Reading 01: The Economics of Hacking

Spreading the Hacker Ethic to a wider audience is a goal necessitated by tenants of the Ethic itself. To promote decentralization and convince people that computers can change lives for the better requires a hacker to endeavor to bring computing to new audiences. The hardware hackers from part two of Levy’s history undertook this task by seizing on a market segment that the “Big Guys” of computing, IBM and Intel, had willfully chosen to ignore. They were going to bring personal computers to the people, something which the tech giants at the time thought was improbable and unpopular. To dissipate the elitism surrounding computing the hardware hackers needed to break the machines out of the ivory towers at a few, elite universities and give the average person a positive interaction with the power of computing. This led to the Community Memory project which was sort of a locally hosted version of Craigslist to bring people from an area with similar interests together. Then the People’s Computer Company was born of Bob Albrecht’s success in running medicine show clinics for computing at high schools around the country. And after a philosophical disagreement about the level of technical education and exchange the PCC was meant for, Fred Moore and Gordon French established the Homebrew Computing Club which would become the breeding ground for the technical achievements that would make personal computing a reality.

The PCC and Homebrew Club can each be seen as serving the Hacker Ethic in two distinct ways. The PCC was the political arm of the Hacker Ethic. It evangelized computers to the community and gave people a platform to get started programming. The Homebrew Club was the technical arm that elevated the political agenda to a whole other level. The success at Homebrew gave the computer evangelists new, powerful weapons in their crusade. Both were necessary to bring about the age of personal computing.

Through their success, the Hardware Hackers in the Homebrew Club had to struggle with the economic demand for their inventions and the Hacker Ethic’s requirement that access to computers and information be free and unlimited. As hobbyists, many Homebrew members were hacking to make personal computing a reality in their own lives, but their discoveries paved the way for a whole industry operation. Creating a company based on hobbyist successes was, on one hand, good because it meant more of the useful inventions could be produced which would mean making the computer easier for common people to use. There were a number of businesses which started up like this around the Altair. It didn’t have much memory and the input/output mechanisms were archaic, so there was a high barrier to entry to who could use it. Once companies started selling accessories which made the machine more useful, that barrier to entry for interacting with the Altair was lowered. So, in this sense, it is good for the Hacker Ethic that these companies started up to mass produce useful devices and share the fruits of useful hobbyist projects with more people. However, making money flies directly in the face of the Ethic’s other imperative to have free and unlimited access to computing.

This tension came to a head over software when the Homebrew Computer Club started passing around copied versions of Bill Gates’ BASIC for the Altair. Bill Gates makes a good point when he criticizes the Club because who could afford to develop quality software for people for free. As I was reading, Bill Gates’ description of the economics of software development seemed very similar to the reason the government collects taxes. The government does jobs that unorganized societies either wouldn’t choose to get done or wouldn’t get done very effectively. Gates’ point about the need to incentivize and support good developers so they can continue developing is pretty salient. So there is this unavoidable tension between the drive to bring computing to the people and the economics of fulfilling that task while still putting food on the table for a family. I think there is a middle ground. It is ok to compromise on all computing resources being free and unlimited as long as it’s not done under monopoly where people are overcharged for these resources. There’s probably no efficient way to regulate this in practice though, so it is the responsibility of the hacker to hold themselves true to this Ethic.