Notes on the Hacker Ethic
2018-11-12
The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age Commute reading today. Written in '01, just before the bubble pop, this presents a relatively straightforward account of '90s open source net ethics. Good to pair this book with Microserfs, Cyberia, and Barlow's Declaration of Cyberspace. Relevant to today, it is useful to keep this ethic in mind when contemplating Google, as the end in the book is deep in Google's DNA. This book, as is common with works from that period, does not treat the second or third order effects of the new technology adequately. Today this ethic is heavily critiqued by experts such as Zeynep Tufekci as not grasping the will to power. Nuances of networked exploitation such as Uber/AirBNB are also generally missed in this write up.
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