Good Bad Attitude

teidou writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay titled 'Good Bad Attitude' talking about the hacker attitude toward rules and government regulation of Intellectual Property. Choice quote: "(Hackers) can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.""

Comments

Except Animals are more likely to be right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hackers are as likely to be wrong as they are to be right. In their case it isn't an accute sense, but chronic pessimism.

Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.

[QuantumFTL]

I'm a hacker, and I'm a little idealistic and somewhat optimistic. But I'm also rather good at seeing structures, and getting a feel for emerging patterns. That's a large part of what hacking is about.

That's exactly the problem, though - humans are so good at detecting patterns that we often detect patterns when they don't exist. The need to rationalize the often irrational world around us is one of the reasons that I feel that a lot of otherwise intelligent people tend to gather at the conspiracy/tinfoil hat fringe - because to them it's better to have an explaination (even a scary one) than to feel that they can't understand all of the crazy stuff going on around them. Random sequences often don't look random, and with the sheer number of events happenning in the world every day, strange coincidences are to be expected. And hey, isn't it nice to have something/one ("the Man"/Ashcroft/whatever) to blame for the woes of society?

I'm not saying that there isn't trouble brewing or that hackers aren't necessarily better at seeing this than others, its just like all the hackers that predicted the death of the internet for the last few decades... They saw change and picked up a pattern that turned out not to be there.

I'm a little concerned by the attitude on slashdot that the sky is falling when in reality, we're dealing with the same kinds of political problems we've always had - presidents being elected without a popular majority and decided by someone other than the people (1824 election), our rights being eroded/Patriot act (Sedition Act, McCarthyism during Red Scare), and a general distrust of politicians (even our founding fathers distrusted politicians!) I really don't think any of this is new, or that we're doomed. This country has had our dark moments and our bright ones, but has survived many things and will continue to survive. Maybe it will not be the same, but this "slippery slope" falicy that so many people call upon when they look at the compramises that are made in our name will not be our end. As long as we're alive, there's hope that things will get better, and there is always something we can do, even if it's small, to make the world a better place.

Now, of course that might be just a bit optimistic on my part, but I feel that those who have power tend to want to keep things nice and stable so they can keep it, and part of that means keeping the masses happy, so we're probably OK.

Cheers,
Justin

From the Slashdot random quotes file...

[LostCluster]

This showed up at the bottom of the page while reading this thread...

We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed. :-) -- Larry Wall in

I think that sums this one up.

Re:Now if hackers could just learn to hack the gov

[billbaggins]

Government is a tool that can be hacked to work for you, just as a computer can be hacked to work for you.

There's just one problem with your analogy - I hack my computer to make it work for me, but most other people would find it more or less unusable. That's fine, because they have their own computers. A government, we have to share. And we don't have root on it. So while we're trying, in our small ways, to hack the gov't to do X, other people are working, oftentimes much harder, to make it do not-X.

Which is not to say that we shouldn't try to make it better, because we should. Just that it's going to be many many orders of magnitude harder to get anything useful accomplished.

Re:Now if hackers could just learn to hack the gov

[the_meager]

You completely neglected to mention the FACT that the wealthy use government to deter competition and maintain their control.

Limited government and free markets undermine that entire system.

(And seriously... if you're going to say that we should use tools to get back at the wealthy, why stop at government? Why not expand into physical coercion with guns, like government seems to?)

It's You

[serutan]

Is it just me or is this one of the more ridiculous sounding things you've heard in a while?

It's you. I thought the thunderstorm was a nice metaphor. Here's another good line:

"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."

But here in the Rush Limbaugh era, we place as much value on making fun of something as on making an actual point. Oh well, too bad for us.

Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.

[networkBoy]

I'd add to that:
Grey-beards and those who are gainfully employed in the non-IT segment of high tech.

I work with a couple of fellow hackers and we always get miffed with our co-workers wo e-mule this and kazza that . . .
I'm only 28 and yet I find myself in a position which is very conservative when compared to my peers.
On the IT note, I don't know quite why it is but those who are in IT positions vs. those like myself who may perform the occasional IT function as part of a larger job scope tend to have remarkably different attitudes. . . good or bad I don't know, but different, yes.

-nB

Graham's Essays

[cthlptlk]

By now, I should know better than to read the Paul Graham essays when they're posted on slashdot, but I can't help myself. I think it's my sick obsession with lisp.

Now that I've read a few in the space of a few weeks, I think I'm able to pin down what bothers me. Graham is really good at a certain rhetorical style: he talks at length about a topic that really isn't the topic at hand, until you start to wonder if you're really reading the essay that you thought you were reading, and suddenly the focus shifts to the target. "Maori customs are really a metaphor/synedoche for the perl philosophy!" or whatever. The change is so dizzying (because it is unexpected but not completly random) and such changes come so fast that the reader doesn't stop to evaluate the correctness of Graham's assertions or the depth of what he's saying. It's like a cheesy magic show...the magician distracts you by waving the wand around, so that you don't see that he's actually pulling the rabbit out of his sleeve, rather than out of the hat. To his credit, I think Graham does this trick really well, and it's hard to do.

The thing is, I can appreciate cheesy-magic-show writing, but at some point, I would like to take away an actual idea from what I'm reading. And what are Graham's ideas? Lisp is really l33t! Hackers are really l33t! Graham's ideas are really that simple; they're not refinements or unexpected corrollaries of ideas that were first trotted out ten or twenty years ago. After a few essays, it becomes apparent that all of these ideas really reduce to I, Paul Graham, am really l33t because I like this l33t stuff! I don't fault Graham in the slightest for thinking this, or even about writing it, but since I'm not Paul Graham, it's not a very interesting idea to me.

Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.

[Anonymous Coward]

The distinction seems fairly clear to me.

IT folks are consumers of software. Fairly empowered consumers, but still consumers at heart. Whereas the guys with the "larger job scope" are likely to be, at some level or another, producers as well.

Stealing software suddenly seems alot less cool when it might be your software that's being stolen.

Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.

[bcrowell]

I think I'd say that, generally, old-school hackers are more respectful of intellectual property than new-school hackers. For example, most grey-beards that I know don't really favor the idea of p2p being used to share files against the wishes of the author.
I think what you're seeing is the way a person changes with age. If you go back 20 or 30 years, those same grey-beards might have had different attitudes.

Consider the picture at the top of Graham's essay. It shows two guys who are now grey-bearded hackers (Jobs and Wozniak) messing with a blue box (a device for making free phone calls, illegally).

When I was a college student in the 80's, I routinely taped my roommates' albums if I liked them. Now I'm older, I have a real job, and I can afford to buy my music, so naturally I disapprove of my students when they trade MP3's :-)

There's also something about having kids that makes you become a lot more cautious...

If you control for age, I think there might be a trend in the opposite direction of what you're suggesting, toward radicalism. The open-source movement has caused some hackers to reconsider some of the basic institutions of our society (like property laws), and organize to resist them. Hacking as a critique of society didn't even exist 20 years ago.

Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.

[sosume]

Just don't let your exclusive mindset make it impossible for others to share their work for free.. that is called fundamentalism. Your way or the highway. If you're so focused on making money, you should take an 80-hours job instead of hoping to make a song or painting that will support all your habits for a lifetime. That is just ridiculous.

Exactly

[Mark_MF-WN]

You hit the nail on the head there. I remember the last time I was able to work, I purchased quite a number of albums, and more than a few video games.

When I'm a student, or too sick to do anything, I certainly can't afford to buy DVDs or CDs. I still buy the odd used game, but $10 for a game that will provide twenty to fifty hours of entertainment is within ANY budget.

But whenever I have dinner with my aunt and uncle, he regales me with stories of all the free software he downloads. It kind of disgusts me since he can obviously afford to purchase it legit. I switched to Linux precisely to get away from having to pirate software. I always encourage people to switch, so that they can benefit from truly a free operating system and office suite. I've gotten quite a few people to switch to OpenOffice.