In Through The Out Door

To the popular
press, “hacker” means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it
means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers,
“hacker” connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a
computer do what he wants– whether the computer wants to or
not.

To add to the confusion,
the noun “hack” also has two senses. It can be either a compliment or an insult.
It’s called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do
something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that’s also called a hack.
The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably
because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant
ones.

Believe it or not, the two
senses of “hack” are also connected. Ugly and imaginative solutions have
something in common: they both break the rules. And there is a gradual continuum
between rule breaking that’s merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something to
your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding
Euclidean space).

Hacking
predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard
Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret
documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a hacker
friend of mine who spent too much time around MIT had his own lock picking kit.
(He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated
enterprise.)

It is sometimes
hard to explain to authorities why one would want to do such things. Another
friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for breaking into
computers. This had only recently been declared a crime, and the FBI found that
their usual investigative technique didn’t work. Police investigation apparently
begins with a motive. The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex, revenge.
Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the
whole concept seemed foreign to
them.

Those in authority tend to
be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience
is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh
at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at
someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. Suppress one, and you
suppress the other.

This
attitude is sometimes affected. Sometimes young programmers notice the
eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to adopt some of their own in order
to seem smarter. The fake version is not merely annoying; the prickly attitude
of these posers can actually slow the process of
innovation.

But even factoring
in their annoying eccentricities, the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net
win. I wish its advantages were better
understood.

For example, I
suspect people in Hollywood are simply mystified by hackers’ attitudes toward
copyrights. They are a perennial topic of heated discussion on Slashdot. But why
should people who program computers be so concerned about copyrights, of all
things?

Partly because some
companies use
mechanisms
to prevent copying. Show any hacker a lock and his first thought is how to pick
it. But there is a deeper reason that hackers are alarmed by measures like
copyrights and patents. They see increasingly aggressive measures to protect
“intellectual property” as a threat to the intellectual freedom they need to do
their job. And they are
right.

It is by poking about
inside current technology that hackers get ideas for the next generation. No
thanks, intellectual homeowners may say, we don’t need any outside help. But
they’re wrong. The next generation of computer technology has often– perhaps
more often than not– been developed by
outsiders.

In 1977 there was no
doubt some group within IBM developing what they expected to be the next
generation of business computer. They were mistaken. The next generation of
business computer was being developed on entirely different lines by two
long-haired guys called Steve in a href="file:///Users/Greg/Documents/Cool/garage.html">garage in Los
Altos. At about the same time, the powers that be were cooperating to develop
the official next generation operating system, Multics. But two guys who thought
Multics excessively complex went off and wrote their own. They gave it a name
that was a joking reference to Multics:
Unix.

The latest intellectual
property laws impose unprecedented restrictions on the sort of poking around
that leads to new ideas. In the past, a competitor might use patents to prevent
you from selling a copy of something they made, but they couldn’t prevent you
from taking one apart to see how it worked. The latest laws make this a crime.
How are we to develop new technology if we can’t study current technology to
figure out how to improve
it?

Ironically, hackers have
brought this on themselves. Computers are responsible for the problem. The
control systems inside machines used to be physical: gears and levers and cams.
Increasingly, the brains (and thus the value) of products is in software. And by
this I mean software in the general sense: i.e. data. A song on an LP is
physically stamped into the plastic. A song on an iPod’s disk is merely stored
on it.

Data is by definition
easy to copy. And the Internet makes copies easy to distribute. So it is no
wonder companies are afraid. But, as so often happens, fear has clouded their
judgement. The government has responded with draconian laws to protect
intellectual property. They probably mean well. But they may not realize that
such laws will do more harm than
good.

Why are programmers so
violently opposed to these laws? If I were a legislator, I’d be interested in
this mystery– for the same reason that, if I were a farmer and suddenly heard a
lot of squawking coming from my hen house one night, I’d want to go out and
investigate. Hackers are not stupid, and unanimity is very rare in this world.
So if they’re all squawking, perhaps there is something
amiss.

Could it be that such
laws, though intended to protect America, will actually harm it? Think about it.
There is something very
American
about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project. It’s hard to
imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in
Germany at that time. Maybe it’s not a
coincidence.

Hackers are unruly.
That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of American-ness. It
is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or
England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the
lines.

I lived for a while in
Florence. But after I’d been there a few months I realized that what I’d been
unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I’d just left. The
reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York. In 1450 it was
filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America.
(So I went back to America.)

It
is greatly to America’s advantage that it is a congenial atmosphere for the
right sort of unruliness– that it is a home not just for the smart, but for
smart-alecks. And hackers are invariably smart-alecks. If we had a national
holiday, it would be April 1st. It says a great deal about our work that we use
the same word for a brilliant or a horribly cheesy solution. When we cook one up
we’re not always 100% sure which kind it is. But as long as it has the right
sort of wrongness, that’s a promising sign. It’s odd that people think of
programming as precise and methodical.
Computers
are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful
laugh.

In our world some of the
most characteristic solutions are not far removed from practical jokes. IBM was
no doubt rather surprised by the consequences of the licensing deal for DOS,
just as the hypothetical “adversary” must be when Michael Rabin solves a problem
by redefining it as one that’s easier to
solve.

Smart-alecks have to
develop a keen sense of how much they can href="file:///Users/Greg/Documents/Cool/say.html">get away with.
And lately hackers have sensed a change in the atmosphere. Lately hackerliness
seems rather frowned upon.

To
hackers the recent contraction in civil liberties seems especially ominous. That
must also mystify outsiders. Why should we care especially about civil
liberties? Why programmers, more than dentists or salesmen or
landscapers?

Let me put the case
in terms a government official would appreciate. Civil liberties are not just an
ornament, or a quaint American tradition. Civil liberties make countries rich.
If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you’d notice a
definite trend. Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an
effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they
want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather
than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries
become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak. It
seems to me there is a Laffer curve for government power, just as for tax
revenues. At least, it seems likely enough that it would be stupid to try the
experiment and find out. Unlike high tax rates, you can’t repeal totalitarianism
if it turns out to be a
mistake.

This is why hackers
worry. The government spying on people doesn’t literally make programmers write
worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And
because this is so important to hackers, they’re especially sensitive to it.
They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense
an approaching thunderstorm.

It
would be ironic if, as hackers fear, recent measures intended to protect
national security and intellectual property turned out to be a missile aimed
right at what makes America successful. But it would not be the first time that
measures taken in an atmosphere of panic had the opposite of the intended
effect.

There is such a thing as
American-ness. There’s nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you
want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be
hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any
group I know to embodying it. Closer, probably, than the men running our
government, who for all their talk of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or
Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or George
Washington.

When you read what
the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers.
“The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so valuable on
certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept
alive.”

Imagine an American
president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother,
the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less
confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it
is the people who break rules that are the source of America’s wealth and
power.

Those in a position to
impose rules naturally want them to be obeyed. But be careful what you ask for.
You might get
it.

Thanks
to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Shiro Kawai,
Jessica Livingston, Matz, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido
van Rossum, David Weinberger, and Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this
essay.

(The href="file:///Users/Greg/Documents/Cool/bluebox.html">image shows
Steves Jobs and Wozniak with a “blue box.” Photo by Margret Wozniak. Reproduced
by permission of Steve Wozniak.)