To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture.
It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them.
The Jargon File offers a more balanced and intricate exploration of The Hacker. It's always worth a read.
I will not argue the angst angle or semantics of manifesto, but given the context of who and when they wrote it, it was and can still carry some weight. But just as your comment betrays your age (I think?), so does mine. I remember going to 2600 meetings in the lower plaza of the Citigroup building once a month.
At that time, someone told me Feds come and photograph to record attendees (all 5 or 8 people if a good turnout). I was new, and laughed it off, until I say two guys taking snapshots (no digital cameras then!) our way. We would wave at them.
Good memories of HOPE 1994 too. Funny to see the back of my head in some of the videos of it posted to YouTube. They were put up only these past 3 years or so.
I also remember the weight of the situation hit me at the least expected during Phiberfest at Irving Plaza, NYC in 1995, celebrating Phiber Optik's (Mark Abene) release from prison.
I don't think taking chances with your time, and someone else's money (VC) is the same as putting yourself out there the way it was in late 70s, early 80s as a hacker.
I think modern 'Hacker' culture as popularly used now, is more 'three-piece', and that anything that may be actually legal, but more on the darker side is actually attacked by modern 'Hacker' culture.
Whether you agree with Anonymous, whose manifesto borrows some from The Hacker's Manifesto, it is more in line with the meaning of the word 'Hacker' to me, and less ameliorated like over-cooked, over-watered oatmeal of the word's usage today by self-described hackers.
We found out that the SS was filming through hotel mirrors in a couple of rooms during Summercon 88. Poor Knight Lightning had to watch hours and hours of nothing but drunken shenanigans (because nobody trusted the dude who showed up out of nowhere claiming his handle was the "Dictator", so basically we trashed his room. I left a blender in there, the only thing I did in that room was mix batches of Margaritas.)
When we had an LOD meetup in Dallas in 1989 or 1990, we changed hotels at the very last minute to avoid a similar situation...
As an early teen when I first read your words ~25 years ago, I immediately related. Even more so a few years later when I was kicked out of my high school computer classes, banned from touching the computers, and then when the FBI showed up at my home (unrelated).
All these years later, it feels odd to see this here, read your comment, and write a reply. Your words served as "inspiration" to probably thousands of youth. I hope you're doing well.
For me, aged 12, the manifesto was a beacon telling me that I was not alone. Nobody I knew IRL shared my interests, no authority saw my curiosity as anything but disruptive. But now I knew there were people, enough of them that they had a name and a 'manifesto', that I started on the road to feeling OK about myself. Through subsequent expulsion from school, arrest by the SS, and worse, that confidence kept me going and eventually helped me turn my life into a positive story. +1 for these words serving as inspiration. Honestly changed my life.
Great story. Glad you're posting here, a real treat. I used to belong to Echo in NYC, and met Mark that way once or twice.
I second your thoughts on 'Hackers' with the exception of its introduction of Angelina Jolie ;) For the record, there were no teenage girls like her around the hacking culture back then; what am I saying? There were no women at any of my meetups, period. I am glad to see that has changed, although there is a long way to go still.
I remember reading your words in my early 20s; it was motivating in a good way for me. It gave me a reason to introspect more on my activities, which were pretty misguided from 1978 on my Commodore PET with cassette drive to the computers I use nowadays.
Swapping prisoners: I had left NYU in 84. Before then you could, if you were so inclined, use your Bobst Library login credentials to telnet into the backend mainframe (Dec PDP 11 or Dec Vax's - can't remmeber). They had an off-campus 777 dial-up though. Ah, modem dial-up tones! I think somebody claimed to have logged on to a Houston NASA computer, and then the SYSADMIN popped on and asked that they identify themselves! ;)
Oh, I would believe it alright. I would have emailed you too at the time. As much as she is the cliche Hollywood leading, she is not. There was enough of the fringe then, and still, that it appealed to my fringe self ;)
Anyway, I never took jobs in infosec, or IT after having had gained all of that experience with the exception of an DBA position when times were tough. I left computers for work, and only use them for fun - coding, animating, livecoding music and visuals, and amateur game dev. Oh, and geeky mathematics stuff!
I was jaded by the office cube syndrome, and web dev becoming the 2000s equivalent of becoming a word proccessor in the 80s (remember that? Learn Word or WordPerfect and earn big salaries?). Nobody correlated it with just transferring typing skills to a computer. There was the occasional hacker/guru who wrote mail merge macros and such, but after the low-hanging fruit was had, it was spellcheck all day!
I went on to do things like technical design, engineering and fabrication of show action equipment, technical diving to service underwater electrical and hydraulics, rope access work, and multimedia, and other stuff where I could apply code in creative ways - automation, math visualizations, and multimedia.
Can you introduce me to Angelina? Oh, never mind, Brad would kick my butt!
Amen Brother/Sister Hacker is not some one who is doing cut'n paste webdev :-)
A lot of so called "hackers" are like david brent unfortunetly
And I say this as some one who was asked by a senior press officer to respond on behalf of my employer (bt) on alt.2600 - unfortunately SD (BT Security) nixed that
It's slightly anticlimactic when the comment being responded to is a casual dismissal completely missing the context of the text. I've seen plenty of stories on HN where there's some random flamewar on top and the authors insightful comments are at the bottom. For the backstory by the author you're better off with the talk given at HOPE in 2002.
I was about to jump on an airplane, and didn't really have time for a nuanced response. The OP comment is, likely, from someone who has no idea what hacker culture was like in the 1970s and early 1980s, so I can see how he doesn't find it very relevant to his life today.
And he's absolutely right that it was angsty venting (I was 19, so I'll even allow adolescent). That doesn't mean that it didn't resonate with multiple generations of hackers in the 30 years since.
Since the term hacker has become so widespread I think it's hard for people to appreciate the difference between scenes calling themselves hackers, but also to recognize other forms of computer subculture.
I also think the previous commenter makes a mistake in not recognizing the influence of teenage angst on hacker culture, like many other subcultures.
Young, mostly male, persons form groups, use nicknames, makes their own publications, rejects the (some) rules of society and try to decide who is the best is almost every subculture at the end of the last century. From punkrockers and ravers, to graffiti writers and street gangs.
I think there's value in knowing how things were and what makes a culture.
Pleased, because I think I'm the answer to the trivia question "What was the first email address to ever appear in a major movie credit roll". Sad, because, damn, is that a bad movie.
I feel you on that. Tron and Sneakers are both more fun, and Sneakers captures computing more accurately.
On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his eyeballs in computing. It's also the first piece of fiction I know of to reference Symbolics. And of course, the protagonist's name is Bob Oliver Francis Howard. Because that book just couldn't get any more in-jokey. But, you know, in a good way.
"You" and "Daemon" also capture bits of computing fairly well.
If you mean the protagonist's full name, it's only mentioned in "Pimpf" AFAIK. And even then, not directly. I had to have TvTropes help me put it together.
I think it's a great bit of campy cinema. It's like Wet Hot American Summer with ravers and 90s cyberculture. It's a lot better today than it was when it was made. Instead of lame it feels charmingly funny and nostalgic.
For all the factual inaccuracies in this movie - which was like 99% of it - I think they have done an amazing job relaying the spirit of the manifesto - the general notion that hacking, as a culture, is really about challenging yourself and satisfying your curiosity.
I quite enjoyed Hacker, albeit to laugh at. But I've seen far worse "Hacker" themed movies. Though it party helps that Hackers has aged pretty well compared to many of the others.
Going back to your point about being angst: if it's any consolation, that's how I felt as a teenager as well. I didn't come across your manifesto until quite some years after it was written but it definitely resonates with how I felt at the time as well.
Well, for what it's worth, there's this comment on IT stuff in movies:
"We write those scenes to be inaccurate and ridiculous on purpose.
I'm a young writer in his mid-30's, computer and game savvy. Lots of us are. I guess you could call it a competition of one-upping other shows to see who can get the best/worst "zoomhance" sequence on the air. Sometimes the exec producers and directors are in on it, and other times we just try to get bits and lines into scripts.
90% of our TV viewing audience will never know the difference and honestly, we love it when threads like this get started and love reading the youtube comments. "
Face facts, you're never gonna live this one down. :) The document is emblematic of what social butterflies call the zeitgeist of an era. What was really more or less a bunch of kids messing around, they see as a revolution, akin to punk rock. "Conscience of a Hacker" seemed to validate their mythology of the 80s hacker as a cyberpunk revolutionary, so it will be preserved and repeated as part of the mythohistory of computing.
Plus it was quoted in Hackers and will be immortal on the strength of that alone.
That one's a little more recent. Agony was our Everquest (and later WoW) guild. We raided together for over a decade. The core of the membership was silicon valley based, and since I travel there a lot, I ended up making many IRL friends that I still hang out with to this day from it.
In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same.
You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more.
Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.
You're not the only one. I give esr a lot of credit for having written the Jargon File at all, because I would not be what I am today had I not encountered it in childhood. But I also give him a lot of blame for writing it in a way that, however satisfactory it must be to his many and multifarious personal prejudices, militates directly against its value in the role he purports to intend that it fill.
I think it's reasonable to argue that he's revised it so thoroughly away from its original form that he can be considered to have written it. Perhaps it would help to distinguish the Jargon File and TNHD, although the former has for a very long time merely been the latter without the cartoons.
> adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more.
Do you have a better way of signaling to the reader that a function is a predicate? I don't write a ton of Common Lisp, but I do still see quite of a bit of foop when I read Common Lisp. Possible that most of the code I'm reading was written when this was still a thing though...
I think the only reason this doesn't exist in Clojure (which is the lisp I used the most) is that ? is a valid identifier. Similarly Scheme includes ? as a valid identifier (at least R5RS as implemented by Chicken).
Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as a programmable reader macro [1]. It is often used, for example, to designate a stand-in domain variable designation in, say an embedded Prolog.
Another reason that CL avoids the "?" convention is that it's "unpronounceable" [2]. CL is the only language spec I've seen that discusses pronunciation; they actually gave thought to how programmers might converse about their code unambiguously [3]. Another manifestation of this is CL's sort-of case-insensitivity [4].
--
[1] The other reserved characters are !, [ ], and { }
[2] Although at least one wag suggested pronouncing it as "eh?", like a good Canadian.
[3] CLtL2 provides quite a bit of this. My fav is a brief excursion into how some hackers pronounce "macrolet" to rhyme with Chevrolet. :)
[4] This is not actually the case, but appears to be true to new Lispers, until they understand that by default, the reader converts everything to upcase.
Did you miss the Hoon language and their pronunciation table that works for other languages too? http://urbit.org/docs/hoon/syntax/ They suggest pronouncing '?' as 'wut'.
You can name your symbol as you want in Lisp, "(make-symbol s)" works for all string "s". With the reader, if you need to define symbols with spaces or otherwise not treated as symbols, or if you want to ensure the names are not upcased (it depends on the readtable), you enclose the name in bars: |anything, whatever| is a single symbol, as well as || (the empty symbol).
The convention for predicates is to use "-p" (there is a hyphen if the rest of the symbol has hyphens, otherwise no hyphen).
I think I saw a few libraries that define "thing?" predicates, but that is quite rare. People generally tend to not break conventions in practice, even though "?" can be regarded as a logical prefix for predicates.
I honestly don't recall the name of the specific piece, but I do remember that it's anthologized in his collection Expanded Universe, and it was clearly the "Singularity" he described, although of course not by that name - there's even a chart and a curve for those readers not yet familiar with the concept of exponential growth! I remember it quite well, not least because I'd thought I was years past learning anything further from Heinlein, and here he was teaching me that there's nothing new under the sun.
Unfortunately I can't give a page reference right this minute, because my last paper copy of the book disintegrated under heavy use some years ago and the samizdat electronic version doesn't have charts or page numbers. But it's in there, and when the new paper copy I've just ordered arrives on Monday, I'll look up the page and reply to this comment with a link to a photo or something.
That's not the only thing in Expanded Universe, of course; it's quite a long book and contains a great deal of other worthwhile material - short stories, articles, and transcripts of various talks, which together both entertain the reader and lend insight into the qualities of the author. It's not the first book I'd recommend if you're only going to read one Heinlein - that would have to be The Door into Summer. But if you're only going to read two, I'd suggest this be the second one.
Not sure I'd suggest The Door into Summer, it's one of the weakest books from Heinlein imho together with the Number of the Beast and I Will Fear No Evil. I'd usually recommend the Moon is a Harsh Mistress or one of his juveniles as the first book.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is definitely my favorite. I don't think Fear no Evil was that bad -- I think it was the last decent book he wrote.
I remember reading the serialization of the first few chapters of Number of the Beast in Omni magazine, and thinking how great it was. Then I got the book and read the rest, and was sad.
Oh yes, Number of the Beast started out good. That's actually what makes it more frustrating.
I think part of my problem with Fear no Evil is that I read it just after reading all of the Lazarus Long stories (which I enjoyed a lot) and coming from that Fear no Evil just wasn't as good...
I actually did like Job A Comedy of Justice which he wrote after Fear no Evil... It's very different from his other books and I wouldn't say it's great but it's fun.
Friday is one of his few novels that I never read..
I sort of like Friday, but I wouldn't really recommend it to someone who isn't also a Heinlein completist. I don't think it is bad, but it's not one of his stronger novels, and I understand why a lot of people really don't care for it; Heinlein is always most controversial when he writes first-person female characters, and there are good reasons why that's so.
> It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them.
Platitudes, yes, but they're platitudes because everyone assumes that those are goods that everyone values. The thing is, while most people would say they value those things, very few people actually follow through on it. But hacker culture is all about what you actually follow through and do, so they actually follow through.
Take, for example, a social justice movement that pulls women out of STEM and into women's studies and related fields, and then complains that women don't get into STEM fields. Meanwhile, women are actually much better represented in hacker culture than in most of STEM, because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about women. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.
> because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about [gender]. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.
Wanted to emphasize this. Hope you don't mind the edit.
That edit is fine and says a reasonable thing that I agree with, but there are two reasons why I said "women" instead of "gender".
1. "Hackers don't give a fuck about women" is a more shocking statement than "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" given millennial social justice sensibilities. That shock was intended, because it demonstrates to readers who aren't hackers the difference between their view and the hacker view, in a very visceral way. When you read, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender", you have to think about it to realize how fundamental a difference in thinking that is. But when you say, "Hackers don't give a fuck about women", you can feel how different it is.
2. Gender is also a much larger issue than women in STEM. In the context of this discussion, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" is true, but in a larger context, I think hackers do care about gender, because gender is very hackable.
In person, I would totally say "hackers don't give a fuck about women" because like you said, it's got a rhetorical good punch, and I can also clarify it if misconstrued. Whereas on the internet, when someone misinterprets, I may, or may not, have to spend another 5 minutes writing a response.
> To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture.
Well sure, but let's not discount the historical value of its angsty naïveté. This is an important part of our cultural history -- it helps explain the peculiar contradiction that many of us still feel a sense of persecution even as working in technology has become both lucrative and respectable.
Computing in general started with such an idealistic, academic mindset. It's important to remember that the "hacker mindset" was really a call to return to that original approach where people would literally hack together on a computer, explore its limits and do it simply for the thrill. By the 80s, there was a business/professionalism that was eating away at that early approach and the "manifesto" is almost a straight lament. Same thing happened to startups, the Web, etc.
I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, and like the counterculture, it ultimately dissolved into the mainstream.
> The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture,
Right. And that's often missed. The hacker ethic and the FSF project are fundamentally countercultural to the Big Iron mentality of the 60s-80s. In the 90s it started getting sanitized by the Open Source folks, and the collision of Big Money and Software in the 00s subverted and subsumed the whole business.
But there are still many people who hack for the sake of the hack. They are often looked down on... it's still countercultural to the modern software/VC world. :-)
I agree with your and the parents comments about hacker culture being counterculture. I don't agree that it still is. The countercultural aspect largely disappeared as computers (and software) became cheap and information widely available. I cringe a bit when see modern hackers using their $3k laptops to have fun coding C in a terminal by themselves. Nothing wrong with that of course, but not necessarily something I would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.
Unless they are hacking on shaders, CUDA or deeplearning (which admittedly isn't C most of the time). Although, I admit that a web server is probably more handy if it's not shaders.
I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).
Although just to be safe, I'd reccomend going back to an older version of the Jargon File. Around 3.x or so, ESR started poisoning the well, and adding some stuff that definitely doesn't belong, reflective of his ideology.
Always a fun read. The Hacker Manifesto reminds us that computing culture stands at a crossroads: between hobbyists and academia, between bedroom programmers and industry, between hackers, and, well, hackers, although both appear on either side of the fence.
While sinister and angsty in tone, this is ultimately a tale of someone discovering the wonders of computing, much as I, and many others did - although I never broke into anything, save my iPod.
From the FSF to MS to the demoscene, we're all computing, and many of us have a spark of feelings this piece evokes - a natural curiosity, a desire to push the boundaries, to see what's possible, and a bit of rebeliousness. It's what separates the hackers (both kinds) and the hobbyists and the wannabes, from those who don't have that feeling, the people for whom this is a 9-5 job, who grind out StrategyObjectFactoryFactorySingletonFactories, and when they get home want to think about anything but programming.
In short, that spark is what separates those who really care about computing from those who just want to get their job done and forget about it.
As usual with any broad, sweeping statements I make, I may be wrong.
Maybe I'm bitter for my age, but I feel that the culture has already gone through the crossroads. I do get what you're trying to say, though, but I believe that it's the industry that finds it self at the crossroads, not the culture. The culture itself has largely been co-opted by business concerns.
I'm unconvinced. All the wacky projects that usually pop up on show HN are pretty strong signs of a culture that encourages things that don't necessarily make business sense.
The number of times I show or talk about a side project with business people and they start talking about it as something I built to generate income rather than just for my own curiousity is quite amusing. I think for certain groups of people the idea of creating for purely intellectual purposes is completely alien. It is part of the reason many companies can't hold onto real technical talent. At a cerain point intellectual richness becomes the main priority in a hackers life and the only thing that will keep them around is challenging new problems to solve.
Yet so many of those projects, when submitted, attract comments on HN from people who just don't get it. The culture is still there, but it's not as uniformly concentrated anywhere anymore. It's hard to tell what that really means. In absolute numbers there are probably more hackers with the spark now than ever, but you wouldn't be able to tell by just casually sampling the computing industry both professional and non-professional.
Them: “So, it’s a game about programming…”
Me: “Yes, it’s so much fun!”
Them: “But I program all day.”
Me: “Me too!”
Them: “The last thing I want to do when I come home is program again”
awkward silence
Them: “You’re nuts.”
Unfortunately as I study higher level mathematics on my own, I hunger to be in a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz around departments and campuses. It sucks to be in solace with knowledge.
I wish I realized earlier that higher education was far more matched to skills needed for research. I would have majored in math instead of biomedical sciences. Too late now. 3.8GPA, waste of a major and the chance I had to be part of the "scene."
Undergraduate math is much more logical than other majors in actually being useful. Aye. :-(
> a graduate program where the eagerness to learn and sharing of profundity and boundless energy to crack the truths of pure logic buzz
Do such things exist? I chose not to continue my studies beyond high school graduation, but from my experience around academics and academia, the sort of program you describe seems at the very least well away from the norm.
High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia. Graduate academia is awesome unless you get stuck under a professor who tries to use you as a grunt worker. It happens but it's not the norm.
> High school academia is nothing like undergraduate academia which is nothing like graduate academia.
I never claimed otherwise. My point is that, while I lack firsthand experience in the area, I've worked with a wide variety of grad students under a number of PIs, and found them universally to present an impression of being stooped under a heavy load of debt, shit work, and misery. Perhaps that's unrepresentative, though, or inaccurately perceived.
Every time I read this I hear it read in the voice of the villain from the movie Hackers. Which I have to admit was totally a guilty pleasure of my teenage years.
It's interesting to contrast what YCombinator/Facebook mean by "hacker" and what it means at DEFCON. Or when this document was written. The former definitely has strong commercial overtones and the latter strong subversive overtones. They really are two very different meanings.
And to a lot of people here thinking this mentality is dead are, I think, confused by the fact that the growth and general appeal of computers have only diluted the hackers, but they are still growing in absolute numbers.
Same goes at DEFCON in a way, where so many people want to see what a hacker is that the whole conference looses its "direction" in a way, as a whole at least...
Very true. When you define "hacker" to mean "A person who writes code quickly and is willing to take business risk", you're not likely to run in the same circles as the people who crack open complex software systems for fun. You might wind up believing those people no longer really exist, having gone the way of the dial-up modem.
I find quite annoying that many people go "oh geez, what is this crap, nah, it's not like this" when this is a huge part of what brought us all that the hackerdom is today (whatever it is anyway).
I thought it was "a board is found" not "a bored is found" what is bored? A board would be a bulletin board system, one of many precursors to the modern web.
The entirety of programming experience in two phrases:
"That didn't work as expected."
"That didn't work, as expected."
Another facet of programming experience - one character (that can be hard to notice) can change the behavior of a program in major ways, yet it can remain undiscovered for quite some time (by both compiler and humans).
ESR claims that everyone is an SJW, he says that blacks have a lower IQ than whites, and he defended an article called "blacks are lazy," saying that it was accurate. In short, he's a piece of scum. And that's the truth.
actually the screenshot you linked shows that he didn't say blacks have lower IQ than whites. He said haiti has an average IQ or 70, and its not because they are black.
Yep. He said Mozilla didn't deserve to exist because they removed Eich as head after that debacle. And yeah, he's an awful person.
But he does, to some extent, deserve the title "Hacker," because he genuinely is a talented programmer. We don't have to stoop to his level, and discrininate based on ideology: even if we hate him, we can admit he's got talent.
His software work is unremarkable (fetchmail is trivial and buggy, and CML2 was rejected by the Linux kernel developers), and he's made his career not by writing software but by attacking real hackers like Richard Stallman and trying to bring down their work, not by actually constructively developing any useful software himself. Attacking real hackers and trying to discourage people from using "free software" isn't "hacking".
When I knew him during the 80's, he would go on and on ad nauseum about his beloved "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle NetNews Reader" and how so much better than every other netnews reader. But he never collaborated with anyone, and he never released it under any license. Much more Bizarre than Cathedral.
> When I knew him during the 80's, he would go on and on ad nauseum about his beloved "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle NetNews Reader" and how so much better than every other netnews reader. But he never collaborated with anyone, and he never released it under any license. Much more Bizarre than Cathedral.
The world is full of such things, and was much more so back in the 90s and early 2000s. People brag about how great their tool is, but refuse to share it. I've never been sure if they're exaggerating the features, or if they're insecure about criticism on their magnum opus, or if they just have such a weird and idiosyncratic evolved setup that they cannot effectively package the software for others to use.
Edit: I mean, it's not like ESR had qualms about releasing fetchmail, which has always been a buggy pain in the ass and far less impressive than he makes it sound.
I think you missed the dripping irony that the person whose sole topic of conversation during the 1980's was the newsreader software he was developing, but he never shared it or collaborated with anyone or ever even published it under any license, also wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazar".
The fact that GPSD is the best thing you can come up with that he wrote pretty much proves my point, doesn't it?
If that's all it takes to brand yourself a "hacker", in spite of executing a vicious multi-decade jihad against Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, then being a "hacker" doesn't mean anything.
I'd like to think that vitriolically disagreeing with the part of the Hacker Manifesto that says "We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religous bias," and other violent acts like sending a death threat to Bruce Perins then trying to excuse it by explaining he was only trying to "defame" him, would disqualify him from branding himself as a hacker. But I'm an idealist.
You know, I think you're right. But the thing is "without religious bias." We can say ESR isn't a hacker because his code's not good enough, and having stated your case, I'd agree, but saying he's not a hacker because he doesn't agree with us ideologically is undermining our own ideology.
Except that he's made a career of trying to pose as a hacker, define what a hacker is, tell people how to become a hacker, viciously attack the person, the philosophy and the life's work of one of the world's leading and most respected, influential and successful (if not quirky) hackers, and even hijack and distort the definition of the very words in the hacker's dictionary to reflect his own extremist political ideology, which most certainly does not align with the non-bigoted ideology in the Hacker's Manifesto that we're discussing.
Well, first off, the hacker as defined by the hacker's manifesto is very different from the definition ESR tried to warp. Also, yeah, ESR is a jerk. I don't argue that. He's an awful person. However, both definitions of hacker involve only judgement by output, not judgement of race or ideology.
And if we called people out for being horrible, RMS would be right out. I respect the man's work work and ideology, but I respect it slightly less when he starts licking his own toes while publically calling John Ousterhout a cancer.
It's not simply because he doesn't agree with you, it's because of his long and vile track record of racism, bigotry, misogyny, and attacking people by twisting facts and outright lying, and of course trying to make a career out of destroying Richard Stallman and his work.
I've known him for decades, since the 80's, and while it's true he totally went off the deep end after 9/11, he has always been a vile awful person.
And remember: Eich wasn't "removed", he CHOSE to resign of his own free will -- Mozilla even begged him to stay and offered him a well paid important position! But ESR's revisionist history never mentions that.
You cite a bunch of people echochambering how much of a big, bad racist ESR is and call him names. The two direct quotes from him make policy points about drama from employees belonging to a group known for same and about anti-racism being used as a motivation for handwaving what he claims is a valid demographic observation.
Even if you don't agree with his (nutzo!) politics you should refrain from repeating sloppy arguments against him.
EDIT: Also, the dogwhistle thing is bullshit. ESR basically never attempts to, in my observation, hide what he's saying. I see where 'thug' has been used by others as slang, but with a lot of people, especially of intellectual background, it is closer to its original term of derision towards anti-intellectuals and folks who would use violence to suppress opposing viewpoints.
I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to achieve here.
Out of curiosity I just headed over to ESR's blog. The thing that stands out most is that 95% of the commenters there are uninformed nutcases (and I mean this literally).
On the other hand you seem to cherry pick some incidents and exaggerate/misrepresent the facts. Today is the first time ever that I've heard the claim that "thug" has the "n-word" connotation.
I'm not claiming that that ESR's private message with the threat was the defamation itself. That would come later, in public.
The implied "Second Amendment Solution" threat of "I will find a way to make you regret it" is that Raymond the angry gun nut would shoot Perens, but Raymond's plausible denial after the fact was that he actually only meant he would make Perens regret it by attacking his reputation in public.
He must feel inspired and vindicated by Trump's antics.
I'm still waiting for you to mansplain how Raymond was justified in accusing members of the open source software community of being "fools" and "thugs", and how "thugs" had absolutely nothing to do with the racial context of "Blacks are Lazy".
Russ's essay makes a different point than "ho boy them blacks sure are lazy aye tell you wut". His essay makes the claims:
(1) Black are lazier than whites if by lazy we mean that they appear to work less hard than whites. This same definition would imply that whites (at least in the areas of Texas I'm familiar with) are lazier than latinos.
(2) For historical reasons, their culture values leisure time more.
(3) For historical reasons, they are paid less for the same unit of work than whites.
(4) Because of (2) and (3), there is no incentive for them to work harder than they currently do.
The meat of the position is halfway through the first paragraph:
> I think that is what led people into the mistaken idea that blacks are lazy--as a characteristic of being black. They're not; it's an economically-ignorant idea to say that they are. They're just rationally valuing their leisure time at the same rate as whites, getting paid less for the same work, and deciding to work less because of it.
Now, we can all disagree with the various premises of his reasoning. I disagree with the general observation in (1). I think many people could disagree with (2) and (3) depending on what facts they'd like to present. (4) does make sense if you agree with (2) and (3) and provides an economic reason for (1).
I don't find the essay correct, but I also don't find it particularly racist in the perjorative sense. It is limited in scope to the population of African-Americans descended from slavery, but then we'd consider a study on Irish-Americans and rates of abortion racist as well.
I disagree that people should've been calling for his dismissal over what amounts to armchair sociology and anthropology; I believe that we shouldn't tar-and-feather people when we could do better by debating them politely (as we are here).
> And who exactly was being "anti-intellectual", and using "violence" to "suppress his opposing viewpoints" and force him to resign, as you claim?
This is misquoting what I said. For reference:
> but with a lot of people, especially of intellectual background, it is closer to its original term of derision towards anti-intellectuals and folks who would use violence to suppress opposing viewpoints.
I was talking about the general case, not the constructed defense of Russ against violence you seem to be trying to trip me up on. My observation is that among essayists with a particular background when they write thug it is shorthand for "jack-booted thug" not "thug lyfe". It is used to invoke the image of being suppressed for badthink by folks summoning the morally outraged, as we saw in the '30s and '50s.
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The Bruce Perens thing I have no comment on without more background information, other than to say "Goddamnit ESR".
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The dogwhistle thing I keep a similarly moderate position on: I believe that there are absolutely phrases that can be used to signal to different portions of an audience. I think to claim otherwise shows a lack of creativity at best and a willful ignorance of public speaking at worst.
That said, it is rhetorically terribly convenient to be able to claim your opponent is using coded signals during a discussion which sympathizers don't recognize (because they're good upstanding folks) and which are of course being used for nefarious purposes.
I have seen people getting increasingly eager to throw out "dog whistle" (and "virtue signal" and "false flag" and all kinds of other rubbish) these days at the slightest provocation instead of actually countering the arguments themselves.
It is lazy, it is sloppy, and it makes sound positions ("Hey, discrimination based on ethnicity is wrong") look like they're too weak to defend conventionally.
Good points, and well expressed. I'm sorry for misinterpreting which case you were referring to.
Evidence that the term was meant as a dog-whistle to provoke a reaction is that it doesn't make any sense in a non-racist context. And the context was already about race, thanks the Russ's brilliant essay.
The names that Eric the Flute (that's what ESR really calls himself ;) ) called other people were hyperbolically exaggerated, and completely unjustifiable, especially coming from somebody who threatens other people's lives on the internet, and walks it back as merely trying to defame. How many people in the open source community who don't have a file systems named after them are actually thugs (or even maddogs)? And why did they all suddenly choose to gang up on poor Russ all together at once?
Maybe Trump has made everyone completely insensitive and bored with these kinds of tactics nowadays, but this happened in 2005, and it's not an isolated occurrence of racism from Eric Raymond: he has a long track record of race baiting, not just his latest tweet.
With both Raymond and Trump, it's a big game of click-bait chicken, to say the most offensive thing possible to get lots of attention, and then prove how smart he is to be able to talk himself out of trouble when everybody gets offended. Just read his blog comments. I'm sure he thought his "I just meant to defame him" excuse for threatening Bruce Peren's life was very clever.
It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them.
The Jargon File offers a more balanced and intricate exploration of The Hacker. It's always worth a read.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html