Hacker Ethos What is a hacker?

I had the enormous benefit of coming of age precisely in parallel with the discovery and maturity of the concept: hacker. The original hacker was into technology, no doubt. He (or she) was clearly an inheritor of the old nerd of chemistry sets and insect collections, but was of a different breed entirely. Meaner, more autonomous, more of an enthusiastic outsider. Che Guevera meets Carl Sagan? Sid Vicious meets Thomas Edison? The hacker started with code. Making code dance. More of an alchemist or magician than an engineer. The object wasnt to make something but to make something happen. To make the code do something that it wasnt strictly designed to do. To invent. Part playful, part cruelty. To invent, but not for any particular practical purpose. More of an impulsion. A need to see your will reflected in the code. A sense of empowerment. Self-help. And, obviously so utterly obviously the rules didnt matter. Not the structure of the code, not the laws of the state, hell not the laws of physics if need be. It was you and your abilities and your ethics. It started in computers, no doubt. But the hacker isnt of computing or even of technology. It is an ethos, a way of being. Stravinsky was a hacker. Remember how the people of Paris responded to his Hacks of Spring? When you get a feel for it, you can begin to recognize the hackers. You begin to see their influence everywhere. Everywhere the code has been made to dance. Everywhere someone has stepped outside the bounds of what is appropriate and simply made something come alive that has never been seen on earth before. Their fingerprints are everywhere. They are dangerous, these hackers. They certainly arent normal. Which doesnt mean that they arent healthy. Better to be healthy in your beautiful abnormality than unhealthy and normal. They are dangerous. But they are also absolutely necessary. The world is racing headlong into a maelstrom. The children of today will inherit a future that we cant even predict. They will be required to solve problems that we dont even know are problems yet. None of the way that we do things now will work. Most of education has already become all but meaningless. How can you teach people things when the amount of new information produced last year is more than the totality of all information produced over the previous five thousand years and is doubling year to year? Clearly, you can not teach them things. You have to teach them capacity. You have to make them capable. You have to make them into artists and physicians of reality. In a word hackers. Education must be hacked. And energy. And politics. And art. And life. And love. And meaning. And the hackers too will have to be hacked. There is a great deal of weakness in being an artist. Sadness and bitterness, fear and loneliness. Just because you have power doesnt mean that you have wisdom or the great health that is necessary. No one is born strong-

enough for life. But you can get there. The hackers too can be made to dance, they too can be made beautiful. I cant wait to see what happens then.