What does it mean to be a True Hacker?

In the Steven Levy book Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution, a pretty solid picture of a “True Hacker” is painted. While this picture certainly includes things like eating Chinese food, being unkempt and lacking personal hygiene, and pulling ridiculous all nighters at the heart of the hacker ethic are a few depictions that Levy provides as to what makes up a “True Hacker”. The greatest evidence of a true hacker though is that of the six tenants of “the Hacker Ethic”:

  1. Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative!

  2. All information should be free.

  3. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.

  4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.

  5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

  6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Being a “true hacker” according to these tenants makes one a very specific type of person a person who sees programming as an art form, a person who is constantly seeking to know more for the sake of knowledge, someone who can prove their worth through their technical prowess. It is from these traits that the other depictions of the hackers in the book stems. It is simply because these MIT students are so hungry for information, so hungry to learn and experiment for the sake of learning and experimentation that leads them to act and behave in the way that they do. That is, no sleep, unyielding persistence to solve problems, and the constant need to be improving upon others ideas or to be “winning”.

It does seem though that in the pursuit of the tenants of the hacker ethic the students at MIT tended toward exclusivity as they saw people as either “winning” where they were just as curious and quick to learn as them and would easily be accepted into the culture, or “losing” where people would be too slow to learn or too not focused enough to make meaningful contributions to the group. This type of exclusivity can be dangerous and can lead to behavior that is seen in the book with the grad student called Fubar. If instead of hacking the computer to semi-embarrassingly point out fubar’s mistakes the hackers could have instead attempted to talk to him about his repeated errors and how his use of the machine is counterintuitive to the way it could be used. The hacker culture that has developed though prevents this as each of the hackers is very caught up in the idea that they are doing things “The Right Way”.

While being a hacker does have a sense of mystique and awe about it especially to people who know next to nothing about what hackers are and what they do one must be careful not to take anything to an extreme. My perception of hackers before reading the first part of the book was largely that of non-hygienic college students huddled in a basement. While the book shows that these perceptions are not all together wrong it also shows through its stories that being a hacker is about so much more.

I do aspire to be a “True Hacker” but not necessarily to the 30 hour a day extreme that the hackers of the book are. Instead I would love to promote the six tenants (especially numbers 2 and 4) while still maintaining healthy life relationships. I am the type of person who is always looking to take things apart for the sake of knowing how they work so most of the hacker tenants come natural to me. Even the all encompassing aspects such as the thirst to solve more problems and the creeping exclusivity that happened to the MIT hackers I can sometimes see in my daily life and while these parts of the culture are shown to be good in the book I think this is an extreme of the hacker culture that should be guarded against (I consciously take efforts to take a break and socially interact with people between programming sessions). Taking this less extreme approach can be beneficial to the person taking it and it can help outsiders more easily see into the culture and can possibly help to draw new talent in who might otherwise be intimidated which is always a good thing no matter where that talent comes from! (Tenant 4).

In closing I aspire to be a true hacker and I hope to do it in a way that can be inclusive and welcoming to other in a way the MIT Hackers from Levy’s book never were!