Coders by Clive Thompson

Author:Clive Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

If you want to understand why cypherpunks—and many coders in general—care so much about privacy, and so distrust authority, it’s worth pausing to look at some history.

The attitudes, it turns out, have a long vintage. Beginning in the ’70s, there have been several big flash points where coders clashed with the powers that be, in government and corporations. Each conflict was a fight over privacy and openness. Big firms and governments wanted to keep their secrets locked up tight, while having the ability to pry into the affairs of everyday people. The hackers wanted precisely the opposite. Hackers thought that everyday people should enjoy their privacy—while powerful interests should be required to expose their secrets.

The first version of this culture clash emerged back at MIT in the ’60s and ’70s, when the original generation of hackers began excitedly playing with the university’s machines. Those hackers had an ethic of openness: If you wrote a cool algorithm or bit of code, you shared it with everyone else. If you didn’t show off your code to others and vice versa, how would everyone learn? “We shared programs to whoever wanted to use them, they were human knowledge,” Richard Stallman, one of MIT’s most prolific hackers, later recalled. Indeed, the MIT coders were so communitarian that they didn’t even put their names on code they’d written. “Signing code was thought of as arrogant,” recalls Brewster Kahle, who arrived at the lab in 1980. “It was all for building the machine. It was a community project.” Sure, the hackers could each be deeply individualistic and each individually convinced of their superior awesomeness. But coding itself? That was a group effort, an intellectual barn raising where all strove to make the computer do cool stuff for everyone’s sake. Owning an algorithm you’d written seemed as nuts as “owning” the concept of multiplication itself, or constitutional democracy, or rhyme.

The MIT hackers hated any attempt to limit their access to the machines or to any technology they wanted to try out. So if a rule got in the way, they just broke it. If they were hacking in the wee hours, as was typical, and their computer broke down, they’d need the proper tools to fix it—only to find that the daytime staff had locked the tools away. So they’d simply hack the locks (making a “master” key from a blank), and abscond with what they needed.

“To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage,” as Steven Levy wrote of those MIT coders in Hackers. “Just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed that people should be allowed access to files or tools that might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works. When a hacker needed something to create, explore, or fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts as property rights.”

This relationship to property gave birth to a radical idea: “free/ libre” software.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.