Reading 00: What Type of Hacker Are You?

Steven Levy’s “Hacker Ethic” posits a number of characteristics that make someone a true hacker. Among them, I am most interested by the guidelines concerning free and open systems and access to information. Naturally, passion for free and open systems leads to a distrust of the authority that governs the use of system and fosters a general disdain for bureaucracy. These two traits ultimately manifested in Chapter 5 with the creation of Stew Nelson’s Midnight Computer Wiring Society. I found these characteristics and the society itself both inspiring and a bit deflating. First, I have worked in a couple bureaucratic workplaces already, and I find it mind numbing how little can get done at times. As an incoming junior employee, I want to be the type of hacker who will get things done, even if it means taking risks to get others to perform or testing things first and checking boxes later. My favorite mentors have been those with similar dispositions. However, reflecting on how something like the MCWS would be received today on college campuses, I can’t help but realize how far we are from that time in computing history. A unilateral student group breaking into building and making adjustments to equipment as they seem fit would be a huge problem and probably with reason. Then I realized that modern young hackers can’t expect to act this way. I notice that hackers seem to attract hackers, and that young hackers can best set themselves up for success by working with senior, successful hackers to navigate the administrative processes that keep todays much more complex systems secure. This is something else I am going to keep in mind going into my job.

Beyond the drive to get things done and a disdain for red tape, “true hackers” as portrayed by Levy seem to have an obsessive focus on their work. No doubt, the world of computing was transformed by the early hackers’ ability to single track their lives. However, I don’t think I could ever be this kind of hacker. In class we discussed the difference between Levy and the Tech Model Railroad Club crowd and a hacker like Margaret Hamilton. I would put it this way. The first group did great things for computing and the latter did great things with computing. The book makes a similar distinction discussing Greenblatt and Gosper at the start of Chapter 5. Levy writes, “Greenblatt was hacker of systems and visionary of application; Gosper was metaphysical explorer and handyman of the esoteric (pg. 83).” One camp is entrenched in technology and pushes the envelope to create innovations, and the other is almost evangelical; bringing computing technologies to other industries and sciences to solve hard problems. There is nothing wrong with either, but I aspire to be the second. In fact, I think Notre Dame has an inclination to produce hackers skewed to this camp. The focus on liberal arts and well-rounded engineers would reasonably produce computer scientists with formidable technical skills and a calling to some other intellectual application. The field needs hackers of the first type, but personally, the potential to apply my skills in service to a final project or customer is more rewarding than the more nebulous and theoretical work that would fall on the shoulders of the other type of hackers.