An author who groks hackers

Habits of the High-Tech Heart CoverI’m half way through reading Quentin Schultze’s Habits of the High-Tech Heart, a book about the ethics of all this technology we bask in. It’s quite a good book, certainly very thought-provoking for a geek like me.

Anyway, I was happy (and a little surprised) that he groks us hackers. It seems he understands the term and the culture fairly well, which is kind of unusual for authors. To quote a couple of paragraphs from chapter 4:

Often the people who identify high-tech moral issues are not in-house managers or technicians but rather extra-organizational “hackers.” The media portray hackers as evil technological zealots, when in fact they are frequently creative and hardworking people who strongly desire to advance information technology for the good of society. Hackers are different from “crackers,” who crack into computer systems often with self-serving and even malevolent intentions. The term “hacker” originated as a description of writers of software who “hack” together the code that makes programs work. But the idea of hacking has come to mean in some technology circles a kind of good-intentioned surveillance of cyberspace with an eye toward helping the common users avoid being exploited—a cyber-version of Robin Hood. The “open source” movement, which supports making nonproprietary software code available to all interested parties, is one example of this altruistic intent; long before this movement, however, hackers shared code with each other. To a typical hacker, poorly written code is a testament to foolishness. Moreover, unstable or insecure code is morally wrong. Most hackers exploit network weaknesses in order to document how vulnerable such systems really are, not to steal information or destroy an organization’s technology.

The truth is that hackers are sometimes the only people willing to point out the moral foolishness behind cyber-hype. In the current era of widespread cyber-foolishness, hackers are whistleblowers who alert the wider world to the folly of corporations and governments that operate vulnerable technological empires. If hackers can break into a federal agency’s computer, for instance, so can other governments or terrorists. Hackers embarrass us all by demonstrating that our information systems are overly touted. They often reveal the imprudence within mainstream technology endeavors, becoming the de facto consciences among technologists. Whereas businesses and governments tend to ignore the larger moral issues, except as they affect the bottom line, hackers are often the only people who will admit publicly that the techno-emperor is naked. Some hacker groups even hold to a “hacker ethic,” whereas most corporations and nonprofit organizations never establish significant ethical standards for their own information technology departments.

Maybe I just like it because he’s patting hackers on the back :-), but I do think he’s onto something. I wish the book were a bit more punchy and concise, but it’s definitely worth a read.

18 February 2008 by Ben    add a comment

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