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Anthropologist Spends Three Years Living With Hackers
concealment writes "Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years studying the community that builds the Debian GNU/Linux open source operating system and hackers in the Bay Area. More recently, she's been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief. When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group's monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco's Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out."
That's awesome. Welcome to the internet. Guess Coleman will talk about how he discovered Reddit in his next article!
will be studying the grooming habits of Orthodox Stallmanites
..she was not burnt by the hot grits.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
It doesn't get more craven then that.
Did I just get old? Or did slashdot really gone down the toilet? Both?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Multi-User System for Interactive Computing !! That's when even the women behind the keyboard had long beards !!
3 years working with Debian dev's. Whats that like 1 release?
Hack Like Me
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
she had to singe and destroy her olfactory nerves
thus rendered dead to the sense of smell, she was able to continue to function while embedded in the community
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Go study the guy deciding between MySQL and Postgres. Geez
You lost me at Wired. That magazine is nothing but sensationalism. Or, maybe I should say SHE lost me at Wired, not you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sure, it's a fluff piece.
The author is trying to sell some books.
There's nothing wrong with that. If you're part of the culture, I'm sure it seems like a waste of time.
I don't see a problem with trying to raise awareness of the community, and maybe correct some flawed stereotypes. I don't see why the community wouldn't want their story told.
According to the general comments with the article, the book has a creative commons license. The author commented that she will release a copy soon, when she fixes the website to go with it.
Maybe you should have actually, ya know, read some things. The book is being released under Creative Commons and she's putting up a site to distribute it. But since you just want mod points for being a smartass...carry on
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
If you don't know the reference, just search for Jane Goodall tramp or read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall
I disagree ... there's also Apple advertising.
You introduced a female into a development group? No wonder Debian didn't get anything done for the past couple of years.
TL;DR - she's writing a book and wants us all to know, and Wired is cooperating. It's a fluff piece. Apparently we should buy it when it comes out.
As the sibling posts also say, you wrote a really bad summary. I think you just wanted to be cynical, or troll.
Aside from the fact that she'll apparently release the book copyleft, there's also the fact that it's a scholarly work - a good way to lose money.
A better summary would be something like "Anthropologist studies nerds, finds that they have an interesting culture and a clear interest in civil liberties issues."
But of course that isn't relevant to Slashdot. There are no nerds here, and no one cares about civil liberties here, right? We just discuss computer parts endlessly, right? I hope some smarter moderators show up soon.
"Hackers in the Mist"
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
TL;DR - she's writing a book and wants us all to know, and Wired is cooperating. It's a fluff piece. Apparently we should buy it when it comes out.
As the sibling posts also say, you wrote a really bad summary. I think you just wanted to be cynical, or troll.
Aside from the fact that she'll apparently release the book copyleft, there's also the fact that it's a scholarly work - a good way to lose money.
A better summary would be something like "Anthropologist studies nerds, finds that they have an interesting culture and a clear interest in civil liberties issues."
But of course that isn't relevant to Slashdot. There are no nerds here, and no one cares about civil liberties here, right? We just discuss computer parts endlessly, right? I hope some smarter moderators show up soon.
I just want to thank you for your post, sadly have no mod points to give
Am I the only one who read all that drivel and thought it sounded like just a commercial for her book coming out? And not only that but the book sounded just like its going to be a piece of pretentious, uninformed, mediocre bullshit written to try and cash in on buzz words and hot topics?
It sounds like a book that people in the culture will laugh at as being fluff while the others who arent that read it will suddenly start running around spouting key phrases and quotes from her book but bill them as their own in order to impress their as equally un-tech savvy friends in a poor attempt at feeling important.
Researcher spends three years in living in a basement
Anybody seen her in their basement?
Day 1. OMFG, the smell.
Day 2. I don't know how long I can live on Doritos and Mountain Dew.
Day 3. I think I've made contact, they keep saying Boobs or GTFO.
Year 3. I'm done, going to the spa.
Season veterans who have spent literally * DECADES completely immersed in the hacker scene still dare not make any sweeping declaration about the nature of the hacker world.
And here we have, a person who only spent 3 fricking years (as she put it "researching") comes out with her "immense knowledge" of the hacker subculture.
My own experience told me that, while hackers in general do share "common traits", hackers from one community differ from hackers from another community, in term of way of thought, habits, etc.
The term "community" means a lot as well - as the word not only define geographic difference, but also the different fields (shared interests) the hackers are working on.
I still remember when the movie scene started to take interest in hackerism they had actors playing stereotypical thick-glassed, talkative, soprano-toned hackers, and they all come with lousy hairdo - As if we are like that.
I've known some of the greatest hackers and from the outside they look normal - just fucking absolutely normal.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Are the editors too lazy to bother with a first name?
perl script or pearl necklace?
no not that necklace silly boy
Well lady, then you know the drill: Tits or GTFO
Not to offend, but was there any insight to this article? So and so did this is more of a twitter comment than an article on slashdot. What did this anthropologist learn from their experience? Anything would really help here.
Disagreeing with you does not make me a troll.
Why didn't Wired ask her how she paid to live for 3 years in one of the most expensive cities in the world?
Seriously, I'd like to know.
None of the guidebooks I've ever read say anything about how getting an eff.org email address is a substitute for avg. $2K@month in rent. (Highest in the USA.)
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-04-11/
vi +
So a groupie is now called an anthropologist.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Yeah, you deserve a ton of mod points. I despise how people on Slashdot look down at anybody who's not in 'the club', whatever they might imagine the club to be. Jon Katz was fuzzy headed, but didn't deserve the reception he got here at all. And neither does this anthropologist.
I really wonder why people are so xenophobic.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Well, I suppose that comes naturally when you're an academic. Her unspoken assumptions are, to her, entirely correct and there could be no other way of looking at the situation. I mean, hackers, right? San Francisco. Obviously! Wouldn't want to hang out in dingy apartments in Omsk or Urumuqi and eat instant noodles with a bunch of people who don't speak English and who don't bathe regularly. Learned the culture inside-out. She has a Ph.D...I just don't see how she could possibly be mistaken in any way. And then the write-up to receive the ultimate in "geek" credibility - Wired magazine! Ooh, shivers of excitement.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I just want to say I'm deeply disturbed by the article using the same word (hackers) to refer to Linux developers and Anonymous.
A better summary would be something like "Anthropologist studies nerds, finds that they have "an interesting culture" and a clear interest in civil liberties issues."
That summary would be wrong, for a very simple reason:
Not all the hackers live within the same "culture.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I could easily be tricked into having her stay with me for weeks. I just don't know if she'd get along with my mom.
The G
I think the comments here show something clearly:
While some antropologists may be interested in understanding hacker culture, the interest is not reciprocal.
This motivates me! Next, me will be doing some research too: Jobless bum spends three years living with hookers, studying the community which carries out the tradition of an ancient profession.
as phantomfive already said: sensationalism
If you don't know the reference, just search for Jane Goodall tramp or read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall
Clearly, the hackers are the new primates.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
That summary would be wrong, for a very simple reason:
Not all the hackers live within the same "culture.
Well, since I happen to study a related field I can say that depends a lot on which specific definition of culture is being used.
But that doesn't really matter here since I wrote "studies nerds", not "studies all nerds" like you appear to have assumed. Basically everyday language requires a degree of co-operation, unlike scientific language.
As the sibling posts also say, you wrote a really bad summary. I think you just wanted to be cynical, or troll.
Well of COURSE I wrote a bad summary. I said it right there - it was too long, and I didn't read it!
Sounds like work that does more to legitimize anthropological methods than provide a meaningful interpretation of a culture.
It would be interesting to know whether anthropological studies have ever been used for anything other than the co-option of the subjects into support for some broader political framework that the people then become subject to. Sure, it's always to "help", but for some reason it's always an institution doing the "helping."
For whatever reason, we don't have people living undercover in academia. Maybe we should.
Yeah, you deserve a ton of mod points. I despise how people on Slashdot look down at anybody who's not in 'the club', whatever they might imagine the club to be. Jon Katz was fuzzy headed, but didn't deserve the reception he got here at all. And neither does this anthropologist.
I really wonder why people are so xenophobic.
I think in this case, people are resistant to the notion that they can be so neatly studied and classified.
If they misjudged her, they made a mistake.
I don't mind so much about the decline in the participation standards, if there has in fact been a decline (not counting the glory days when the lamers had five digit ids).
What I tremendously resents is the decline in the wording of the story summaries, which become ever more useless and trollish by the minute. It's not the people here that will drive me away. It's the decline in story summaries and the attitude of the editorial oversight which permits this to happen.
If we had a moderation system to assign "vague-assed trollery" to the story submissions, I would instantly tweak my filter such that I never see these stories again (and the 300 comments out of 500 adjusting the crookered picture frame).
The only reason I haven't jumped ship already is that most of the alternatives have been violently Twitterized. I'm determined to think in full paragraphs. I just can't wait for the headline "Generation Z rediscovers the paragraph." Maybe if I'm lucky--and live long enough to see it--the paragraph will become retro cool.
For funding this person's 3 year vacation in San Francisco.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The last I checked, which admittedly was when I graduated half a decade ago, anthropology was about observation. A certain amount of contact and interaction is of course necessary, but immersion (and marching as a sociopolitical gesture is certainly a sign of cultural immersion) is an obvious indication that the anthropologist has become a participant and not an observer and can no longer be considered unbiased.
Yes! Finally an anthropologist has come to find out:
Oh, man! I can't bear the wait any longer. I've got to know.
And .. and .. and .. What do they eat?!
I really wonder why people are so xenophobic.
It is not everyone on slashdot. It is just the fourteen year olds among us.
Some of them have been practicing at being fourteen for a decade or more. They are particularly obnoxious.
I look forward to Coleman's book. She may offer some insight into this failure to mature syndrome. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with over exposure to FPS games, but I'm just guessing.
Will
I think in this case, people are resistant to the notion that they can be so neatly studied and classified.
Perhaps you're right. Though really, no group of humans is and anthropologists are well aware of this fact. :-)
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Dmitry Sklyarov has been free for more than 10 years. Did she finish this research 7+ years ago? If so, then it can't contain facts about Anonymous...
She uses 'I was like', 'they were like' an awful lot. That, to me, is not the sign of an intelligent person.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Hello,
This seems similar in nature to the work Dr. Sarah Gordon did while speaking with and investigating computer virus writers back in the 1990s. Unlike Coleman, though, Gordon seems to have focused more on criminal hackers. Very interesting reading.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
I laughed.
Actually it's Canadian Academic money, no need for you to get worried about your taxes unless you are Canadian. See the summary and the article both mention McGill University and if you do a minute of research you'll find out "Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University." So I think between her salary, prize money for her earlier work, academic grants from us Canuckastan's etc, etc she could afford to spend the time in SF to write another well received academic book.
More recently, she's been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement
spent three years studying the community that builds the Debian GNU/Linux open source operating system
Yet she still does not understand the difference?
Wired is not sensationalism... I can't find the sensationalism for all the ads... it is however and excellent cage liner for the test rats... very absorbent and tears into nice nests for the females.
http://dilbert.com/fast/1993-04-11/
For people who aren't into Windoze and Crapintoshes. You know, Unix/Linux folk.
The only reason I haven't jumped ship already is that most of the alternatives have been violently Twitterized. I'm determined to think in full paragraphs. I just can't wait for the headline "Generation Z rediscovers the paragraph." Maybe if I'm lucky--and live long enough to see it--the paragraph will become retro cool.
Generation Z will never discover the paragraph. The closest they will come is strings of phrases and cliches loosely related to the same topic or train of thought. Generation Z perceives paragraphs as well as structured thought as work and therefore must be avoided. As you have observed, people adopt language use from their environment, and the fine literary, theatrical, and music arts which they have been exposed to include text messaging, Harry Potter, teenager sitcoms on Disney/Nick/ABC family, Hannah Montana and Lady Gaga--all of which can be published on twitter with little comprehension lost.
As for the recent editorial quality, I blame new management and the lack of cApiTaL punishment. It'd be nifty if trolls and trollish stories were punished by having their posts all capitalized via moderation, for example, every down vote causes another letter get capitalized. I know I'd gloss over articles and posts written in all caps. But it'd also be nifty if trolls were lynched.
greed@All_Evils:~#
Isn't the "app revolution" producing profound changes in geek culture? A democratization of app building tools and platforms so it's pretty easy to learn to build an app and a lot of motivation to hit the big time with one? So we are getting a big influx of app builders who may not come from traditional programming soil at all, are fully self-taught, and know very little about the underlying system. Compare using one of the high level easy SDKs now with first learning C/C++/Perl/Assembler to be taken seriously for a job. These are different times.
...Generation Z...
Whoa!!!! Hold up here. If are already at Generation Z, what are we going to call the next set of brats, i mean, kids that grow up after Generation Z?
And while I remember Generation X, I don't recall any called Generation A-V, or Y.
Did Nvidia doing the naming here?
Be seeing you...
I saw that movie. Fell asleep. Boring, cliched "action" (a fight on top of a speeding train? Seriously?). Endless sequences of people walking or standing in a room. No sexual tension. Stereotypes like Judy Denche's very boring 'M' rendition. Only a little dry humor, and tackling Bond's mid-aged crisis and ageism issues, is not enough to save this movie.
Coleman is an annoyance for me. She does not understand the hacker culture and values.
Guerillas in the Mist.
Finally get to take a shower.
No brain, no pain.
After Gen Z comes the generation codenamed Altruistic Anus.
And Douglas Coupland to blame for it all.
I must disagree with your comment. Maybe *some* (self-proclaimed?) hackers don't care about such studies. But at the several conferences I have been to (including, yes, many DebConfs, where I met her over eight years ago) there is usually interest and empathy with people doing various social analysis on us, or sharing with us their research.
We have had several anthropologists and sociologists, from college students to holding doctorates, making interviews or presenting their studies and work. There is always, sure, people who are not interested. But they are often most welcome.
Oh, and about the hacker stereotype: I have been an Emacs user for longer than many people here have been alive (first used it in 1983; I was born in 1976). I even am bearded and long-haired (but I do shower every day! Two at most! More than once a week!) But I learn to use and love Emacs' org-mode thanks to another anthropologist friend whom I met while he was studying our group in 2009.
Did this account get hacked? Looking at the comment history, it appears like it used to have good karma and a reasonably useful posting history. Now this crap.
Note to self: Proof read you fucking moron.
did the same thing with a group of marketers.
However it took her a lot less than 3 years to figure what they were about.
Because maturity is marked by speculation over the root of medical conditions which one supposes to affect a large group of people who one doesn't enjoy the comments of on an internet news site.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Coleman makes an appearance in the 2012 documentary "We Are Legion".
Pfftt. I spent four years with a bunch of pseudo intellectuals and semi-pro alcoholics. I probably racked up a larger bill than she did, and I'm still paying for it.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You might be interested in media ecology. The lack of longer discourse and even paragraph-length writing is due to the difference between someone who reads books and someone who skims news articles or facebook feeds... Reading books cultivates our ability to follow long-form reasoned arguments, to focus on a train of thought, and to think deeply about what someone says by turning back the page and rereading, etc. Notice that reading (a discipline) cultivates a skill, rational discourse -- if you don't read much, it won't happen.
I've noticed that computer programming also helps people to think in a logical, organized manner and to synthesize disparate information into a coherent argument. If the first generation of slashdot readers grew up in a print culture and then learned to program, that would create a community of people with the capability for quality discourse. And when I say "grew up in a print culture," I mean that they grew up reading books and did not primarily watch television. This means that, in most cases, their parents cared about education...
But, once the internet became ubiquitous, and the succeeding generations grew up with it, you may get a lot of people who grew up without learning to follow long trains of thought by carefully reading difficult books. Instead, they read websites and magazines, watch TV and youtube, and so on. None of these things cultivate the facilities needed for either deep or lengthy discourse. They don't even necessarily help you to focus for very long on any one thing.
Librarians might save society after all :)
Zero Cool? Acid Burn? Cereal Killer?
Maybe she got to hack The Gibson.
Spending three years, and from a real anthropologist, means she actually knows *more* about the hackers than any individual one in the group.
Anyone insulting here only shows ignorance of what her profession is*.
She may be a poor writer after that (I didn't read her work), she may be stupid, she may not vote my side, she may believe hideous things -but definitely: part of her job, after three years of full-time work, she just knows more than you and me. And than any single individual here not having devoted *years* professionally to the topic.
H.
(*) Sorry Cowboy, you can foe me now -- you also can check you're part of my friends, for years...
Herve S.
Perhaps you should take to to hear what she actually has to say.
Peeking Behind the curtain at anonymous.
A long way from sweeping generalisations common here.
O hai!
I'd just like to take a minute to point out that you are both arrogant and clueless. You seem to believe that your generation has some sort of richer or better culture, or perhaps a deeper wisdom. Youth is often arrogant and derisive of what they have not experienced. What's your excuse?
You have constructed a bias in thought without input from reality. Your generation was decried by the previous one just the same -- the tradition is at least as old as Socrates. Aside from the general principle that ninety percent of everything is 'crud', your complaint is mostly one of ignorance. You don't seek out counterexamples, or involve yourself with the creative minds of the younger generations. For my part I am rather pleasantly astounded at the number of young people that I meet who have actually read The Brothers Karamazov, although meeting an equal number who have read Finnegan's Wake fails to elicit the same emotions.
Overall, this may be a generation that is unused to theatre -- but expects at least 20 hours of plot from video games. They may have a preference for netspeak -- but they interact with each other on a global scale. They may not write sonnets -- but only because you can't use a 3D printer to make them. They may not share your musical tastes -- and for that they should truly be damned, because everyone knows that good music hasn't been made since whichever formative decade you experienced.
I would label this as a case of projection: you are a small-minded person with limited knowledge outside your own domain, and assume that this is true of everyone else.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Story made me think of this old manifesto http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html
She actually comes across as a reasonably intellegent person, who appears to not view hackers as bugs under a microscope.
Of course, that may be one reason that academics don't care for her....
And why not three years? Is a 19 yr old hacker who's come to it over the preceeding three years not a hacker? Can you be over 40 and still a hacker?
mark "well over: most recent hack: repairing HP's ppd for the z3200PS printer"
...limnology? ? ? ?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-28/dupont-sends-in-former-cops-to-enforce-seed-patents-commodities.html
http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2012/11/21/why-so-secretive-the-trans-pacific-partnership-as-global-corporate-coup/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/frank-olson-cia-lawsuit_n_2206983.html
Now here's a great book about my fave subject written by a most astute and intelligent lady:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/fashion/naomi-wolf-on-her-new-book-vagina.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what "It" was. Now what I'm with isn't "it", and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too"
Replace "It" with "Slashdot", and replace "Weird and scary" with "Stupid and gone down the toilet". Voila!!
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
probably best analysis of nerd/hacker culture thats been done by and outsider.
most previous attempts were poorly researched with bad intentions to make us a strawmen for greater societies own personal failings.
Something tells me you've never tried to mod a game that was written for the Source engine (probably has something to do with your irrational fear of Steam). There is a very large open-source community that regularly mods the ever loving shit out of every Source engine game ever - all with Valve's consent. Source is perhaps the most easily hacked engine ever. I have myself written thousands of lines of code in Sourcemod so that I can customize Left 4 Dead 2 to my liking, and that doesn't count the tens of thousands of lines of other people's plugins. L4D2 launched in 2009 and to this day still gets updated (last update was a week ago)
Valve also has the Steam workshop so that they can pimp user-made mods, and even allow the mod developers to make money off their creations. Valve also endorses custom campaigns for L4D2 and even went so far as to take a community campaign and make it official, releasing it for the XBox as well (which requires significant certification fees). So the idea that game-modding has been smothered is totally bunk, proven such by the very people you are deriding here.
:(){
*utterly confused*
So this anthropologist is watching hackers that create Debian GNU/Linux but really she is trying to get inside the hacker [sic] scene that are Anonymous while eating Chinese food with the local LUG?
WTF?!
I had thought that at least on /. we were safe from the medias hacker [sic] non-sense.
Well, about time to forget my 6-or-so digit membership number (as I apparently already have).
Somebody should slap concealment around with a copy of the Jargon File and the /. editors too, while they're at it!
I am a small-minded person with limited knowledge outside my own domain.
I have been lost ever since I realized this.
Are you telling us that some people are not like this?