Reading 01: No True Hacker
When I was younger, I thought of a “true hacker” as a young guy in his mid 20s, usually wearing a
trench coat and sunglasses (even indoors!), who got into databases or got control of systems
remotely. After taking systems programming, my view shifted more towards a more broad view,
that hackers are basically just people who do side projects. However, reading through this week’s
reading, I’ve come to think of a “true hacker” as someone who creates something with pure
passion, especially if that something is a modification of or interacts with an existing system, and is
willing to spend an inordinate amount of time working on their project.
I think especially of the early hackers from MIT of the Tech Model Railroad Club as my example
of “true hackers”. When I was reading the stories of how they would spend 30 hours over a
weekend just learning about new systems, or that they would stay up until 3 in the morning or
switch to 30 hour days just to have more time to play around with a computer, I realized that having
true passion is an incredibly important part of being a hacker. In that regard I suppose I do aspire
to be a hacker. Having the drive and passion to work as long as the TMRC hackers did is
incredibly
admirable and something I would like to emulate. While I’ve worked for long stretches of time
before, I’ve only rarely worked as long or as hard as the early hackers did, and never as often as
they did - I can’t imagine staying up until 3 in the morning in the hopes that I might get the chance
to work on a project of mine on a consistent basis.
However, there are also some problematic parts of being considered a “true hacker” that makes
me reticent from identifying with or even aspiring to be one. Firstly, the hacker culture is a non
inclusive one, based on our readings and discussion in class. Even if the hacker ethic in theory
states that hackers should be judged based on their merits and not inherent characteristics like
race, gender, education status, etc., we see that many early hackers had shockingly sexist ideas,
to the point where they’d probably be called incels today. It makes some sense that in the ‘60s
there would be some degree of sexism within the hacker subculture, especially as there were
very few women at MIT at the time, but the sexism still remains to this day and seems to still be
present within the culture around programming and the industry itself.
In addition to the non inclusive aspects of the hacker culture, another thing that makes me shy
away from wanting to be a “true hacker” is simply the amount of time that these hackers spend
on their projects. While I admire it, and I wish I could do it, it is not something that I want to do all
the time, if that makes sense. I want to have a more balanced lifestyle, with other interests that I
can spend time on, and more time with my friends. While some of the hackers were able to
maintain some social relationships, a lot of them shunned that in favor of just their group of
hackers, and their work. In a sense that is admirable, but I do not like the idea of basing my life
entirely around hacking, to the degree that these hackers did.
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