What is a hacker?
I had the enormous benefit of coming of age precisely in parallel with the discovery and maturity of the concept, “hacker”. The original hacker was into technology, no doubt. He (or she) was clearly a descendent of the old “nerd” of chemistry sets and bug collections, but was of a different breed entirely. Meaner, more autonomous, more of an enthusiastic outsider. Che Guevera meets Carl Sagan? Sid Vicious meets Thomas Edison?
The hacker started with code. Making code dance. More of an alchemist or magician than an engineer. The object wasn’t to “make something” but to “make something happen”. To make the code do something that it wasn’t strictly designed to do. To invent. Part playful, part cruelty.
To invent, but not for any particular practical purpose. More of an impulsion. A need to see your will reflected in the code. A sense of empowerment. Self-help.
And, obviously (so utterly obviously) the rules didn’t matter. Not the structure of the code, not the laws of the state, hell — not the laws of physics if need be. It was you and your abilities.
And your ethics.
It started in computers, but the hacker isn’t of computing — or even of technology. In its deepest sense, hacking is an ethos, a way of being.
Stravinsky was a hacker. Remember how the people of Paris responded to his Hacks of Spring? When you get a feel for it, you can begin to recognize the hackers. You begin to see their influence everywhere. Everywhere the code has been made to dance. Everywhere someone has stepped outside the bounds of what is appropriate and simply made something come alive that has never been seen on earth before.
Their fingerprints are everywhere. They are dangerous, these hackers. They certainly aren’t normal. Which doesn’t mean that they aren’t healthy. Better to be healthy in your beautiful abnormality than normal and unhealthy.
They are dangerous. But they are also absolutely necessary. The world is racing headlong into a maelstrom. The children of today will inherit a future that we can’t even predict. They will be required to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet. None of the way that we do things now will work. Most of education has already become all but meaningless. How can you teach people things when the amount of new information produced last year is more than the totality of all the information produced over the previous five thousand years — and is doubling every year?
Clearly, you can not teach them “things”. You have to teach them capacity. You have to make them capable. You have to make them into artists and physicians of reality. In a word — hackers.
Education must be hacked. And energy. And politics. And art. And life. And love. And meaning. And the hackers too will have to be hacked.
There is a great deal of weakness in being an artist. Sadness and bitterness, fear and loneliness. Just because you have power doesn’t mean that you have the wisdom or the great health that is necessary. No one is born strong-enough for life. But you can get there. The hackers too can be made to dance, they too can be made beautiful.
I can’t wait to see what happens then.