Reading03

It would seem to me that Paul Graham’s vision of a hacker is compatible with Steven Levy’s view of a hacker, at least in his essay “Hackers and Painters.” Paul Graham views hackers as people who create things and activate the creative parts of their minds to do something new and interesting.

Graham says in the essay that when Yahoo bought his company Viaweb, they asked him what he wanted to do. He responded with “I had never liked the business side very much, and said that I just wanted to hack.” The early hackers of Steven Levy’s book were of the same vein as this mindset. They were hacking for the enjoyment of it, without any worry about business and profits. They just wanted to create and break things and then put those things back together in a more elegant way.

Well, while on paper, what Graham is saying is compatible with Steven Levy’s hacker, I think looking more deeply into it will show a few issues with what Graham says and the results of history. Paul Graham became super rich from the sale of Viaweb. At some point in his life, he had to have thought about money as a goal, rather than just the enjoyment of hacking. Sure, he probably has tried in his life to perfect his style of hacking just like a painter perfects their style, but it’s hard to believe that he did it all without the goal of profits in his mind.

I think Paul Graham accepts this difference between a person like him and the hackers of the 60s. This is because of his view that a hacker is like a painter. Steven Levy’s hackers were tinkerers. Just like they messed with the model railroads, they messed with the computer. In their minds, there was never any conception of a profit to come from what they were doing. But, professional artists like painters could be able to anticipate a source to come from their art if they continue to work for years and years. Paul Graham tries to portray the hacker in the same way.

Paul Graham says that hackers, just like other artists, adopt “day jobs” to give them income while they work on their passions during non-work hours. He says that since hackers are “makers,” then it must be true that hacking is an art for them, rather than a science. And, like artists, to be a hacker, you should be making as often as you can, to perfect your art.

This “day job” mentality to hacking is such an odd one to me. I suppose this is because I view computer science jobs as an engineering job, and while, sure, I can work on a side project which I’ll be interested in, I don’t view that the same as the music I play or write. The problem I think I have is that when you work on a programming thing, you’re almost always creating a tool and not a thing to be enjoyed. We talked about this a lot in ethics, so I won’t elaborate here, but, for example, when you’re creating a video game, all the things going into it (art, music, narrative) make the art, but the programming itself is just a method to make it happen.