source programmers, but extending itself with the emergence of generalized peer production.

In my opinion, it should be seen as a counter-reaction to alienated Network Sociality.

It is also the title of a specific book.

Book: The Hacker Ethic

Source of the concept is the book: Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Random House, 2002

Quote from the back cover of The Hacker Ethic, by Pekka Himanen:

“Nearly a century ago, Max Weber articulated the animating spirit of the industrial age, the Protestant ethic. Now, Pekka Himanen - together with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells - articulates how hackers* represent a new, opposing ethos for the information age. Underlying hackers' technical creations - such as the Internet and the personal computer, which have become symbols of our time - are the hacker values that produced them and that challenge us all. These values promoted passionate and freely rhythmed work; the belief that individuals can create great things by joining forces in imaginative ways; and the need to maintain our existing ethical ideals, such as privacy and equality, in our new, increasingly technologized society."

Bio

Pekka Himanen

URL = [1]

Pekka Himanen is a Finnish philosopher and researcher on the information society, most well-known for his landmark book The Hacker Ethic, which updates Max Weber's classic on the Calvinist work ethic. In his book he shows how network society is both exacerbating the Calvinist work ethic to the point where it becomes immoral and unsustainable, while also creating as a counter-reaction the new hacker ethic, which is based on a peer to peer ethic. The hacker ethic in this broad sense of cooperative working should not be confused with the more specific sense of the ethic of computer hackers.

Website at [2] ; Email him at [pekka.himanen@hiit.fi]

The Wikipedia entry on The Hacker Ethic at [3] A random review at [4]

Discussion

A view on the hacker ethic by Richard Barbrook

From the "Manifesto for ‘Digital Artisans:

4. We will shape the new information technologies in our own interests. Although they were originally developed to reinforce hierarchical power, the full potential of the Net and computing can only be realised through our autonomous and creative labour. We will transform the machines of domination into the technologies of liberation.

9. For those of us who want to be truly creative in hypermedia and computing, the only practical solution is to become digital artisans. The rapid spread of personal computing and now the Net are the technological expressions of this desire for autonomous work. Escaping from the petty controls of the shopfloor and the office, we can rediscover the individual independence enjoyed by craftspeople during proto-industrialism. We rejoice in the privilege of becoming digital artisans.

10. We create virtual artefacts for money and for fun. We work both in the money-commodity economy and in the gift economy of the Net. When we take a contract, we are happy to earn enough to pay for our necessities and luxuries through our labours as digital artisans. At the same time, we also enjoy exercising our abilities for our own amusement and for the wider community. Whether working for money or for fun, we always take pride in our craft skills. We take pleasure in pushing the cultural and technical limits as far forward as possible. We are the pioneers of the modern." (http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/hrc/theory/digitalArtisans/t.1.1.1 )

On the necessity of open collaboration

" The free sharing of information - in this case code as opposed to software development - has nothing to do with altruism or a specific anti-authoritarian social vision. It is motivated by the fact that in a complex collaborative process, it is effectively impossible to differentiate between the "raw material" that goes into a creative process and the "product" that comes out. Even the greatest innovators stand on the shoulders of giants. All new creations are built on previous creations and themselves provide inspiration for future ones. The ability to freely use and refine those previous creations increases the possibilities for future creativity." (http://news.openflows.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/23/1518208 )

Tony Prug: the hacker ethic and the protestant ethic

From http://rabelais.socialtools.net/FreeSoftware.ToniPrug.Aug2007.txt:

"Hackers and the Protestant ethics

For Himanen_(2001), it is the hacker ethics that drives the development of Free Software. Hacker not meaning just a computer specialist of certain type, but any person who practices some of the hacker ethics. It was Levy_(1984) who first formulated main point of hackers ethics as: a) access to computers (and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works) should be unlimited and a total, hands-on approach is imperative; b) all information should be free; c) mistrust authority and promote decentralization; d) hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position; e) you can create art and beauty on a computer; f) computers can change your life for the better.

Hackers are inclined to become obsessed with their work. They pursue it relentlessly, often at the expense of other aspects of life. Because of this, they have been portrayed as anti-social, weird in ways which ``normal human beings cannot understand. Yet, their work differs significantly from what we consider today to be a dominant paradigm of capitalist society, the Protestant work ethic. According to Himanen, it is social motivations that separate those two ethics: in the Protestant ethic work has invaded leisure and aspects of private life, like finding a spouse and having friends, are frequently carried out work. Those social activities at work serve in the Protestant ethic to distract attention from the idea that pursuing one's passion should happen at work too (Himanen, 2001: 51). Although for hackers what they do (but not necessary the employment) is passion, why would people in such large numbers work in their leisure time too just to give the result of their work away in the public domain, for free? The linking of a contribution to society with passion is what for Himanen characterises the hacker ethic a powerful model. Recent empirical research in which 680 Free Software programmers were interviewed concluded that enjoyment is the biggest reason why hackers do what they do (Lakhani_and_Wolf, 2003). A paradox that remains theoretically unresolved is how can people with such socialization elements (high priority to work, frequent aspects of strange communication with other people) and values of individual freedoms have at the same time such a firm link to the society and what they consider good for it. The company Google understands this well and implements aspects of it in practice by allowing its engineers to spend twenty percent of their time at work working on their own technical projects, not necessarily linked with what company does. For a hacker, ``making a living is a depressive, unbearable option that he replaces with ``it's my life, as Himanen_(2001,_40) correctly observes. The curse of the Protestant ethic of work as necessary suffering that one is obliged to withstand, the iron cage built by our rationality, as Max Weber concluded on the character of this modern lockdown of humanity (Weber, 1965: 182), thus, even more paradoxically, gets hacked, reused in unexpected, unintended ways, by the people engaged in one of most rational tasks, computer programming. Is that not what hackers are doing to the computing tools and global communications networks built to a large extent for military and profit making purposes, reusing them in their own way, redefining some of the core postulates of our time: why do we work how we work, what is our relationship with the product of our work and what do we do with the results? The answer to the question "why" is for hackers clear: because it is pleasure, not suffering. How? In collaboration, sharing the results and internals of what is produced, with open access for anyone whose material conditions allow them to observe and engage in what is done. Can hackers have the last laugh, as simultaneous co-creators of the iron-turns-silicon cage and its hackers?

When Max Weber concluded that the Protestant ethic is a driver for he development of capitalism, his main argument focused on an ethic of dedication to work, and, most importantly, of saving the profits, which in turn leads to the investment of accumulated capital. This was one of the key elements how, according to Weber, the capitalist machine got moving. Castells (1996: 200) agrees with Weber and adds that to explain society today, we need to have ``some kind of cultural glue that makes social actors behave in similar fashion on a large scale, and that purely rationalist explanations, for something as large as emergence of capitalism, aren't enough. There are also recent works (Mikkonen_et_al.,_2007) in which very similar conclusions are drawn, this time from empirical data collected, through interviews and questionnaires, from communities of programmers. The findings reaffirm some findings of Himanen's Hacker Ethics, most known of all writings in this direction, stating that motives for participation in open source and free software production today are mainly for the material benefit of participants. Yet, Himanen's research left many questions open and posed hacker ethics as a threat to protestant ethics, while Mikhonnen's research concludes that some sort of special ethics of hackers is a myth. Overall, these researches agree with Weber's use of concept of the Protestant ethic as the spirit of capitalism and analyze hackers in relation to it, starting from the hacker ethic as being in opposition to the Protestant ethic, and concluding that reality is lot simpler, since hackers end up joining the forces of capitalism and the Protestant ethic in the end.

None of this was convincing enough for me, starting from Weber's use of only a few elements of Protestantism, followed by a superficial use of his work in the sociology of hackers during last ten years[6]. They agree with Weber all too quickly, and offer no close reading of Weber's work, nor of the key concepts (religion, Protestantism, rationality) that made that work possible. Himanen's work touches upon the kind of reading that I believe is necessary, but it is still playing it far too safe in far too many areas. I'm tempted to start from the opposite position. For the benefit of his conclusions on Protestantism as the spirit of capitalism, Weber presented Protestantism as a single, unified whole, although he was fully aware that that was not the case. Using Weber's conclusion presents us with an all too easy to use, yet deceiving, formula. To use it as label, as a quote that one can just attach to one's work, as Castells and others do in explaining social phenomena of hackers and our computing age, betrays both the complexity and the richness of Weber's work and of the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Hackers are not a challenge to the Protestant ethic, quite the contrary. I'm tempted to claim they are far more protestant than what capitalism can bare, hence their uneasy fit. Open Source is a movement that, with quite some success, attempted to ``pacify Free Software, to bridge the gap between Free Software and capitalism. Project Oekonux is a good example of an opposite theoretical approach. The move of the Open Source initiative to bring Free Software closer to capitalism shows that: a) there is a gap between the Free Software movement and capitalism; b) without a significant institutional intervention and re-interpretation that gap can not be overcome; c) more than practice (since practice of Open Source doesn't differ that much), it is the founding documents, principles that Richard Stallman stands by so fiercely that are the bite that capitalism can not subsume, swallow in its original form. Re- interpretation work that Open Source, and to a large extent publisher O'Reilly, did, was necessary for inclusion of Free Software into capitalist economy. The task that I set for myself is similar to that of the Oekinux project, with a different path of investigation: to conceptualize, give a theoretical form to that which resists capitalism in Free Software. An expression of the hacker ethics needs to be hacked to enable future, social, hacks." (http://rabelais.socialtools.net/FreeSoftware.ToniPrug.Aug2007.txt)

More Information

1. See also The Hacker Manifesto and the Play Ethic
2. The Hacker Ethic and Meaningful Work. Tom Chance, essay