Notes on or related to the Hacker Ethic. Some quick links first...
The Play Ethic - why believe in work when it doesn't believe in you?
A Guardian article about a small company where employees participate in decisions about their working hours.
Another Guardian article on Open Source as a model for education, and social services.
A paper by Peter Reason on the political, epistemological, ecological and spiritual dimensions of participation.
These chapters were originally posted on the official web site for the book, but have subsequently been taken down. I'm reproducing them here with permission, according to the notice on the original web site:
From The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells (Random House, 2001). For more, see www.hackerethic.org. This writing can be published freely on the web with this information included.
This is an excerpt from Pekka Himanen's book 'The Hacker Ethic'.
At the core of our technological time stands a fascinating group of people who call themselves hackers. They are not TV celebrities with wide name recognition, but everyone knows their achievements, which form a large part of our new, emerging society's technological basis: the Internet and the Web (which together can be called the Net), the personal computer, and an important portion of the software used for running them. The hackers' "jargon file," compiled collectively on the Net, defines them as people who "program enthusiastically" and who believe that "information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible." This has been the hacker ethic ever since a group of MIT's passionate programmers started calling themselves hackers in the early sixties. (Later, in the mid-eighties, the media started applying the term to computer criminals. In order to avoid the confusion with virus writers and intruders into information systems, hackers began calling these destructive computer users crackers. In this book, this distinction between hackers and crackers is observed.)
My own initial interest in these hackers was technological, related to the impressive fact that the best-known symbols of our time - the Net, the personal computer, and software such as the Linux operating system --- were actually developed not by enterprises or governments but were created primarily by some enthusiastic individuals who just started to realize their ideas with other like-minded individuals working in a free rhythm. (Those who are interested in the details of their development may turn to the appendix, "A Brief History of Computer Hackerism".) I wanted to understand the internal logic of this activity, its driving forces. However, the more I thought about computer hackers, the more obvious it became that what was even more interesting about them, in human terms, was the fact that these hackers represented a much larger spiritual challenge to our time. Computer hackers themselves have always admitted this wider applicability of their ways. Their "jargon file" emphasizes that a hacker is basically "an expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example." In this sense, a person can be a hacker without having anything to do with computers.
The main question transformed into, What if we look at hackers from a wider perspective? What does their challenge then mean? Looking at the hacker ethic in this way, it becomes a name for a general passionate relationship to work that is developing in our information age. From this perspective, the hacker ethic is a new work ethic that challenges the attitude to work that has held us in its thrall so long, the Protestant work ethic, as explicated in Max Weber's classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905).
To some computer hackers, this kind of linking of the hacker ethic to Weber may at first seem alien. They should keep in mind that in this book the expression hacker ethic is used in a sense that extends beyond computer hackerism, and that for this reason it confronts social forces that are not normally considered in discussions concerned exclusively with computers. This expansion of the hacker ethic thus presents an intellectual challenge to computer hackers, as well.
But first and foremost the hacker ethic is a challenge to our society and to each of our lives. Besides the work ethic, the second important level of this challenge is the hacker money ethic - a level that Weber defined as the other main component of the Protestant work ethic. Clearly, the "information-sharing" mentioned in the hacker-ethic definition cited above is not the dominant way of making money in our time; on the contrary, money is mostly made by information-owning. Neither is the first hackers' ethos --- that activity should be motivated primarily not by money but rather a desire to create something that one's peer community would find valuable --- a common attitude. While we cannot claim that all present computer hackers share this money ethic or that it is likely to spread into society at large, as we can about their work ethic, we can say that it has been an important force in the formation of our time and that the hackers' debate over the nature of the information economy could lead to consequences at least as radical as those of their work ethic.
The third element present within the hacker ethic from the very beginning, touched upon in the cited definition by the phrase "facilitating access to information and to computing resources," could be called their network ethic or nethic. It has addressed ideas such as freedom of expression on the Net and access to the Net for all. Most computer hackers support only some parts of this nethic, but in terms of their social significance they must be understood as a whole. The impact of these themes remains to be seen, but they definitely go to the heart of the ethical challenges of the information age.
This book is based on an ongoing collaboration between its three authors, a collaboration taking place in various forms over several years (with Manuel Castells through research we conduct together in California, and with Linus Torvalds in the midst of just having fun). The idea for a book dealing with the hacker ethic was born the first time all three of us met, in the fall of 1998, when we were invited speakers at a symposium hosted by the University of California at Berkeley, that traditional hacker stronghold. At that time, we decided to expand our presentations, which dealt with the same subjects as the present work. Linus, we decided, would start as a representative of computer hackerism, Manuel would present his theory of our information age (consisting of the rise of informationalism, the new information-technology paradigm, and a new social form, the network society), and I would examine the social meaning of the hacker ethic by placing the example of Linus's computer hackerism against Manuel's larger background picture of our time. Naturally, each one of us would still speak for himself.
The book adheres to this plan: in his Prologue, "What Makes Hackers Tick? a.k.a. Linus's Law," Linus --- as the originator of one of the most famous hacker creations of our time, the Linux operating system - describes his view of the forces that contribute to the success of hackerism. Manuel has spent the last fifteen years on a study of our time, culminating in his three-volume, 1,500-page work, The Information Age (second revised edition, 2000). In this book's Epilogue, "Informationalism and the Network Society," he presents for the first time the findings of his research, with some new important additions, in a form accessible to the general reader. My analysis is placed between Linus's and Manuel's and is divided in three parts accordingt to the three levels of the hacker ethic: the work ethic, the money ethic, and the nethic. (Some further elaborations of these themes can be found at the book's Website, www.hackerethic.org.)
Those readers who prefer to have a description of the theory background before, and not as a closing systematization of, my examination, may consult Manuel's epilogue right away. Otherwise, let Linus start.
From The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells (Random House, 2001). For more, see www.hackerethic.org. This writing can be published freely on the web with this information included.
This is an excerpt from Pekka Himanen's book 'The Hacker Ethic'.
Linus Torvalds says in his Prologue that, for the hacker, "the computer itself is entertainment," meaning that the hacker programs because he finds programming intrinsically interesting, exciting, and joyous.
The spirit behind other hackers' creations is very similar to this. Torvalds is not alone in describing his work with statements like "Linux hackers do something because they find it to be very interesting." For example, Vinton Cerf, who is somtimes called "the father of the Internet," comments on the fascination programming exerts: "There was something amazingly enticing about programming." Steve Wozniak, the person who built the first real personal computer, says forthrightly about his discovery of the wonders of programming: "It was just the most intriguing world." This is a general spirit: hackers program because programming challenges are of intrinsic interest to them. Problems related to programming arouse genuine curiosity in the hacker and make him eager to learn more.
The hacker is also enthusiastic about this interesting thing; it energizes him. From the MIT of the sixties onward, the classic hacker has emerged from sleep in the early afternoon to start programming with enthusiasm and has continued his efforts, deeply immersed in coding, into the wee hours of the morning. A good example of this is the way sixteen-year-old Irish hacker Sarah Flannery describes her work on the so-called Cayley-Purser encryption algorithm, "I had a great feeling of excitement. . . . I worked constantly for whole days on end, and it was exhilarating. There were times when I never wanted to stop."
Hacker activity is also joyful. It often has its roots in playful explorations. Torvalds has described, in messages on the Net, how Linux began to expand from small experiments with the computer he had just acquired. In the same messages, he has explained his motivation for developing Linux by simply stating that "it was/is fun working on it." Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the Web, also describes how this creation began with experiments in linking what he called "play programs." Wozniak relates how many characteristics of the Apple computer "came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program . . . [a game called] Breakout and show it off at the club." Flannery comments on how her work on the development of encryption technology evolved in the alternation between library study of theorems and the practice of exploratory programming: "With a particularly interesting theorem . . . I'd write a program to generate examples. . . . Whenever I programmed something I'd end up playing around for hours rather than getting back to plodding my way through the paper."
Sometimes this joyfulness shows in the hacker's "flesh life" as well. For example, Sandy Lerner is known not only for being one of the hackers behind the Internet routers but also for riding naked on horseback. Richar Stallman, the bearded and longhaired guru, attends computer gatherings in a robe, and he exorcises commercial programs from the machines brought to him by his followers. Eric Raymond, a well-known defender of hacker culture, is also known for his playful lifestyle: a fan of live role-playing games, he roams the streets of his Pennsylvania hometown and the surrounding woods attired as an ancient sage, a Roman senator, or a seventeenth-century cavalier.
Raymond has also given a good summary of the general hacker spirit in his description of the Unix hackers' philosophy:
To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to be loyal to excellence. You have to believe that software is a craft worth all the intelligence and passion you can muster. . . . Software design and implementation should be a joyous art, and a kind of high-level play. If this attitude seems preposterous or vaguely embarrassing to you, stop and think; ask yourself what you've forgotten. Why do you design software instead of doing something else to make money or pass the time? You must have thought software was worthy of your passions once...
To do the Unix philosophy right, you need to have (or recover) that attitude. You need to care. You need to play. You need to be willing to explore.
In summing up hacker activity's spirit, Raymond uses the word passion, which corresponds to Torvalds's entertainment, as he defined it in the Prologue. But Raymond's term is perhaps even more apt because, even though both words have associations that are not meant in this context, passion conveys more intuitively than entertainment the three levels described above-the dedication to an activity that is intrinsically interesting, inspiring, and joyous.
This passionate relationship to work is not an attitude found only among computer hackers. For example, the academic world can be seen as its much older predecessor. The researcher's passionate intellectual inquiry received similar expression nearly 2,500 years ago when Plato, founder of the first academy, said of philosophy, "like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself."
The same attitude may also be found in many other spheres of life-among artists, artisans, and the "information professionals," from managares and engineers to media workers and designers, for example. It is not only the hackers' "jargon file" that emphasizes this general idea of being a hacker. At the first Hacker Conference in San Francisco in 1984, Burrell Smith, the hacker behind Apple's Macintosh computer, defined the term as follows: "Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It's not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you're doing." Raymond notes in his guide "How to Become a Hacker" that "there are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things [than software], like electronics and music-actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art."
Looked at on this level, computer hackers can be understood as an excellent example of a more general work ethic-which we can give the name the hacker work ethic-gaining ground in our network society, in which the role of information professionals is expanding. But although we use a label coined by computer hackers to express this attitude, it is important to note that we could talk about it even without any reference to computer people. We are discussing a general social challenge that calls into question the Protestant work ethic that has long governed our lives and still maintains a powerful hold on us.
Let's see what type of long historical and strong societal forces the hacker work ethic, in this sense, faces. The familiar expression "Protestant work ethic" derives, of course, from Max Weber's famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905). Weber starts out by describing how the notion of work as a duty lies at the core of the capitalist spirit that arose in the sixteenth century: "This peculiar idea, so familiar to us to-day, but in reality so little a matter of course, of one's duty in a calling, is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture, and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it. It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional activity, no matter in what it consists, in particular no matter whether it appears on the surface as a utilization of his personal powers, or only of his material possessions (as capital)." Weber goes on to say: "Not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling."
Then Weber demonstrates how the other main force described in his essay, the work ethic taught by Protestants, which also arose in the sixteenth century, furthered these goals. The Protestant preacher Richard Baxter expressed that work ethic in its pure form: "It is for action that God maintaineth us and our activities; work is the moral as well as the natural end of power," and to say "I will pray and meditate [instead of working], is as if your servant should refuse his greatest work and tie himself to some lesser, easier part." God is not pleased to see people just meditating and praying --- he wants them to do their job.
True to the capitalist spirit, Baxter advises employers to reinforce this idea in workers of wanting to do one's job as well as possible by making it a matter of conscience: "A truly godly servant will do all your service in obedience to God, as if God Himself had bid him do it." Baxter sums up this attitude by referring to labor as a "calling," a good expression of the three core attitudes of the Protestant work ethic: work must be seen as an end in itself, at work one must do one's part as well as possible, and work must be regarded as a duty, which must be done because it must be done.
While the hacker work ethic's precursor is in the academy, Weber says that the Protestant ethic's only historical precursor is in the monastery. And certainly, if we expand on Weber's comparison, we can see many similarities. In the sixth century, for example, Benedict's monastic rule required all monks to see the work assigned to them as their duty and warned work-shy brethren by noting that "idleness is the enemy of the soul." Monks were also not supposed to question the jobs they were given. Benedict's fifth-century predecessor John Cassian made this clear in his monastic rule by describing in admiring tones the obedience of a monk, named John, to his elder's order to roll a stone so large that no human being could move it:
Again, when some others were anxious to be edified by the example of his [John's] obedience, the elder called him and said: "John, run and roll that stone hither as quickly as possible;" and he forthwith, applying now his neck, and now his whole body, tried with all his might and main to roll an enormous stone which a great crowd of men would not be able to move, so that not only were his clothes saturated with sweat from his limbs, but the stone itself was wetted by his neck; in this too never weighing the impossibility of the command and deed, out of reverence for the old man and the unfeigned simplicity of his service, as he believed implicitly that the old man could not command him to do anything vain or without reason.
This Sisyphean straining epitomizes the idea, central to monastic thought, that one should not question the nature of one's work. Benedict's monastic rule even explained that the nature of the work did not matter because the highest purpose of work was not actually to get something done but to humble the worker's soul by making him do whatever is told-a principle that seems to be still active in a great number of offices. In the medieval time, this prototype for the Protestant work ethic existed only within the monasteries, and it did not influence the prevailing attitude of the church, much less that of society at large. It was only the Protestant reformation that allowed the spread of monastic thinking to the world beyond the monastery walls.
However, Weber went on to emphasize that even though the spirit of capitalism found its essentially religious justification in the Protestant ethic, the latter soon emancipated itself from religion and began to operate according to its own laws. To use Weber's famous metaphor, it turned into a religiously neutral iron cage. This is an essential qualification. In our globalizing world, we should think of the term Protestant ethic in the same way we think of an expression such as platonic love. When we say that someone loves another person platonically, we do not mean that he is a Platonist-that is, an adherent of Plato's philosophy, metaphysics and all. We may attribute a platonic love relationship to a follower of any philosophy, religion, or culture. In the same way, we can speak of someone's "Protestant ethic" regardless of his or her faith or culture. Thus, a Japanese person, an atheist, or a devout Catholic may act-and often does act-in accordance with a Protestant ethic.
One need not look very far to realize how strong a force this Protestant ethic still is. Commonplace remarks like "I want to do my job well," or those made by employers in their little speeches at employee retirement parties about how a person "has always been an industrious/responsible/reliable/loyal worker" are the legacy of the Protestant ethic in that they make no demands on the nature of the work itself. The elevation of work to the status of the most important thing in life-at its extreme, a work addiction that leads to complete neglect of one's loved ones-is another symptom of the Protestant ethic. So is work done with clenched jaws and a responsibility-ridden attitude and the bad conscience many feel when they have to miss work due to ill health.
Seen in a larger historical context, this continued dominance of the Protestant ethic is not so surprising when we remember that even though our network society differs in many significant ways from its predecessor, the industrial society, its "new economy" does not involve a total break with the capitalism Weber describes: it is merely a new kind of capitalism. In The Information Age, Castells stresses that work, in the sense of labor, is not about to end, despite wild paradisiacal forecasts such as Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work. We easily fall for this illusion that technological advances will, somehow, automatically, make our lives less work-centered-but if we just look at the statistical facts of the rise of the network society so far and project them into the future, we must agree with Castells on the nature of the prevailing pattern: "Work is, and will be for the foreseeable future, the nucleus of people's life." The network society itself does not question the Protestant ethic. Left to its own devices, the work-centered spirit easily continues to dominate within it.
Seen in this overall context, the radical nature of hackerism consists of its proposing an alternative spirit for the network society-a spirit that finally questions the dominant Protestant ethic. In this context, we find the only sense in which hackers are really crackers: they are trying to crack the lock of the iron cage.
The Purpose of Life
The displacement of the Protestant ethic will not happen overnight. It will take time, like all great cultural changes. The Protestant ethic is so deeply embedded in our present consciousness that it is often thought of as if it were just "human nature." Of course, it is not. Even a brief look at pre-Protestant attitudes toward work provides a healthy reminder of that fact. Both the Protestant and the hacker ethic are historically singular.
Richard Baxter's view of work was completely alien to the pre-Protestant church. Before the Reformation, clerics tended to devote time to questions such as "Is there life after death?" but none of them worried about whether there was work after life. Work did not belong among the church's highest ideals. God himself worked for six days and finally rested on the seventh. This was the highest goal for human beings as well: in Heaven, just as on Sundays, people would not have to work. Paradise was in, office was out. One might say that Christianity's original answer to the question "What is the purpose of life?" was: the purpose of life is Sunday.
This statement is not just a witticism. In the fifth century, Augustine compared our life quite literally to Friday, the day when, according to the teachings of the church, Adam and Eve sinned and Christ suffered on the cross. Augustine wrote that in Heaven we'll find a perennial Sunday, the day on which God rested and Christ ascended to Heaven: "That will truly be the greatest of Sabbaths; a Sabbath that has no evening." Life is just a long wait for the weekend.
Because the Church Fathers saw work as merely a consequence of the fall from grace, they also took very particular conceptual care in their descriptions of Adam's and Eve's activities in Paradise. Whatever Adam and Eve may have done there, it could not be seen as work. Augustine emphasizes that in Eden "praiseworthy work was not toilsome"-it was no more than a pleasant hobby.
The pre-Protestant churchmen understood work, "toil," as punishment. In medieval visionary literature that speaks to churchmen's images of Hell, the implements of labor fully reveal their true nature as instruments of torture: sinners are punished with hammers and other tools. What's more, according to these visions, there is in Hell an even more cruel torture than the directly inflicted physical one: perennial toil. When the devout brother Brendan saw, in the sixth century, a worker on his visit to the beyond, he immediately made the sign of the cross: he realized that he had arrived where all hope must be abandoned. Here is the narrator of his vision:
When they had passed on further, about a stone's throw, they heard the noise of bellows blowing like thunder, and the beating of sledge hammers on the anvils and iron. Then St. Brendan armed himself all over his body with the sign of the Cross, saying, "O Lord Jesus Christ, deliver us from this sinister island." Soon one of the inhabitants appeared to do some work. He was hairy and hideous, blackened with fire and smoke. When he saw the servants of Christ near the island, he withdrew into his forge, crying aloud: "Woe! Woe! Woe!"
If you do not conduct yourself well in this life, the thinking went, you are condemned to work even in the next. And, even worse, that work, according to the pre-Protestant church, will be absolutely useless, meaningless to an extent you could never have imagined even on your worst working day on earth.
This theme crystallizes in the apotheosis of the pre-Protestant worldview, Dante's Divine Comedy (completed just before his death in 1321), in which sinners who have devoted their lives to money-both spendthrifts and misers-are doomed to push huge boulders around an eternal circle:
More shades were here than anywhere above,
and from both sides, to the sounds of their screams,
straining their chests, they rolled enormous weights.
:
And when they met and clashed against each other
they turned to push the other way, one side
screaming, "Why hoard?", the other side, "Why waste?"
:
And so they moved back round the gloomy circle,
returning on both sides to opposite poles
to scream their shameful tune another time;
:
again they came to clash and turn and roll
forever in their semicircle joust.
Dante borrows this idea from Greek mythology. In Tartarus, where the very worst human beings were dispatched, the most severe punishment was meted out to greedy Sisyphus, who was doomed to endlessly push a big rock up to the top of a hill, from which it always rolled back down. Sunday always beckons to Sisyphus and the sinners in Dante's Inferno, but it never comes. They are condemned to an eternal Friday.
Considering this background, we can now gain a better understanding of how great a change in our attitude to work the Protestant Reformation entailed. In allegorical terms, it moved life's center of gravity from Sunday to Friday. The Protestant ethic reoriented ideology so thoroughly that it even turned Heaven and Hell upside down. When work became an end in itself on earth, the clerics found it difficult to imagine Heaven as a place for mere time-wasting leisure, and work could no longer be seen as infernal punishment. Thus, reformed eighteenth-century cleric Johann Kasper Lavater explained that even in Heaven "we cannot be blessed without having occupations. To have an occupation means to have a calling, an office, a special, particular task to do." Baptist William Clarke Ulyat put it in a nutshell when he described Heaven at the beginning of the twentieth century: "practically it is a workshop."
The Protestant ethic proved so powerful that its work-centeredness permeated even our imagination. A great example of this is Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), a novel written by a man trained as a Protestant preacher. Marooned on an abundant island, Crusoe does not take it easy; he works all the time. He is such an orthodox Protestant that he does not even take Sunday off, though he otherwise still observes the seven-day week. After saving an aborigine from his enemies, he aptly names him Friday, trains him in the Protestant ethic, and then praises him in a manner that perfectly describes that ethic's ideal worker: "Never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant, perfectly obliged and engaged; his very affections were ty'd to me, like those of a child to a father."
In Michel Tournier's twentieth-century satirical retelling of the novel, Vendredi (Friday), Friday's conversion to the Protestant ethic is still more total. Crusoe decides to put Friday to the test by giving him a task even more Sisyphean than what Cassian's monastic rule prescribed:
I set him a task which in every prison in the world is held to be the most degrading of harassments-the task of digging a hole and filling it in with the contents of a second; then digging a third, and so on. He labored at this for an entire day, under a leaden sky and in heat like that of a furnace. . . . To say that Friday gave no sign of resenting this idiotic employment, is not enough. I have seldom seen him work with such good will.
Sisyphus has truly become a hero.
The Passionate Life
When the hacker ethic is placed in this large historical context, it is easy to see that the hacker ethic --- understood not just as the computer hackers' ethic but as a general social challenge --- resembles the pre-Protestant ethic to a much greater degree than it does the Protestant one. In this sense, one could say that for hackers the purpose of life is closer to Sunday than to Friday. But, it is important to note, only closer: ultimately, the hacker ethic is not the same as the pre-Protestant work ethic, which envisions an attainable paradise of life without doing anything. Hackers want to realize their passions, and they are ready to accept that the pursuit even of interesting tasks may not always be unmitigated bliss.
For hackers, passion describes the general tenor of their activity, though its fulfillment may not be sheer joyful play in all its aspects. Thus, Linus Torvalds has described his work on Linux as a combination of enjoyable hobby and serious work: "Linux has very much been a hobby (but a serious one: the best type)." Passionate and creative, hacking also entails hard work. Raymond says in his guide "How to Become a Hacker," "Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes a lot of effort." Such effort is needed in the creation of anything even just a little bit greater. If need be, hackers are also ready for the less interesting parts necessary for the creation of the whole. However, the meaningfulness of the whole gives even its more boring aspects a worth. Raymond writes: "The hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery."
There's a difference between being permanently joyless and having found a passion in life for the realization of which one is also willing to take on the less joyful but nonetheless necessary parts.
From The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells (Random House, 2001). For more, see www.hackerethic.org. This writing can be published freely on the web with this information included.
This is an excerpt from Pekka Himanen's book 'The Hacker Ethic'.
Dedicated to Eric Raymond - the introducer of the allegory of the cathedral and the bazaar
According to the hackers' "jargon file," the original hacker ethic meant the belief that "information-sharing is a powerful positive good." In practice this meant the ethical duty to work through an open development model, in which the hacker gives his or her creation freely for others to use, test, and develop further. Although for the author of this writing, the ethical arguments for the hacker model are the most interesting and important ones, there is also a more pragmatic level that is significant and fascinating. Just as we can add to our ethical arguments for the hackers' passionate and free way of working the more pragmatic point that, in the information age, new information is created most effectively by allowing for playfulness and for the possibility of working according to one's individual rhythm, we can likewise say that the open model is not just ethically justified but also very powerful in practice (in fact, the "jargon file" also says that it is a "powerful positive good"). It is worth of taking a closer look at the hackers' idea of openness from this purely pragmatic viewpoint. Thus all observations in this essay will be purely pragmatic; those who want to read more about the ethical arguments for the hacker model may turn to my book The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells (Random House, 2001).
The development of the Net is an excellent concrete example of the hacker ethic in action, but the Linux project, which has arguably taken the ideal of openness the furthest so far, serves as an even better one. Torvalds started working on Linux in 1991 while he was a student at the University of Helsinki. After developing an interest in the problems of operating systems, Torvalds imported into his home computer the Unix-like Minix operating system, written by Dutch computer-science professor Andrew Tanenbaum. By studying and using it as a developmental framework, he proceeded to design his own operating system. An essential feature of Torvalds's work was that he involved others in his project from the very beginning. On August 25, 1991, he posted a message on the Net with the subject line "What would you like to see most in minix?" in which he announced that he was "doing a (free) operating system." He received several ideas in reply and even some promises for help in testing the program. The operating system's first version was released on the Net as source code free to all in September 1991.
The next, improved version was available as soon as early October. Torvalds then extended an even more direct invitation to hackers to join him in the development of the new system. In a message sent to the Net, he asked for tips about information sources. He got them, and development advanced quickly. Within a month, other programmers had joined in. Since then, the Linux network has grown at an amazing creative pace. Thousands of programmers have participated in Linux's development, and their numbers are growing steadily. There are millions of users, and their number, too, is growing. Anyone can participate in its development, and anyone is welcome to use it freely.
For the coordination of their development work, Linux hackers use the entire toolbox of the Net: e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups, file servers, and webpages. Development work has also been divided into independent modules out of which hacker groups create competing versions. A group consisting of Torvalds and a few other principal developers then decides which of these versions will be incorporated in the improved version of Linux (and, of course, the modular structure also develops gradually). Torvalds's group does not, however, hold any permanent position of authority. The group retains its authority only for as long as its choices correspond with the considered choices of the hacker community. Should the group's choice prove less than enlightened, the hacker community proceeds to develop the project in its own direction, bypassing the former leaders of the pack.
In order to control the continuous development of Linux, publications have been divided into two series. In the stable versions, safe for use by average users, the y in the release number x.y.z is even (e.g., version 1.0.0), whereas in the developmental versions, aimed at programmers, the y is the stable version's y + 1 (e.g., the stable 1.0.0's improved but still not finally tested developmental version is 1.1.0). x grows only when a truly fundamental change is made (at the time of writing, the latest available version is 2.4.0). This simple model has worked surprisingly well in the management of Linux development.
In his well-known essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," published originally on the Net, Eric Raymond has defined the difference between Linux's open model, and the closed model preferred by most companies, by comparing them to the bazaar and the cathedral. Although a technologist himself, Raymond emphasizes that Linux's real innovation was not technical but social: it was the new, completely open social manner in which it was developed. In his vocabulary, it was the shift from the cathedral to the bazaar.
Raymond defines the cathedral as a model in which one person or a very small group of people plans everything in advance and then realizes the plan under its own power. Development occurs behind closed doors, and everybody else will see only the "finished" results. In the bazaar model, on the other hand, ideation is open to everyone, and ideas are handed out to be tested by others from the very beginning. The multiplicity of viewpoints is important: when ideas are disseminated widely in an early stage, they can still benefit from external additions and criticisms by others, whereas when a cathedral is presented in its finished form, its foundations can no longer be changed. In the bazaar, people try out different approaches, and, when someone has a brilliant idea, the others adopt it and build upon it.
Generally speaking, this open-source model can be described as follows: It all begins with a problem or goal someone finds personally significant. That person may release just the problem or goal itself, but usually he or she will also provide a Solution-version 0.1.1, to use the Linux numbering system. In the open model, a recipient has the right to freely use, test, and develop this Solution. This is possible only if the information that has led to the Solution (the source) has been passed on with it. In the open-source model, the release of these rights entails two obligations: these same rights have to be passed on when the original Solution or its refined version (0.1.2) is shared, and the contributors must always be credited whenever either version is shared. All this is a shared process, in which the participants move gradually-or sometimes even by leaps and bounds (say, a shift from version 0.y.z to version 1.y.z)-to better versions. In practice, of course, projects follow this idealized model to a greater or lesser extent.
Although Raymond's allegory of the bazaar and the cathedral elegantly captures the difference between the open-source and closed-source models, I would like to explain the power of the open model vis-a-vis the closed model further by suggesting another pair of allegories: the academy and the monastery. In fact, the open-source model resembles the academy even more directly than the bazaar. Scientists, too, release their work openly to others for their use, testing, and further development. Their research is based on the idea of an open and self-correcting process. The sociologist Robert Merton wrote that this idea of self-correction was as important a principle to science as openness. He called it organized skepticism - historically, it is a continuation of the synusia of Plato's Academy, which also included the idea of approaching the truth through critical dialogue. The scientific ethic entails a model in which theories are developed collectively and their flaws are perceived and gradually removed by means of criticism provided by the entire scientific community.
Of course, scientists have chosen this model not only for ethical reasons but also because it has proved to be the most successful way of creating scientific knowledge. All of our understanding of nature is based on this academic or scientific model. The reason why the hackers' open-source model works so effectively seems to be-in addition to the facts that they are realizing their passions and are motivated by peer recognition, as scientists are, too-that to a great degree it conforms to the ideal open academic model, which is historically the best adapted for information creation.
Broadly speaking, one can say that in the academic model the point of departure also tends to be a problem or goal researchers find personally interesting; they then provide their own Solution (even though in many instances the mere statement of the problem or proclamation of a program is interesting in itself). The academic ethic demands that anyone may use, criticize, and develop this Solution. More important than any final result is the underlying information or chain of arguments that has produced the Solution. (It is not enough to merely publish "E = mc2"-theoretical and empirical justifications are also required.) Nevertheless, the scientific ethic does not involve only rights; it also has the same two fundamental obligations: the sources must always be mentioned (plagiarism is abhorrent), and the new Solution must not be kept secret but must be published again for the benefit of the scientific community. The fulfillment of these two obligations is not required by law but by the scientific community's internal, powerful sanctions.
Following this model, normal physics research, for example, continuously provides new additions ("developmental versions") to what has already been achieved, and after testing these refinements the scientific community accepts them as part of its body of knowledge ("stable versions"). Much more rarely, there is an entire "paradigm shift," to use the expression that philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn introduced in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the broadest sense, there have been only three long-lived research paradigms: the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic physics, the "classic" Newtonian physics, and the Einsteinian-Heisenbergian physics based on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Seen this way, present theories are versions 3.y.z. (Many physicists already call the version 4, which they believe is imminent, "The Theory of Everything." Computer hackers would not anticipate the arrival of version 4.0.0 quite so eagerly.)
The opposite of this hacker and academic open model can be called the closed model, which does not just close off information but is also authoritarian. In a business enterprise built on the monastery model, authority sets the goal and chooses a closed group of people to implement it. After the group has completed its own testing, others will have to accept the result purely as it is. Other uses of it are called "unauthorized uses." We can use our allegory of the monastery as an apt metaphor for this style, which is well summed up by Saint Basil the Great's monastic rule from the fourth century: "No one is to concern himself with the superior's method of administration or make curious inquiries about what is being done." The closed model does not allow for initiative or criticism that would enable an activity to become more creative and self-corrective.
It is true that many hackers oppose hierarchical operation for ethical reasons, like that it easily leads to a culture in which people are humiliated. But they also think that the nonhierarchical manner is the most effective one. From the point of view of a traditionally structured business, this may initially seem quite senseless. How could it ever work? Should not someone draw an organization chart for the Net and Linux developers? It is interesting to note that similar things might be said of science. How could Einstein ever arrive at his E = mc2 in the chaos of self-organized groups of researchers? Should science not operate with a clear-cut hierarchy, headed up by a CEO of Science, with a division chief for every discipline?
Both scientists and hackers have learned from experience that the lack of strong structures is one of the reasons why their model is so powerful. Hackers and scientists can just begin to realize their passions, and then network with other individuals who share them. This spirit clearly differs from that found not only in business but also in government. In governmental agencies, the idea of authority permeates an action even more strongly than it does in companies. For the hackers, the typical governmental way of having endless meetings, forming countless committees, drafting tedious strategy papers, and so on before anything happens is at least as great a pain as doing market research to justify an idea before you can start to create. (It also irritates scientists and hackers no end when the university has been turned into a governmental bureaucracy or monastery.)
But the relative lack of structures does not mean that there are no structures. Despite its appearance, hackerism does not exist in a state of anarchy or mean paradisiacal utopianism any more than science does. Hacker and scientific projects have their relative guiding figures, such as Torvalds, whose task it is to help in determining direction and to support the creativity of others. In addition, both the academic and hacker models have a special publication structure. Research is open to anyone, but in practice contributions included in reputable scientific publications are selected by a smaller group of referees. Still, this model is designed so as to guarantee that in the long run, it is the truth that determines the referee group rather than the other way around. Like the academic referee group, the hacker network's referee group retains its position only as long as its choices correspond to the considered choices of the entire peer community. If the referee group is unable to do this, the community bypasses it and creates new channels. This means that at the bottom the authority status is open to anyone and is based only on achievement-no one can achieve permanent tenure. No one can assume a position in which his or her work could not be reviewed by peers, just as anyone else's creations can be.
It goes without saying that the academy was very influential long before there were computer hackers. For example, from the nineteenth century onward, every industrial technology (electricity, telephone, television, etc.) would have been unthinkable without its underpinning of scientific theory. The late industrial revolution already marked a transition to a society that relied upon scientific results; the hackers bring about a reminder that, in the information age, even more important than discrete scientific results is the open academic model that enables the creation of these results.
This is a central insight. In fact, it is so important that the second big reason for the pragmatic success of the hacker model seems to be the fact that hackers' learning is modeled to a large extent the same way as their development of new software (which can actually be seen as the frontier of their collective learning). Thus, their learning model has the same strengths as the development model.
A typical hacker's learning process starts out with setting up an interesting problem, working toward a solution by using various sources, then submitting the solution to extensive testing. Learning more about a subject becomes the hacker's passion. Torvalds initially taught himself programming on a computer he inherited from his grandfather. He set up problems for himself and found out what he needed to know to solve them. Most hackers have learned programming in a similar informal way, following their passions. The examples of the ability of ten-year-olds to learn very complicated programming issues tell us much about the importance of passion in the learning process, as opposed to the slow going their contemporaries often find their education in traditional schools to be.
Later on, the beginnings of Torvalds's operating system arose out of his explorations into the processor of the PC he purchased in 1991. In typical hacker fashion, simple experiments with a program that tested the features of the processor by writing out either As or Bs gradually expanded into a plan for a Net newsgroup-reading program and then on to the ambitious idea of an entire operating system. But even though Torvalds is a self-taught programmer in the sense that he acquired his basic knowledge without taking a class, he did not learn everything all by himself. For example, in order to familiarize himself with operating systems, he studied the source codes of Tanenbaum's Minix as well as various other information sources provided by the hacker community. From the very beginning, in true hacker fashion, he has never hesitated to ask for help with questions in areas in which he has not yet acquired expertise.
A prime strength of the hacker learning model lies in the fact that typically a hacker's learning teaches others. When a hacker studies the source code of a program, he often develops it further, and others can learn from this work. When a hacker checks out information sources maintained on the Net, he often adds helpful information from his own experience. An ongoing, critical, evolutionary discussion forms around various problems. The reward for participating in this discussion is peer recognition.
The hackers' open learning model can be called their "Net Academy." It is a continuously evolving learning environment created by the learners themselves. The learning model adopted by hackers has many advantages. In the hacker world, the teachers or assemblers of information sources are often those who have just learned something. This is beneficial because often someone just engaged in the study of a subject is better able to teach it to others than the expert who no longer comes to it fresh and has, in a way, already lost his grasp of how neophytes think. For an expert, empathizing with someone who is just learning something involves levels of simplification that he or she often resists for personal intellectual reasons. Nor does the expert necessarily find the teaching of basics very satisfying, while a student may find doing such teaching tremendously rewarding, since he or she does not as a rule get to enjoy the position of instructor and is generally not given sufficient opportunity to use his or her talents. The process of teaching also involves by its very nature the comprehensive analysis of subject matter. If one is really able to teach something to others, one must have already made the material very clear to oneself. While preparing the material, one has to consider it carefully from the point of view of possible further questions and counterarguments.
Once again, this hacker model resembles Plato's Academy, where students were not regarded as targets for knowledge transmission but were referred to as companions in learning (synetheis). In the Academy's view, the central task of teaching was to strengthen the learners' ability to pose problems, develop lines of thought, and present criticism. As a result, the teacher was metaphorically referred to as a midwife, a matchmaker, and a master of ceremonies at banquets. It was not the teacher's task to inculcate the students with preestablished knowledge but to help them give birth to things from their own starting points.
In the hacker community, too, we can think of the best experts as the community's gadflies, midwives, and symposiarchs. They are able to entice the collective learning process, which links the learning and development models together as a powerful hacker way of creating things.
From The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells (Random House, 2001). For more, see www.hackerethic.org. This writing can be published freely on the web with this information included.
This essay is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
License England & Wales. Read the full license here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk.
N.B. You can download a PDF of the dissertation here. I find it much easier to read long documents when they are broken up into pages. You can also download the LATEX source files I used to generate the PDF and this HTML if you want in this directory.
This essay begins with the following proposition: given that we spend a large proportion of our time working, a just society will provide or encourage meaningful work. I further assume that, rather than mounting a full frontal assault on the root of the problem, which I identify as capitalism and instrumental wage labour, we should instead seek out and broaden spaces where life can unfold freely (Gorz, 1994). Hackers, a group or label used in a sense unfamiliar to analytical philosophers, have created such spaces, and fit Melucci's description of individuals who "invest... in the creation of autonomous centres of action". Hackers have, to an extent, "oppose[d] the intrusion of the state and market" (quoted in Della-Porta & Diani, 2003) into their lifeworld since they first emerged as a social group in the late 1950s (Levy, 2001). I shall therefore set out to show how the Hacker Ethic, by which all hackers work, provides a promosing model both for further research into meaningful work and for public policy in the same area.
I shall proceed by first developing an understanding of the Hacker Ethic, which will highlight a central concern of my essay, that of orientations that I characterise as self-indulgent and social placing conflicting obligations upon individuals. I will then analyse Marx's concept of alienation to deepen my understanding of meaningful work, and to show how the Hacker Ethic addresses Marx's concerns. Finally, I will show how, by employing my conception of alienation, the Hacker Ethic can to an extent overcome the conflicting obligations.
The word 'hacker' originated in the computer labs of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1950s amongst a group of programmers who believed that "all information should be free" and that "access to computers... should be unlimited and total" (Levy, 2001, p.40). Hackers now define themselves as "an expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example" (Raymond, 2003). One could work in a 'hackerish' way in any field of endeavour where universal access to, and sharing of, the tools of your trade would be positive and viable. Decades later the media began to apply the term to criminals using computers, who hackers began to call 'crackers' (Raymond, 2003).2
Pekka Himanen wrote the first major study of the hackers' attitude from a philosophical perspective, establishing a 'Hacker Ethic' with seven key characteristics: passion, freedom, their work ethic, their money ethic, their network ethic, caring and creativity (Himanen, 2001, p.141). Broadly speaking the Hacker Ethic suggests (a) the importance of a particular kind of work, namely the kind that hackers can be passionate about, that isn't motivated by money, and that is playful (b) a particular approach to working, which allows an individual rhythm of life and yet also places the community and cooperation at the centre, and (c) a particular approach to building productive communities, involving equal and unfettered access to information and tools facilitated by open sharing. Utopian though it sounds, it is important to recognise that the hackers who subscribe to this ethic have built much of the infrastructure of today's information society 3.
Parts (a) and (b) encapsulate a work ethic that is orientated towards work as being intrinsically worthwhile and motivating, rather than instrumental. Hacker work is, in the words of the hacker Linus Torvalds, "interesting, exciting, and joyous", "intrinsically interesting and challenging" (Himanen, 2001, pp.xiii-xvii) and "goes beyond the realm of surviving or of economic life" (Capurro, 2003). That these features are intrinsic to the work, rather than being a subjective attitude on the part of the individual, is demonstrated by a comment from an employee of Microsoft. The company competes with the work of hackers, often attacking them, and so charged an employee with the task of investigating the competitiveness of the hackers' work. Without any bias in favour of hackers, he wrote that when hacking on their software, "the feeling was exhilarating and addictive" (OSI, 1998).
It is important to note that when hackers talk about intrinsic motivation they almost always use adjectives like "fun", "passionate", "joyous" and "entertaining". In contemporary society we maintain a distinction between work and leisure, and are acutely aware of when work erodes the time we usually dedicate to leisure. To hackers, the distinction is a non sequitor. Hacking on some challenging code is every bit as entertaining as playing a game of football or reading a book, albeit in a different way. Not all play is "something wasteful [or] frivolous", and can be "the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person"; to hack "is to dedicate yourself to realizing your full human potential; to take an essentially active, rather than passive stance towards your environment; and to be constantly guided in this by your sense of fulfilment (sic), meaning and satisfaction" (Kane, 2000).
This guiding sense is apparent in hackers' approach to work management, and specifically in how they decide what to work on. The dominant factor, according to most theorists, is the desire to "scratch and itch", i.e. to satisfy a need (Raymond, 1999) (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005). This need may be a functional one where the hacker needs a particular bit of software, or it may be a personal one where the hacker wants to try his hand at a particular technique. Most hacker work is entered into voluntarily because it is "intellectually stimulating", because it "improves skills" and because of the code's "work functionality" (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005). If this is the case, then the adjectives given by Torvalds and the Microsoft employee should not be thought of as the sole motivations for work, nor solely as pleasant byproducts, but rather as factors that affect how a hackers prefer to scratch their itches.
This orientation around the activity and its inherent worth gives rise to a meritocratic form of organisation. According to Levy, "Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position." If a hacker wants to pursue a line of work, they simply start hacking and gain approval from other hackers when their work shows merit. Access to computing equipment and advice from fellow hackers isn't restricted by bureaucracy or unjust social arrangements (Levy, 2001, p.43). Of course meritocracies place demanding barriers to entry insofar as they require a certain level of skill and aptitude. They also fail to emphasise other aspects of personality or capability that we might find positive such as race and gender, which may be "deeply felt" by some individuals (Adam, 2004). This problem can be overcome simply by acknowledging the positive aspects of equal opportunities, and of social duties that help the less able; these suggestions are coherent with the hackers' work ethic.
Weizenbaum, an early critic of hackers, suggested that hackers work "without definite purpose". Unable to set long-term goals or analyse information in a teleological context, he claimed that hackers are aimless and disembodied. Compulsively scratching itches, Weizenbaum's hacker is like a hyperactive child who may engage passionately in frenzied activity without ever achieving anything. This is a culture that he describes as "instrumental rationality", the result of the belief that if some task is technically feasible then it is worth performing (quoted in Hannemyr, 1999). For a work ethic to be truly fulfilling, truly meaningful, he suggests that it must account for some kind of worthwhile aim towards which the hackers' activity is directed. However, as Hannemyr (1999) has pointed out, hackers create products not only for the pleasure of the work but also for the utility and beauty of the products themselves. Hackers value "flexibility, tailorability, modularity and openendedness to facilitate on-going experimentation". The activity of creation may not be as aimless as Weizenbaum suggests, however one can still object that these aims are limited. Creating for the sake of abstract features in the product could still be characterised as a form of instrumental rationality, without wider personal or social goals such as the creation of tools that enhance personal life quality or that meet a pressing social need.
Wiezenbaum could reply that such a creative act would simply fetishise the role of information and activities that create it, without good reason to value them as abstract entities. He could further point out that such an attitude would have no objection to creating harmful products, such as software that facilitates anonymous online transfer of child pornography, if the creation of the product was particularly enjoyable and if the code was deemed to be beautiful. This lack of focus on outcome leads to an ambuguity in the work ethic: is it the case that hackers value characteristics inherent to the work and the code they create, or do they also account for the use value of the products? This ambiguity makes it difficult to say, given that they have a limited amount of time during which to hack, how they should spend it.
The hackers' work ethic, insofar as it concentrates on how one should work and why it should be motivating, invites the charge of self-indulgence. It argues for an autonomy in work that facilitates personal fulfilment without clarifying this ambiguity of values, and without accounting for social obligations that might reasonably abridge this autonomy. The Hacker Ethic does, however, encapsulate social obligations in part (c) mentioned above. These obligations can be most clearly studied in the free software movement, an applied example of the hackers' social ethic.
The free software movement arose out of the hacker subculture in MIT in the 1980s. It was started by Richard M. Stallman, who wanted to produce an entire operating system that would be developed and distributed according to the principles of the Hacker Ethic. This act would be "a way of bringing back the cooperative spirit" found in the hackers' social ethic (FSF, 2003). This spirit was being taken away by an increasingly proprietary application of copyright to software, whereby the copyright owners abridge hackers' access to information.
The hackers' social ethic is based upon three principles: First, the belief that sharing information, be it about the weather or a novel, is good; second, that hackers have an ethical duty to share the information with which they work 4; and third, that hackers should facilitate access to computers wherever possible (Raymond, 2003). These principles are closely related to the hacker work ethic, since they facilitate it by removing artificial restrictions on the hacker's freedom to use the information with which they work. It is important to note that there is no obligation to create socially valuable products, only to remove restrictions, a liberal feature that I will attend to later.
Stallman applied these axioms by subverting copyright, a limited monopoly granted by the state to a creative person in return for their increased productivity. He wrote and applied a license to his copyrighted work that gave the community free access to the information. He coined this act "copyleft", and described the licensed work as "free software", where "free" refers to freedom rather than price. The license guarantees the following four freedoms:
Stallman conceived of these freedoms as an ethical duty on the part of the hacker to society. Not sharing information in this way is "the wrong treatment of other people", "anti-social" and it "cuts the bonds of society" (Stallman, 2004a) (Stallman, 2004b). These bonds are hinted at when he writes that not sharing with others is "divisive" because it reduces the emphasis on "helping one's neighbors" and on working "for the public good". To do this is an obligation, but not one so strong that we must always work for the public good (Stallman, 1992) (Stallman, 2005). Even the suggestion that we ought to work for the public good on occasion seems to contradict Raymond's reluctance to mention working on socially valuable products.
In a seminal position paper, Stallman describes the harms that non-free software causes, which parallel the freedoms his licenses guarantee. In the first place, "fewer people use the program" (Stallman, 1992). People might be unable to use a program because of 'natural restrictions', such as blindness, or by 'artificial restrictions', such as copyright. In correspondence with Stallman, he confirmed that only harms caused by artificial restrictions need concern a hacker, suggesting that they have no obligation to ensure that, for example, a blind person can use their program as well as somebody with sight (Stallman, 2005). The second harm he identifies is that "none of the users can adapt or fix the program", caused by an application of copyright that obstructs access to the program's source code. This also causes the final harm, which is that "other developers cannot learn from the program, or base new work on it" (Stallman, 1992). Again, a person with no programming skills or with blindness would suffer the harms regardless of artificial restrictions.
The free software philosophy operates on the harm principle, suggesting that placing any artificial restriction on the sharing of information causes a social harm that is never justified and that must therefore be avoided.rom this Stallman develops a golden rule, that one must always share software freely under the terms described above. Though he suggests that it is a Kantian moral position, one could also advance a rule utilitarian or rule consequentialist account, that one ought to share software freely because the good consequences, and the avoidance of the aforementioned harms, always outweigh the bad. He writes that "if anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs." 5. This analysis is admittedly trivial, but necessary since the ambiguity of his moral philosophy, and his probable focus on either a Kantian, utilitarian or consequentialist account, causes problems in my account of alienation later in this essay.
The free software social ethic also has an important positive component that goes beyond Raymond's weak or liberal emphasis on rights and access. Though these are an important part of the free software ethic - Stallman maintains that the freedoms his licenses guarantee are a human right (Berry, 2004, p.70) 6 - it also emphasises values such as cooperation and communication in productive communities. "The conception of the social good is strongly communitarian and privileges both a vision of a social order that assigns rights and obligations, and one that is fair and equitable" (Berry, 2004, p.73). The rights and obligations that this position implies are taken as a Kantian categorical imperative and should be scrupulously followed by all hackers.
Stallman's position poses two problems. In the first place, one might reasonably ask why it is that we have any obligation to share information but not to produce it. The ethic is neutral towards an idle hacker who does no work but hostile to a busy hacker who refuses to share his work. It may be simply that social sanctions against idleness already exist, and so the Hacker Ethic is only concerned with an additional sanction not present, that against exclusive ownership of information. Raymond, for example, is an ardent supporter of the free market and so presumably he believes that we needn't worry about idleness because the need for money will compel a hacker to work. Stallman's more left wing political stance, on the other hand, explains his reference to working for the public good. It is safe to say, then, that the Hacker Ethic does place value on individual performing socially useful work, but that there is no consensus on where the responsibility for this lies, be it in the market or social obligations.
The second problem is to do with Stallman's aversion to natural restrictions. By 'natural', Stallman doesn't just refer to biological restrictions but also to other restrictions that we would normally think of as outside the direct control of the hacker. So both blindness and poverty in the user are natural restrictions that the hacker cannot directly overcome, or at least that is the prevailing opinion in the society in which Stallman lives. But the aversion remains strange. Imagine if I were blind or if I had no money. I would be unable to use free software for any purpose, be it to use it, to adapt it or to learn from it if the program doesn't work with accessibility software or if I am unable to purchase a computer. Would I not be less free, according to Stallman's criteria, than a person who faces no natural restrictions but is nonetheless unable to study how the program works because of artificial restrictions? Surely the hacker breaks the bonds of society more strongly if he refuses to make it usable for the majority of his fellow human beings out of a desire for other work that would be characterised as self-indulgent? Furthermore, buying a computer for the poorer person would seem to heed Raymond's call for universal access to computers, and Stallman's call to work for the public good.
An amended rule based upon his four freedoms might state: where the good consequences of a hacker overcoming restrictions outweigh the bad, the hacker has a duty to overcome these restrictions, be they natural or artificial. In the examples given above, adapting my software for blind people or buying a computer for a poorer person would have obvious good consequences, whilst abridging my autonomy and setting me back financially. Given that Stallman suggests we ought to accept a lower wage writing free software rather than attempting to "get rich" through writing non-free software, the hacker will have to heed his social obligations in most cases.
In response to this claim, Stallman simply wrote to me that "to demand an impractical level of clarity in practical applications of ethics simply brings it to a standstill, since it sets the bar impossibly high" (Stallman, 2005). In other words, his philosophy is based upon a utilitarian principle that, if taken to its logical extreme, becomes impractical or even undesirable but which, when applied in moderation, becomes desirable. Aside from the fact that this violates his desire for a categorical imperative, because it is impossible to apply the ethic in full to all members of society, it also suggests that he is wrong either in thinking the bar is too high, or somewhere in the construction of the social obligations that set the bar so high.
In his defence, it would be absurd to suggest that a hacker must go out of his way to educate the whole of society to an advanced level of physics so they could use his physics program, even if society wanted to use it. This would involve the hacker volunteering a phenomenal amount of time and resources to educating society, with limited discernible public good. It is not so absurd, however, to suggest that a hacker should spend a small proportion of his time adapting a program essential to a group of people so that they can use it, even if that work isn't intrinsically interesting for the hacker.
The free software philosophy, as an example of the hackers' social ethic, seems to be a strongly socialistic counterweight to the self-indulgent work ethic. Stallman writes that "a user of software is no less important than an author... their interests and needs have equal weight, when we decide which course of action is best" (Stallman, 1992). That is to say that the author of some software has obligations to himself and to society. The self-indulgent obligations are met by working in a joyous and passionate way on software that is intellectually challenging, that develops skills and that has significant use value; the social obligations are more complicated. Stallman posits a weaker social obligation that can be met by distributing any information produced under a free, copyleft license. I have advanced a stronger social obligation, more consistent with the calls for universal access, that can only be met by producing socially useful information, distributing it under a free, copyleft license and purchasing equipment for those whose poverty denies them access.
A hacker will automatically meet Stallman's social obligations without prejudicing his self-indulgent obligations simply by virtue of working according to the Hacker Ethic. By releasing his work under a free license, the hacker won't prejudice his ability to work freely, passionately, joyously and so on. In fact, as part of a community that also meets this obligation, the free distribution of information will facilitate his self-indulgent work practises. A hacker may, however, have to temper his self-indulgent obligations to meet the stronger social obligations. For example, making a piece of software usable for blind people may not challenge the hacker, it may be uninteresting work, but it should nonetheless be undertaken for the sake of universal access to that software.
In practise, of course, the point of moderation between the obligations bestowed by the work ethic and the social ethic is decided not by an ethical principle but by judgement of each individual hacker. But the question remains as to whether or not the Hacker Ethic has anything to say on this matter. For Torvalds and Himanen, once a hacker is self-sufficient then the Hacker Ethic can account for characteristically self-indulgent work practises. For Stallman, given self-sufficiency, he is interested in social relations and obligations. Unlike in other cases, where the two demands are clearly antagonistic, the mechanisms that hackers employ to meet their social obligations facilitate their self-indulgent work practises, and vice versa. Given the close connection between these two aspects of the ethic, it would seem possible and attractive that there might be some common framework that could account for both aspects and help resolve the conflicts.
I propose that the Marxian theories of alienation are a good candidate for such a framework. In dealing with relations between the worker and his labour, the worker and his product, and the worker and other people it presents a unified theory with a common language. This allows me to overcome the discursive chasm between Himanen's and Stallman's accounts of the Hacker Ethic whilst retaining both the spirit and language of each. In focussing on relations of production and creation it addresses the central concerns of the Hacker Ethic: how we work and what we do with the products of our labour.
Marx's theory of alienation identified four kinds or aspects of alienation, which I shall analyse in turn: alienation from labour, from products, from society and from our species essence. For Marx, alienation is not a matter of psychology; we cannot make our activities meaningful by changing our attitudes towards the activity nor our perspective on the context of the activity. Rather, alienation arises from the material conditions of our labour, and the relations those conditions set up between ourselves and our product, between ourselves and the activity, between ourselves and others, and finally between ourselves and our species being. To overcome alienation, then, requires that we change the way we work such that these relations become more healthy.
A product is the embodiment of a worker's labour, it's "objectification", it's "realisation" (Marx, 1992, p.324). There is a relationship between the worker and his product that is socially constructed, which will have both concrete and abstract components. The concrete is between the worker and the product itself with its own specific and unique qualities. The abstract is based on a perception of the product's generality, ignoring many of the specific qualities but appreciating its uses and its status as the realisation of the worker's creative powers. "The full and productive relatedness to an object comprises this polarity" (Fromm, 1963, pp.113-114).
Under capitalism, the product is a commodity that is traded on a market, rather than remaining a product for the worker's own consumption. A commodity is produced according to the needs of the buyer rather than the self-sustaining needs of the worker, and so the worker's labour becomes subordinate to the division of labour within society (Marx, 1960, p.71). "The worker's needs, no matter how desperate, do not give him a license to lay hands on what these same hands have produced" (Ollman, 1980, p.143). Thus by losing any concrete relationship with the product, the worker suffers a loss of reality.
When the product becomes a commodity, the abstract relationship is transformed, and the generality of the product becomes one of market value rather than one related to the concrete product. The worker loses his abstract relationship with the product and gains a relationship with congealed market value. That value is determined as much by the market as by the efforts of the worker and the abstract and concrete qualities of the product. When the commodity is sold the worker is left with money, and so the worker loses the abstract relationship with the product representing a further loss of reality. "In exchange for his creative power the worker receives a wage or a salary, namely a sum of money, and in exchange for this money he can purchase products of labour, but he cannot purchase creative power. In exchange for his creative power, the worker gets things" (Rubin, 1975, p.xxv).
This is more than a matter of the worker losing control over the product; rather than being experienced as a result of his creative power, the product is experienced by means of the other commodities bought with the product's market value. By contrast, a relationship whereby the worker experiences his labour as the results of his creative power, where he can use the product and value it not as a means to an end but for its own sake, is one in which the reality of the product is preserved. And a product that increases the worker's creative power would be a gain in reality.
Marx says that the relationship under capitalism, with its unhealthy concrete and abstract components that no longer relate to the product at all, causes alienation (Marx, 1992, p.324). He goes on to say that the product takes on an "external existence" that confronts the worker as "hostile". One can understand this in one of two ways. According to the first, not only is there no guarantee that an increase in productivity will improve your living conditions, but it is likely to increase the power of the hostile system that keeps them in these conditions by giving the capitalist more than the worker receives. The devaluation of the worker increases in proportion to his productivity (Cox, 1998). According to the second interpretation, the unhealthy relationships directly diminish the reality that the worker created and so are hostile, as opposed to relationships that increase the reality or those that are neutral in this respect.
Elster raises a problem relating to the objectivity of this kind of alienation: is the worker in fact external to and in a hostile standing with the product, or does he feel external? If it is the former then an individual can overcome alienation only by changing the mode(s) of production that give rise to the alienated relationship, whereas if it were the latter the worker could overcome alienation by changing his state of mind, either by replacing it with positive feelings or by accustoming himself to them such that they no longer made him feel miserable (Elster, 1985, pp.74-76). I would suggest that Marx be opposed to the psychological explanation, and that the worker cannot give meaning to his product when he has no real connection to it, concrete or abstract. This disconnection gives rise to the feelings Elster describes.
Another problem is that, according to this account, the only way to overcome the two losses of reality would be to keep control of the product. But this would make productive social relations impossible; exchange of products in any form would represent a loss of control and therefore of reality. If there is nothing special about a worker being in control of his own products, and instead we worry about workers being in control of a sum total of reality that provides a sum total of creative power, then we can at least conceive of social relations based on equally valuable products, such that nobody loses any reality or creative power. Labour-based theories of value are one likely candidate.
I would suggest that in exchanging one product for another that increased one's creative powers, without the abstractification of money, one is at least mitigating the alienation caused by moneyed exchanges. This weaker claim means that already we have to forfeit any hopes of an unalienated society, but it allows us to rescue some semblance of pragmatism whilst providing a basis for lessening alienation. This can then be applied to the Hacker Ethic.
Because hackers deal with information they can overcome alienation in both the concrete and abstract components of the relationship. In the first place, because their products are non-rivalrous they can continue to use their product whilst sharing it freely with others. By employing free software licenses, as per the Hacker Ethic, they retain a concrete relationship with the product that can increase the hacker's creative powers. Hackers revere work that enables them to achieve new things (Levy, 2001, pp.46-48).
Secondly, by creating the product for its own sake - i.e. for its valuable generalities such as its usefulness and intellectually challenging design - rather than as a means to an end, the hacker can continue to appreciate the product's abstract qualities, such as artful or concise expressions of complex ideas (Levy, 2001, pp.43-45). Though a hacker may sell his product, the commodification isn't absolute because the free software licenses guarantee that the hacker can retain his full and productive relatedness to the product. Commodification in this context isn't directly connected to the worker's relationship with the product, it isn't hostile as in the capitalist context. It would only be relevant if, as Torvalds, Himanen and Stallman suggest, the hacker was unable to be self-sufficient and so had to treat his products primarily as commodities. In this situation the market value of his work would determine the concrete and abstract relationships.
Marx claimes that, if the worker is alienated from the product, which is itself the objectification of labour, then it follows that labour is an activity of alienation (Marx, 1992, p.326). This is dubious, since the alienation only occurs when the product is finished and becomes a loss of reality; there is nothing in the activity of production that suggests alienation takes place, according to my explanation of Marx's account of alienation so far. But Marx develops a similar terminology to explain how the relationship between worker and his labour is also alien.
Marx ascribes various attributes to alienated labour: He says it is "external", which he further defines as making the worker "feel miserable and not happy", that which "does not develop free physical and mental energy", that puts the worker in a state where he cannot "feel himself" whilst working; alienated labour is also forced labour; it is a means to an end, not satisfying in itself; and finally it is, as with the product, "directed against himself" (Marx, 1992, pp.326-327). Unalienated labour involves the "free actualisation and externalisation of powers and ... abilities" (Elster, 1986, p.101). This notion can be broken down into two component parts: the freeness of the activity of labour, and the capacity of actualisation and externalisation of one's powers through labour.
Central to this list of adjectives is the idea that the labour ought to be entered into freely as a conscious activity. Men should gain freedom through labour that is free "from autonomous social forces and laws" (Gray, 1986, p.178), and that allows the individual to choose both what work he does, and when and how he does it. Marx gives the example of an individual in a capitalist society who is forced to specialise in hunting, fishing or literary criticism (Marx, 1968, p.45). Unregulated market forces control not only the value of any commodity, as previously mentioned, but also therefore what labour workers can feasibly enter into if they are to sustain themselves; these forces are ultimately autonomous, in that the worker has no control over them whatsoever.
Using Lukes' analysis of power (Lukes, 1974), I understand this free activity that Marx describes as requiring three kinds of autonomy: first, the worker must be able to directly influence decisions about the work he does (this may be more or less compatible with "reasonable" social forces such as utilitarian or egalitarian considerations); second, the the worker must be able to affect the perspectives and agendas that determine the work he does, such that social laws cannot unfairly predetermine the scope of his activity; third, the worker must be able to enter into discourse that determines how society understands work and in particular the kinds of work he wants to engage in. On the second point I say unfairly because it would be absurd to posit a scenario in which an unskilled labourer could work as a neurosurgeon without proper training. Similarly, as noted in my section on free software, we may want to account for reasonable social forces such as the relative social utility of various kinds of work.
In terms of self-realisation, Elster defines activities that lend themselves to it by reference to "some further goal or purpose" that "can be performed more or less well", and that offer "a challenge that can be met". One can contrast self-realisation to passive consumption, suggesting that any productive activity - i.e. one in which the individual has an affect on the world external to him that is creative rather than destructive or insignificant - lends itself to self-realisation, more or less (Elster, 1986).
One could further object that there may be individuals who wish to pursue productive activities that have no social utility whatsoever, or even negative utility. For example, an scientist might want to build a nuclear weapon that could misfire and destroy an entire city. It wouldn't seem acceptable in this situation to allow the scientist to fulfil his natural capabilities. I will look at this tension in more detail later in the essay.
The crucial point for Marx is that, insofar as we accept that each individual will have natural capabilities that can be developed and give the individual new productive capacities, society shouldn't limit the scope of the individual's development and productive activities. Alienation occurs where the reverse is true, where workers are restricted either in their ability to develop their natural abilities, or to pursue a variety of productive activities.
One consequence of modern capitalism makes this kind of alienation particularly stark, namely that "the lives of millions of people are reduced to the narrow limits of their undemanding work. Fantasy, rather than creative effort, then becomes the vehicle through which they escape it, and fantasy itself, packaged as accessible pleasures to be bought in the market place, is relentlessly commoditized" (Williamson, 1997). The essence of the capitalist division of labour is deskilling, an economic and political process whereby the workers' tasks are reduced to "mechanical routines that can be quickly learned". The worker has no control over his tools and "becomes a mere appendage to an already existing material condition of production", resulting in a kind of "operational autonomy" akin to the autonomous social forces and laws posited by Gray. The worker, meanwhile, suffers a "knowledge deficit" and a "solidarity deficit, defined with respect to the levels of understanding and community required for self-rule" (Feenberg, 1991, pp.27-28).
In the context of this essay - that of computer hackers - one might balk at the notion that highly qualified software engineers are engaged in "mechanical routines" that provide little or no scope for the development of skills and a growth in knowledge. Many in the industry, however, think that this is the case. Scott Adams' popular comic Dilbert satirises a software engineer's life inside a cubical, churning out code according to the wishes of the clueless managers, working according to Taylorist management principles (Adams, 1996). Alan Kay, a legendary computer scientist, thinks that computer science degrees in the US are becoming little more than "vocational training". Deskilling needn't be as extreme as forcing a worker to manage an operationally autonomous machine, and software engineers may be afforded more scope for developing their skills that many other workers, but they are nontheless susceptible to deskilling and a loss of operational autonomy. The absence of deskilling and a total operational autonomy in a workplace wouldn't invalidate the place of these factors in a theory of alienation; rather, it would suggest a division of labour that has overcome alienation to some extent.
Thus the worker is alienated both in the division of labour and in the division of himself. The former forces him to engage in productive activities that preclude him from using his productive capabilities, leading to miserable and unfulfilled feelings, whilst the latter precludes him from being able to develop his nascent productive and social capabilities through his work. The alien character of labour under capitalism is demonstrated, Marx says, by the fact that if we weren't forced we would avoid work "like the plague" (Marx, 1992, p.326).
As with the worker's relation with his product, it is difficult to see how the relation with production could be entirely unalienated, as conceived by Marx. In the first place, Marx's conception of a perfect, unalienated individual involved a bewildering diversity of productive activities, all combining to satisfy every creative and productive potential. He wrote that:
[In capitalism man] is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (Marx, 1968, p.45)
Elster rightly criticises this vision as "fanciful", accusing Marx of "wishful thinking". It would impose huge burdens on workers to know about all of his creative and productive capabilities, to have the resources required to fulfil them and to be able to pursue each of them whilst guaranteeing self-sufficiency. Even the most self-indulgent worker bent on total self-realisation would have a difficult time achieving it. However, even if one cannot posit a system that completely overcomes alienation, one can suggest systems that provide more possibilities for "autonomy, creativity and community" that can mitigate alienation (Elster, 1985, pp.89-92).
Unalienated labour, then, requires operational autonomy and a variety of productive and creative activities that actualise the worker's capabilities. Through it the worker must meet some challenge and be able to judge how well the challenge was met. This is exactly the kind of productive activity that hackers engage in. By working to scratch an itch, with a desire to improve skills, meet an intellectual challenge and all the while increase one's productive powers, the hacker overcomes the external nature of alienated labour. Nobody would voluntarily enter into labour that made him feel miserable, or that didn't develop free mental energy. Hackers, entering voluntarily into their work with passion, cannot be characterised as working against themselves, against their productive nature. Moreover, by rejecting the distinction between work and leisure and by emphasising instead the active realisation of potential, "the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person" (Kane, 2000), the Hacker Ethic orientates all life activities around this unalienating maxim. The Hacker Ethic's emphasis on play and fun create the basis for opposition to top-down management of their work, and for the positive alternative of self-organisation and an overall operational autonomy (Adam, 2004).
The Hacker Ethic also goes beyond Elster's understanding of self-realisation to include an account of passion. A hacker might, for example, spend her working day studiously hacking some problematic code, realising her capabilities in abstract mathematics, debugging and other technical pursuits. Alternatively, she might stay up late into the night for days on end in frenzied hacking sessions, passionately trying to solve the problem with as elegant and concise code as possible. According to Elster's criterion, if the outcome were the same - i.e. she realised her capabilities equally in each case - then we should consider each case equal. The Hacker Ethic, however, argues that the latter case is a better example of meaningful work because it truly engaged the individual; it enriched her life, gave it focus, to return to Levy's account of the early MIT hackers (Levy, 2001, p.45).
One may object that this maxim is too demanding, and makes justifying necessary drudgery extremely difficult. Again, this objection has two components: an objection related to personal tasks such as cleaning and cooking, which can be dismissed by building in the need to first be self-sustainable and then to adhere to the maxim; and secondly an objection related to socially useful or necessary tasks that conflict with this maxim, which I will return to later in this essay.
A further objection is that, though there is emphasis on a diversity of tasks in the Hacker Ethic, there is little emphasis on developing all of your capabilities, and in particular those not related to software. Though many hackers do engage in other creative activities it cannot be said that they all develop their full mental and physical energy. This is a result of a hesitance on the part of most hackers to advocate a perfectionist account of personal development such as Marx's; they favour a more liberal or welfarist approach that emphasises the freedom to engage in fulfilling activities as well as the virtue of engaging in these activities in general. But Marx's account of developing all of our capabilities seems too demanding, both because we are limited by time and by our capacity to know of all of our capabilities. I may need five lifetimes to properly develop all of mine, including some that I wouldn't know about until I pursued certain activities; I may, for example, have the potential to be a talented police officer, but I won't know until I try it, and I cannot spend my life trying every life activity in the hope that I might find and develop my capabilities. The Hacker Ethic's emphasis on pursuing tasks that we know will develop our capabilities, rather than pursuing tasks for other, external reasons such as the potential for financial gain is more reasonable.
Because information sharing is such a powerful force in hacker communities, hackers actively help and encourage each other to develop skills. This is one instance in which the ethic takes a more proactive and perfectionist approach, both creating and promoting an environment in which hackers developer their skills fully. This is not identical with promoting the realisation of all capabilities, as Marx suggested. Instead, the Hacker Ethic emphasises the value of developing and realising capabilities in all productive activities. The onus, as Stallman suggested in the context of social obligations, is not to work but, if one is to work, to do so in a particular way. This can be seen in the importance given to "the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs" (FSF, 2004) and in emphasis on documenting everything for the benefit of nascent hackers.
Crucially, following my analysis of operational autonomy using Luke's analysis of power, we can see how hackers are able to exercise operational autonomy. There isn't a single organisational structure adopted by all hacker communities - some adopt democratic structures, others voluntarily defer the final decision making to a benevolent dictator (with the proviso that they can always "fork" the project by taking the code and developing it in a new community with a different organisational structure), whilst many allow structures to organically develop (Brand & Chance, 2005). In each of these arrangements, however, hackers can choose what code to work on; they can influence the agendas that direct their work, both by entering into the open discussions about the direction of the project(s) they work on and by simply opting out of any projects whose agendas conflict with the hacker's own priorities; and finally though it is not forced nor prevalent in every productive forum, hackers can and often do enter into discussions about work itself and what it means to engage in meaningful work.
Marx asserts that "the relationship of man to himself becomes objective and real for him only through his relationship to other men" (Marx, 1992, p.331). The alienation of the worker from his product only becomes real when his product is bought by a consumer, an act that constructs the hostile standing of product to worker and also of worker to consumer. If, as is the case under capitalism according to Marx, the relationship between worker and consumer is one of domination, of the non-producer over production and its product, then we can see how the relationship becomes one of man to an alien being. This of course rests on the assumption that a healthy relationship - the opposite of an alienated relationship - is one where the parties are relatively equal and where nobody suffers a significant loss of reality, which I think is fair.
The consumer is also alienated when he receives a product that "does not belong to him", since he put none of his labour into it, making the commodity alien to him (Marx, 1992, p.331). Marx refers here to his contention that value and ownership can only be bestowed by labour, and that this value and ownership is only conferred on the creator, so that the consumer cannot own nor value the product. Again for the sake of preserving exchange-based relationships, we can instead say that a product may lose value when it is exchanged as a commodity. This kind of alienation is obviously not as bad as losing your product, since the consumer may gain creative and productive power through purchasing the product. But where the product is treated entirely as a consumable (i.e. it isn't used productively), and where it doesn't contribute to the sustenance of the worker (e.g. food), then the product is neither a gain nor a loss in reality; the consumer simply gains a thing that has limited use value. Therefore at both ends of this relationship, worker and consumer, people can be alienated.
There are also other relationships in which a worker stands, those in relation to his fellow workers, which are marked by competition rather than cooperation and that put the worker in a hostile and disconnected standing. Workers must compete for jobs in the first place, and then within the workplace they must compete for better positions with better wages, and even to keep their job. They only cooperate insofar as it benefits the company, i.e. for the end of capital. In general, workers have no power to change the nature of these relations; though in many contemporary workplaces workers are afforded notionally managerial positions, they must manage according to the needs and ends of the company, i.e. capital accumulation. Though this may seem an overly stark and pessimistic view of the workplace, it is the logical application of the principles of capitalism, and so any instances of cooperation - any real relationships between workers - are incidental and a sign of the worker rebelling against capitalism's constraints. Where cooperative work environments exist, unless the arrangement has capital advantages over more competitive environments, they will generally be under pressure to change to a more competitive basis. There is limited space for the cooperative spirit that Stallman has tried to restore (FSF, 2003).
Marx's heavy emphasis on the importance of social alienation - suggesting that alienation only becomes real through his relationship to other men - seems to contradict, or at least call into question the seriousness, the reality, of his claims about the other forms of alienation. It implies that alienation in the activity of production, which is a matter of the activity becoming external and unfulfiling, can only occur in a social context. This would mean that an isolated worker who produced according to his needs would always perform fulfilling work regardless of how it affected his creative powers. Or, Marx means no productive activity can be real in such an isolated context, and so whatever the worker did, it would never be real and fulfilling until placed in a social context. Both of these interpretations are flawed, if we are to take seriously his previous claims about the importance of the relationship between a worker and his product, and between a worker and the activity of his work. I would suggest that, to be consistent, placing work and products in a social context makes them more real because in the new inter-personal relationships they provide the worker with more use value, more social value, in other words more reality.
In the case of hackers, as I have already mentioned, the hacker won't lose the product to the users, and the users won't passively consume the product. This is generally true of all computer software, whether or not it is produced by hackers and released under a free license. But the license guarantees that the hacker and the user receive exactly the same rights with respect to the product, and that both are endowed with the product's full creative and productive potential. Relations between hackers as workers are based upon cooperation and the free sharing of both the workload and products; they are characterised by a positive cycle, whereby the more hackers produce and relate to one another through sharing, the more productive and communicative powers they have. Furthermore, as I mentioned in the section on alienation from the activity of work, the Hacker Ethic emphasises operational autonomy meaning that hackers have the power to change or opt out of any relationships that they don't like. Giving control to all parties, avoiding relations of domination and fostering "a community of goodwill, cooperation, and collaboration" are explicitly stated as goals of the free software movement, for example (Kuhn & Stallman, 2001).
As well as creating healthy social relations through its mode of production, the Hacker Ethic also accounts for why its social relations are more healthy, suggesting that to do otherwise is to cut "the bonds of society" (Stallman, 2004b). By emphasising the need to work "for the public good" and to "help one's neighbours" (Stallman, 1992) (Stallman, 2005) - including people we are connected to through productive and interpersonal relations - the Ethic puts social sanctions on alienated relations.
The Hacker Ethic, therefore, overcomes the alienation between producer and consumer by making such a distinction as producer and consumer invalid, and by basing the relationship upon the future potential endowed by the product. The user may simply consume the software, or at least only use it and never modify or even share it, but that is their choice. There is nothing in the relation with the product nor the person who shared it with them that forces their hand in this respect.
This raises a problem that is related to the question of social obligations I raised at the end of the section on free software. It may be the case that hackers aren't aware that a relationship is unhealthy, either because they are too altruistic or simply not sufficiently self-aware, and so may fail to change or opting out of the alienating relationship. Worse still, a hacker may feel compelled to remain in a relationship that abridges his operational autonomy because of other considerations. These could include egalitarian obligations such as to create usable software for everybody (where the hacker has to give up a proportion of his time to work on less fulfilling code), or to provide computer equipment to poor people (where the hacker has to be motivated by what will earn the most money, rather than by factors intrinsic to the product and the activity of work).
If the interests of the workers and the users "have equal weight" (Stallman, 1992) then these relationships are equal ones, not characterised by domination. If one takes Stallman's weaker social obligations and discounts the stronger obligations I posited, then this study of alienation describes the normative basis for my claim that social and personal obligations aren't in conflict in the Hacker Ethic, but rather intimately linked. Hackers maintain healthy social relationships - Stallman's "bonds of society" (Stallman, 2004b) - by working in communities and releasing their work under a free software license. Their doing so in no way prejudices their ability to pursue what I have characterised as healthy, unalienated work and to remain in healthy relations with their products. The Hacker Ethic, if followed properly, allows a worker to achieve our "species being", Marx's vision of the essence of and the ultimate example of mankind. A hacker is able, through his work, to strive towards his essence, his individual life (Marx, 1992, p.328).
If, however, one assumes the stronger obligations, and one takes seriously the problems that these cause for the account of productive relations and alienation, then there is no obvious way out. A strong egalitarian assumption presents the possibility of social relationships fuelling alienation in one aspect (the hacker's relation to his activity of work) whilst soothing alienation in another (the hacker's relationship to the needy users). Analysing the Hacker Ethic in terms of alienation at least provides a common framework within which these conflicts can be understood. They are not simply a matter of individual autonomy being abridged by social obligation, nor simply vice versa, but as a necessity for balance between the two demands. Improper prioritisation of one would simply shift the locus of alienation.
There also remains the problem of kinds of work that have a negative social utility. I gave the example earlier in the essay of a scientist who wants to develop a nuclear weapon that could misfire and destroy an entire city. Should a community of hackers allow one of their colleagues to pursue such work? This asks not only whether or not a hacker ought to prioritise certain kinds of socially useful work, but also whether or not it is acceptable for hackers to abridge an individual's operational autonomy in blocking them from pursuing that work. A less extreme example may be a hacker who has shown no capabilities in the field of medical science, but who nonetheless would like to spend a few years studying the field, which will mean a break from other socially useful work. If there is no guarantee that the hacker will be any more socially useful at the end of her study should hackers accept and even support this sabattical?
One possible solution lies in an aspect of Marx's conception of alienation that I haven't touched upon yet. I have omitted it so far because it seems to contradict his emphasis on operational autonomy; this problem, and a proper explanation of the idea, need addressing before I show how it can help resolve the central conflict of personal and social obligations. Marx describes how labour ought to be "consciously regulated by [the workers] in accordance with a settled plan" (Marx, 1996, p.40). Commonsense suggests that we cannot immediately grasp what our capabilities are, and what work we will find most fulfilling; even as children in relatively cooperative environments we take time to learn what we enjoy, be it passive consumption or a childlike productive activity. The ancient Chinese philosophy Taoism understands our individual essence - our Tao - as something inexpressible, a self-defining basis for our character. When we act in accordance with our essence we find that our body and mind work "self-so", or without forcing. These ideas, despite their poetic and vague expression, can lend insight into Marx's idea of our essence. It is not something that we can rationally come to understand or discover, but rather something that we happen upon. We cannot express why we find certain activities more fulfilling, we simply do, and we understand this when we partake in them.
The most pressing objection to Marx's settled plan, then, is that no system of regulation or organisation can hope to determine each individual's appropriate activities. Instead, it should set-up conditions whereby individuals can discover and then partake in their essential activities. This might satisfy Elster, who says that Liberalism "forgets that the choice is to a large extent preempted by the social environment in which people grow up and live". Yet it must avoid the heavy-handed paternalism advocated by some Marxists lest it violates the workers' operational autonomy. "The solution", Elster continues, "must be a form of self-paternalism", whereby people can, individually or collectively, shape their choices relating to their labour (Elster, 1986, p.98). We can interpret Marx's "settled plan", then, not as a kind of micro-management by some wiser beings for the benefit of the workers, but as a kind of macro-management that creates the conditions for unalienated labour.
Returning to the central conflict, then, if hacker communities can collectively shape their choices relating to their labour, then they can meet some or all of their social obligations consensually in a way that isn't alienating. A community may, for example, undertake a study to see how usable their software is. They would then identify certain shortcomings and draw up a list of tasks to resolve the usability problems. This would be exactly the kind of situation that I have, so far, identified as causing a conflict between the individual hacker's self-indulgent needs and the social obligations that the tasks represent. However, if the community were to draw up this list and then, by common consent, distribute the tasks evenly - a "settled plan" of sorts - then the decision would not create problems in the same way as under capitalism. If the worker were to work on a usability problem because they were paid then they would have no control over the matter, the product they create would be the realisation of somebody else's needs and the whole venture would be performed towards the goal of capital accumulation. In the hacker community, by contrast, the worker still exercises control over every aspect of the process, if not absolute; the worker can realise his capabilities to some extent, if not completely or most appropriately; and the worker is oriented towards a socially meaningful goal. This is exactly how hackers, tracking, assigning and resolving problems with public mechanisms and employing social incentives and sanctions to encourage collective action.
In this essay I have first sketched out an understanding of the Hacker Ethic with two components: a work ethic and a social ethic. In clarifying the somewhat fuzzy articulations of each ethic that currently exist, I have raised one central concern: how one can balance social obligations with those that I characterise as self-indulgent. Hackers themselves practise a balance that they decide upon already, but they lack a coherent normative basis for deciding how to achieve the most ethical balance.
I have then explored Marx's theory of alienation, developing an understanding of meaningful work as constituting relations between worker and product, worker and activity of labour and worker and other people. This allows me to describe the conditions and relations of meaningful, unalienated work by reference to each relation. I have shown that each relation has equal importance such that, contrary to more individualistic accounts of personal fulfilment, a worker can only be fulfilled when she stands in healthy relations to other people and, contrary to some strongly socialistic accounts of meaningful modes of production, a worker can also only be fulfilled when she stands in healthy relations to her work and her products. Thus modes of production can be judged according to how well they resolve conflicts between these three relations, by how well they balance competing demands on a worker's time and energy.
There is a slight flaw with my argument, but one that I think should be solveable. The hacker work ethic as described by Himanen operates on a kind of virtue ethic, as does my account of alienation; both concern themselves with promoting virtuous qualities in hackers. But Stallman's account of social obligations, as I mentioned on page 10, is morally ambiguous and is most likely based upon a Kantian, utilitarian or consequentialist position, none of which are immediately compatible with the virtue ethics of Himanen and my account of alienation. Thus an area for further work involves working on a coherent moral basis for all three accounts, which I suspect would involve developing a virtue ethic for social obligations in relation to intellectual products and production. Questions include: Is Stallman's position better captured by Kantian ethics, rule utilitarianism or rule consequentialism? Can Stallman's position be restated in terms of virtue ethics? Can we advance a virtue ethics of intellectual products and production, work or even more generally of meaningful life activities?
If we limit the scope of social obligations to those articulated by Stallman, which deal only with the relations defined by the way you distribute your work after it has been produced, then the Hacker Ethic achieves and ideal balance. Social obligations in no way abridge the hacker's scope to meet his self-indulgent obligations, and i