Patrice Riemens on Wed, 2 Jul 2014 19:37:49 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two, |
Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two The Hacker Spirit and the disease of Anarcho-Capitalism: long time buddies? (continued) (...) The first character trait both of them share is their individualistic tendency. There are very good reasons for that: even seen from a (purely) technical viewpoint, sharing is only possible between individuals if they are able to create personal projects. And besides, on a more mundane plane, the relationship between a person and her/his PC - /personal/ computer - had become so closely ... personal from the 1980s onwards that it bordered on solipsistic alienation (individually owned computers were a rarity before that time). But more remarkable similarities can be observed: the cult of excellence, for instance: permanent improvement is a must. One other common characteristic: 'there are no limits' as principle. Overcome obstacles, jump barriers, enter systems, cross to the other side, those are the terms to describe the continuous, assiduous, boundless and headlong rush into the vast fields of knowledge about the technical space, which, with the advent of the internet, had become a true virtual space in itself. The tendency to set challenges, like 'whom of us will reach furthest' is the outcome of individual excellence coupled to the will to explore the unknown. In its crudest form this takes the shape of a duel (between two opponents). But there are more complex configurations, all subsumed under the competition principle, which itself is (typically) a male thing. Hence, it is not by accident that most hackers are males, with a high level of education, inclined towards abstract thinking, and not seldom afflicted with the Asperger syndrome [37]. From small bands of infotech-crazies to the build-up of powerful hierarchies, the span is smaller than one would think. Communities of /hackers-geeks/ celebrate meritocracy, risk-taking, (the need for) maximum commitment, and, last but not least, the duty to wreck your brain first before annoying your pals we stupid questions, a precept epitomized by the acronym R.T.F.M. - /Read The F&^%$*@! Manual/ [#****]. A community consisting of people who are able to understand and appreciate individual effort knows also how to add up to it as a value and a pledge towards the shared cause of knowledge. The fairly explicit references to one's attractiveness, the mainifest pride to have come faster than everyone else to a solution elegant, powerful, and entertaining to boot, all this expressed in terms of hard-won technical competences are recurrent leitmotivs in hacker culture [38]. The individual engaging in hacking is surrounded by an aura of sorts, conferring him (her) a kind of superior power. On the other side are the non-hackers, the 'lusers', the 'sheep', who understand zilch about machines. Manuals are written, guides (like '-xxxx- for Dummies' -transl) published for their benefit; one can even manage to teach them certain programs! But it remains a common sense fact that knowledge has a pyramidal structure: there are 'exoteric' [##] levels, which are understandable to the general public, and there are arcane, esoteric ones, open only to the initiated. And there are many levels of initiation and competence, referred to in the stereotype distinction between, on one hand, those who belong to the elite in terms of being familiar with machines (the /'truleite'/) and those who are mere apprentices (aka /'lamers'/) [39] >From this state of mind stem, more or less by default, two behavioral characteristics: one is a thinly veiled despise of the physical body, and for the real world in general and for actual contact with other human beings [##*]; and the second is a tendency to see everything in black and white, like a transposition of the ones and noughts in the binary code: it's either right or wrong, good or bad (and for people too). The world is the theatre of epic battles between the forces of good and those of evil, the latter ones hatching their dark schemes, world-wide. The white (or dark) knights of Knowledge, the Jedis of the machines, may chose for one or the other, but it is clear that this is war in which we all have a stake. And those who are the best armed cannot afford to remain mere spectators. Maybe our discourse is a bit overdone, but many examples are there to back it up. The atmosphere is constantly weighed down by the threat of conflicts. Individualism and the cult of limitless liberty are two major traits shared by both the hacker spirit and anarcho-capitalism. We can add to that a true believer attitude with regard to the purported redeeming power of technology. Besides that both anarcho-capitalists and hackers share the same ennemy: institutions, and more specifically (US)federal institutions, which put curbs on their liberties (unrestricted access to knowledge in one case, unrestricted freedom to get rich in the other). Yet if one is to believe Eric S. Raymond's half-serious pronouncements, the points of agreement go much further. And Eric Raymond himself is a high-ranking, 'historic' member of the hacker tribe, and a hard-core libertarian to boot. In his portrayal of the imaginary personage J.Random Hacker, he describes his political convictions as follows: "Formerly vaguely liberal-moderate, more recently moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism). There is a strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both paleoconservatism and ?hard? leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day." [40] (to be continued) Next time: more about hacker politics ------------------------ [37] Asperger is related to autism, and comes with socializing difficulties and stress. It has been noted that San Francisco's Bay Area has percentualy many more cases of Asperger than the (US) national average. In 2011, lawyers in the United Kingdom pleaded Asperger as extenuating condition in order to reduce the criminal liability of Ryan Cleary, an alleged member of the (in)famous 'Lulzsec' hackers (group), which stood accused of high-level, successful attacks. We will go more into the 'Lulz spirit' (from LOL, Laughing out Loud) later on, suffice here to say that it consists of breaking into secured systems, extract private data and publish them, all 'for fun'. [#****] http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs22/i/2007/356/0/4/Mao_RTFM_vectorize_by_cmenghi.png being of course my favorite illustration of this concept. [38] FAQs (/Frequently Asked Questions/), a repository of answers to possible questions about how to use a program, a tool, etc. makes exceedingly manifest the conviction that an individual must really do all he/she can (to obtain the knowledge) before even thinking of asking for help. Of course, this approach can take various hues, some more, some less community-based, by prioritising the necessity to develop shared knowledge, but under no circumstance should the latter be see as some kind of pre-digested gruel (i.e ready-to-use, turnkey solution/ knowledge), accessible to one and sundry. The ability to find your own way out when challenged by a novel situation, and to apply a creative solution to the problem offers a striking resemblance to the myth of the explorer, able to orient him (her?)self in unknown territory by reading and interpreting the clues he discovers around him (her? ;-) [##] I had to look that one up too. According to the French Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exot%C3%A9risme), the exoteric is what is public, as opposed to the esoteric. Reminded me of the two (rival) Communist parties after the return of Greece to democracy in 1974 ... [##*] After I had asked passers-by three times our way back to the railway station in some forlorn Italian border town, a friend of mine, kindof arch-nerd, observed, puzzled: "but you talk to people?!". [39] To understand what we talking about here, and get an idea of what motivates a hacker, it is really worth to take a look at one of the best independent publications on hacking, Phrack, which has been active since the mid-eighties: http://www.phrack.org [40] Eric S. Raymond, /The Jargon File/: http://catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html despite being somewhat ego-centric and a bit obsolete by now, /The Jargon File/ remains a fundamental document. ----------------------------- Translated by Patrice Riemens This translation project is supported and facilitated by: The Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/) The Antenna Foundation, Nijmegen (http://www.antenna.nl - Dutch site) (http://www.antenna.nl/indexeng.html - english site under construction) Casa Nostra, Vogogna-Ossola, Italy # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org