This Fall I am taking a class called Hackers in the Bazaar at Notre Dame. Once a week I will post an essay from this class exploring hacker culture. I find it deeply interesting and I hope the reader does too. The first reading is Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Awesome book, btw. I do recommend reading it when you have time.
When people describe a hacker, they think of someone who breaks into systems. They think of the Hollywood hacker, like in Mr. Robot. They may also think of Jesse Eisenberg playing Zuckerberg in The Social Network, especially the intern scene. Most people I meet tell me hackers are scary. They are secretive, but this bastardization of the term hacker is something that drives me insane.
In the book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, you will be introduced to the following Hacker Ethic:
- 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!
- All information should be free.
- Mistrust authority. Promote decentralization.
- Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
- You can create art and beauty on a computer.
- Computers can change your life for the better.
- Like Aladdin’s lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.
To me, when I read this the first time, something stood out, in particular the last three bullet points. You can create art and beauty on a computer. When I wrote my first Python script, I didn’t think “hey this is beautiful and neat.” I think this is where most people give up, sadly. My perspective on creating art and beauty changed when I wrote my first large program. It was an SQLite DB with an API layer that would keep track of tasks, tools, people, and objects that those people were repairing. It was maybe 500-750 lines in total, but it worked like magic. I think that was the moment everything changed for me. Yes, I wrote code before, and it seemed boring because it seemed like AI could write it.
This felt very different. Yes, AI helped in parts, but it was my architecture that made it possible. In that moment I realized that if I described the task to any AI model, it would try to do everything at once inside a large monolithic blob that no one could decipher. To me there is something human in coding that I don’t think AI can do.
Hacking isn’t Hollywood-esque in the way most people think. To me a neat hack is how to reduce something from 100 lines to 10. The part that most people forget is the human aspect of coding. I love and adore the snarky code comments or fun nicknames for items that make it easy to remember them. I still feel like my favorite script I have ever seen to this day belongs to Noah Jacobs, called Daedalus and Icarus. Icarus is his scraper that sometimes flies close to the sun, and when it does, the error message:
“Icarus got torched by the sun” pops up. The script initializes with: “Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight, For the greatest tragedy of them all is never to feel the burning light.”
When I first saw this, I think I spent about 5 minutes giggling to myself. It was silly, but at the time funny. AI doesn’t make jokes, and it doesn’t make them so well. Since then, I always leave some snarky or funny comments. “Like Aladdin’s lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.” These abstractions that hackers use are common and, to me, make coding feel human. Luckily, we get a bit more than 3 wishes. Aladdin’s lamp is also a super good way to describe a personal computer. The genie can grant any wish, and in a way a computer can do the same. You just have to tell it very specifically what you want. It can’t bring people back from the dead, make someone fall in love, or kill anyone directly.
“Computers can change your life for the better” is the most important one to me. I was non-technical for a long time. I tried learning to code through no-code platforms, but I wasn’t curious enough at the time to appreciate it. I was told it was hard, and it was really challenging to learn to code, so I avoided it. To be honest, the number one thing that made me change my mind was that it wasn’t hard if I loved it. I love spending hours with my co-founders nerding out about certain technical bits in what we do. They always laugh, crack jokes, and make me feel like a part of the team. For that, I am eternally grateful.
True hackers are always groups of people. True hackers truly love to code and do what they do. True hackers are curious creatures who will “make it work.” True hackers are people who will tell it as it is. True hackers won’t take an “it is what it is” as an answer. True hackers love simplicity. They hate idiocy. They hate when they aren’t in control. True hackers hate bureaucracy and love true libertarian-style thinking. I am excited and privileged to be a part of this community. I am humble enough to know that I need to grow and keep that skill alive. I am excited and passionate to continue my journey. I don’t care about fame or anything like that. I am just curious to know more and figure out how this world works a bit better. That’s all a hacker is, in my opinion. Not Hollywood drama breaking into the Pentagon.