Reading01

It is clear that when the “Hacker Ethic” reached the West Coast in San Francisco, its ideals were appropriated and altered slightly to fit the hippie culture of sharing and communicating of that era in that area. The Community Memory system is a great example of this. Community Memory provided a way for people to use technology and communicate with each other, no matter who they were. This differed greatly from the “True Hackers” at MIT. There, they believed that they followed the Hacker ethic, which included the idea that access to technology should be unlimited. However, I believe they failed in this respect. All of the “True Hackers” had some connection to MIT, whether it be going there, working there, or having a parent working there. This was a privilege that most people didn’t have. As such, even if someone wanted access to technology, there was no guarantee that they would be able to do it.

On the other hand, in San Francisco, the Community Memory terminals were accessible by all in a public space. The Community Memory system was probably most people’s first interaction with a computer system. Even though the people who used it probably were not hacking it, they did get firsthand experience in figuring out how the machine worked and how to use it to its fullest advantage. In providing Community Memory to the public, the Hacker ethic of unlimited technology came one step closer than it did during the “True Hacker” era.

Community Memory was just the first foray into bringing the Hacker ethic and computer technology to the greater public, as opposed to just keeping it in a small, isolated and privileged group. With this move to more wide usage of the Hacker ethic, other questions come up. To bring technology to the masses, to truly fulfill the Hands-On Imperative, other components of the Hacker ethic may be abandoned. The “Hardware Hackers” of the 1970s quickly considered abandoning the principle that “all information should be free.” Bill Gates, who sold a BASIC interpreter in the 1970s, wrote an angry letter in a Homebrew magazine targeted towards those who were spreading his software without paying him. He considered it wrong and tantamount to stealing; all the work he completed was meaningless in his mind unless he got paid for it. This was ironic, of course, since he himself got the original interpreter code from another, already working interpreter.

Thus comes the conflict between the original Hacker ethic and where the “Hardware Hackers” brought it. It is true that money is necessary for a company to expand, and it is only with the massive expansion of companies like Apple and Microsoft that the personal computer revolution occurred and brought computers into the hands of a lot more people. It is also true that this yielding to a more business-like mindset made more things proprietary, and allowed more information to be hidden behind walls of encryption and payment. People could no longer hack their computers the way they wanted to, the way in which these computers were invented in the first place.

It matters, in the end, that the most people get access to an uninhibited form of technology, so that they may learn about it and learn how to improve it. However, there needs to be a middle ground between offering technology for everyone and putting the most important parts of technology behind DRM, encryption and paywalls.