No. Not those New Bohemians!

As part of my research, I’ve had to dig into the history of hackers. Real hackers, not the the criminals and vandals that the media refers to.

The fundamental reference for hacker history is Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, written in 1984, way before the media started using the word as a synonym for someone who breaks the law.

The book has been around for a while, so I will not bother to review it, other than to say that it still remains the most comprehensive resource for understanding the origins of a movement that has began as a small group of people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, what’s interesting about hackers, is that, in my opinion, they are somewhat unacknowledged heirs to the bohemian tradition.

“How can that be?” you might ask. After all bohemians are night creatures who sit around bars and paint stuff, while hackers (the real ones) are just computer nerds who have no girlfriends and use the terminal! If you get past the stereotypes, though, you can find many similarities between the archetypal bohemians from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and the hackers that emerged from the 1950s and after.

From bohemians to hackers: finding a common ground

I’m lucky. It turns out that one of my PhD supervisors (Americans call them advisors, I believe), Dr Tony Moore, is an authority when it comes to the bohemian tradition, particularly in Australia, so I had (still have) quite a large volume of work to review. So far, here are the common points I’ve been able to find between the two groups:

• Negation of the establishment. In the case of bohemians, it was disdain for all things bourgeois. In the case of hackers, it was a mistrust of authority and aversion towards some forms of capitalism. Such contempt was ironic in both cases, as both bohemians and hackers were a product of that establishment, and largely dependent on it.
• An element of nostalgia towards earlier incarnations of their own group. Tony Moore has an excellent analysis of this phenomenon in Australia’s bohemian scene, but essentially, every new generation that comes around causes the earlier ones to think that they do not embody the real essence of the movement. By calling Richard Stallman “the last of the real hackers”, Levy demonstrates that the same is true for hackers, particularly because younger hackers are thriving, as I’ve come to find out.
• Outsider perception of criminality. Bohemians were seen as outcasts who spent their time in slums and highly doubtful places, in the company of less-than-desirable individuals. Hackers, well, need I say more?
• Fondness of the gift economy. “…bohemians pushed at the limits of disinterested and gratuitous acts”, says Tony Moore, while at the same time being authors of commodities for bourgeois consumption. Likewise, hackers’ behaviour closely follows the academic gift tradition, while many have gone on to found successful corporations and businesses.

So there you have it, folks. This is a very quick summary of the common characteristics I’ve identified so far. Next post will focus on the differences and what makes each group unique.

Jobs’ explanation is laughable. Almost all of the criticisms thrown at Adobe apply to Apple as well. The “not an open standard” argument is perhaps the funniest. While it is true that Flash is by no means and open standard, apart from being proprietary and closed source, Apple’s products are no different. He himself admits so:

Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards.

To add insult to injury, Apple’s preferred video codec, H.264, which it calls an “industry standard”, is in fact no more open than Flash itself. Indeed, it is the source of a corporate dispute that threatens to diminish the HTML5 open standard that Jobs so much praises.

Jobs goes on to praise Apple’s “openness”:

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. (…) Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

What Jobs conveniently leaves out is that Webit itself was derived from an earlier, robust rendering engine, KHTML, brought to you by the fine folks at the KDE project, a GNU/Linux Desktop environment. The only reason why Webkit is free software is because, if Apple wanted to use KHTML’s previous code base, it had to be bound by the terms of its free and open source license, the GNU General Public License, or GPL. It is perfectly reasonable to speculate that, had Apple not been bound by the GPL’s terms, Webkit would be as closed as the rest of the countless proprietary projects Apple develops. There is no real commitment to free software on Apple’s part. It just does it when it is obligated by the software it “borrows” from. I know of no free software projects developed by Apple that are not the product of the legal “restrictions” (read “freedoms”) it has to respect in order to use previously-existing software. OS X’s kernel, Darwin, is a prime example.

Apple’s real reason for not supporting flash is one of market share and control. It has come to realise that, by controlling (and profiting from) third-party application development through tight control of its App store is a guaranteed way to remain competitive and extremely lucrative. They can’t do it on OS X, too late for that, so they do it on their new, crippled iPod OS. In doing so, they lock in their customers and keep their competitors behind their golden fence.

While Sanger’s relationship with Wikipedia and the Foundation in the past few years has become colder, to say the least, I can only wonder what prompted Sanger to rush into notifying the authorities without first a) inquiring whether or not the Foundation was aware of the existence of the offending images and b) actually verifying that said images could indeed be considered as child pornography.

The Register has followed up on the whole case, and it appears that the images may not be child pornography after all, as they “do not depict real people” (probably meaning that they were drawings or illustrations) and that Sanger subsequently acknowledged that the use of the term child pornography “may have been misleading”.

On the other hand, Sanger’s rationale for speculating that Wikimedia knew about the images is also rather light. He browsed the history and noticed that they had been there long enough for someone to have noticed. Now, if one were to believe the Wikipedia article on the Commons, the project hosts over six million files. Yeah, you read right, that’s six million pictures, videos and audio clips maintained by volunteer editors, an overwhelming majority of whom are not associated with the foundation.

Now, I don’t think Sanger had bad intentions when he did this, and, while I haven’t seen the images, I’m sure they must have been disturbing. Still, Sanger’s course of action leaves much to be desired. Not because of the fact that he probably created a public relations nightmare for the foundation but because he kinda made himself look like a fool. He should have written directly to the foundation (as opposed to directly to the FBI, his representatives and whoever else) asking them to a) verify his non-lawyer’s opinion and b) given them a sensible window of time to notify authorities themselves. He did not do this, I’m guessing, because he genuinely believed that the project’s official “management” —more specifically Wikimedia’s Deputy Director, Erik Möller— was behind it.

I understand why Sanger has become mistrustful of the Foundation and Jimbo, but to believe that they knowingly allowed the inclusion of (and thus supported) child pornography, is a bit too much.

Jane McGonigal is a game researcher with a PhD in performance studies from Berkeley. Her argument is bold: games —or rather videogames— can help solve many of the world’s problems. How, you may ask? I’ll let her tell you. My comments after the video.

McGonigal’s thesis’ brilliance relies on its simplicity. It’s one of those why didn’t I think of that kind of ideas. She takes the concept of crowdsourcing and exploits in a way no-one had done before, attempting to tap into an almost endless human resource: motivated gamers, who, by their own nature, are excellent problem solvers.

Unlike other online efforts such as Free/Open Source software production or sites like Wikipedia, the underlying motivation for McGonigal’s potential problem solvers is fun. Sure, she talks about how gamers develop all sorts of ties and secondary motivations, but, ultimately, they’d be there for the fun of it. If a site like Wikipedia can attract the critical mass of editors that it has today, most of whom are there for as a result of intrinsic, selfless interests, just imagine the potential of this thing!

Ted talks seldom disappoint, but this one is way up there among the very best.

In what is perhaps the ultimate twist of irony, Amazon.com decided it would be a good idea to go all Nazi on kindle users who had legitimately bought George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm and delete them from their e-book readers, citing a conflict between the publisher and the copyrights holder in the US, where the books haven’t gone into the public domain, presumably thanks to the abomination that is the Sonny Bono copyright extension act.

Now, I don’t care if readers were reimbursed and I most certainly don’t care whether or not Amazon is allowed to do this by the Kindle’s terms of service. It is just plain wrong.

To start, the act of going into your legally-purchased machine and deleting your legally-purchased e-book feels like a violation of your most private space. Imagine if Penguin Books or your neighbourhood bookstore decided that they no longer want you to have a copy of that book they sold you, so they decide it’s OK to send someone to break into your house, retrieve the book and leave a check by the door. That’s what you can be subjected to when you purchase a Kindle —and more incredibly— that’s what Amazon actually decided to do to keep the publisher and the copyright holder happy, all at the expense of those foolish enough to purchase an e-book to read on their shiny new Kindle.

This is just a symptom of how twisted DRM technologies are. Content industries, namely film & television, software, music and increasingly book publishers have become so obsessed with anyone copying their stuff that they are willing to step on the very people that make them money. By wanting to exercise such tight controls, they end up abusing their legitimate customers, invading their privacy and treating them like criminals.

Sorry, Amazon, it’s unrestricted formats or good ol’ paper books for me. I think I might give my dog-bitten paperback copy of Nineteen Eighty-four a re-read, just in case I ever feel tempted to buy a Kindle.