Reading03

Can the Hacker Ethic truly and fully survive in a world of commercial and proprietary software? Is it better to be a “professional programmer, … the goal-oriented … responsible engineer” or is it better to be a programmer with “love for [computing] in [your] heart” and “hacker perfectionism in [your] soul”?

In the third part of “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”, Steven Levy details the third generation of hackers mainly by following the trajectory of On-Line Systems – Ken Williams’ company that initially drove the video game industry to success. Within these chapters, we see commercialization in full swing and the Hacker Ethic dwindling.

I think the Hacker Ethic in its true form cannot survive fully in the world of commercial and proprietary software. As long as money is part of the motivation behind coding or hacking, some of the Hacker Ethic is lost. I’m not saying, however, that these young programmers working for a company and creating neat games and hacks don’t deserve to be paid; simply that the underlying principles behind the Hacker Ethic do not fall in line with selling software.

The first two points of the Hacker Ethic, “Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total,” and “all information should be free” are absolutely abandoned in the boom of the video game industry that we read about in this part of the book.

At first, we see “the Brotherhood” of On-Line, Sirius, and Broderbund exhibiting Hacker-like tendencies as companies, sharing the types of games they were building as if “there were no secrets between them” (p. 321). However, as time went on, the companies grew more and more competitive, and by 1982, they “never swapped secrets anymore” (p. 409).

Late in 1982 as well, On-Line exhibited some behavior defiant of the Hacker Ethic in order to stay competitive and make more money. On-Line “became focused on converting product into other product,” which “shifted the hacker joy of creating new worlds” (p. 427). This went directly against the creative vibe of the Hacker Ethic – On-Line got its start from Roberta Williams’ creativity with Mystery House, and continued its success with creative work by young hackers working to create the fastest, highest resolution, best-selling game. By just reproducing products already established in the industry, On-Line lost its creative spark.

It was around that time when many of the hackers who worked for Ken Williams were leaving On-Line in search of higher royalties and better companies to work for. They were unhappy with all the bureaucracy that had taken over On-Line after Ken Williams hired Dick Sunderland to run it. The “Summer Camp” vibe and the informal employee-boss relationships had both come to an end, while at the same time Ken was cutting down their royalty earnings; who would want to stay?

The company that many programmers were leaving for was Electronic Arts (EA), a company that wanted to combine “hackerism and untold wealth” (p. 406). With Electronic Arts, we see some of the Hacker Ethic trying to survive even within this new age of commercialization and proprietary issues. They self-described as “nontraditional” and wanted “innovative authors…who are independent and won’t work in a software ‘factory’ or ‘bureaucracy’” (p.403), directly appealing to whatever hacker-like programmers there were left. EA even had the ultimate hacker of the previous generation on the board – Steve Wozniak himself.

With money as an equally important motivator, however, I still don’t think the Hacker Ethic was getting a true revival with companies like EA. Ultimately, “All information should be free” is the cornerstone of the Hacker Ethic and whenever there is monetary motivation, which became the norm in the 1980s, the Hacker Ethic cannot truly survive. Aspects of it definitely can be present in programmers then and now, but in its pure form I don’t think it survives.