PmWiki | EAO / HackingHeaven

(:nl:)'+'''Hacking the Way to Heaven'''+' '''''Education and Evangelisation in a Digital culture'''''

Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

'''Chapter 1: Hackers and Heaven'''

''Who or what is the hacker?'' A Congregation of hackers? Comment on Chapter 1

Given the frequent demonisation of the hacker, lining up 'hacker' and 'heaven' in the same sentence might be too much for some. Hackers in the public (as in media) view are often presented as odd creatures at best, mostly young and dishevelled, or criminals at worst who spend late nights poring over virus-related code. Hacking might be heaven for them, but hell for the rest of us.

It is, of course, a parody of the hacker to present him or her that way. The hacker is not always young, nor criminal – let's not forget that hackers find their place in history more or less from the 1960's, as the Internet was being built and gained media prominence, especially as 'hacker culture', from around the 1980's at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. People like Richard Stallman are amongst the more famous of that lot. Forty or so years ago on top of the twenty or so years of age of the student of that time makes sixty or so in anyone's arithmetic, and those who were hackers then are almost certainly still hackers now. But of course, many are young and a new breed. There's no crime in that!

Criminals? Undoubtedly some enthusiasts and experts of all things digital have flouted the law. It is somewhat difficult nowadays, in digital matters, to avoid flouting the law, partly because the law is always late in catching up with rapid developments. On the other hand, who,reading this, has never had a pirated item of software on his or her computer? But of course there have been those who have gone far beyond that, who have vandalised, destroyed, broken in and been in every sense malicious, based on their digital knowledge and expertise. The term we might use for such an individual is 'cracker', not 'hacker'. Let's not allow the anti-social actions of a few to brand the first social movement of the digital era that truly belongs to that era, one in fact that in addition to being proud of its technical wizardry, often takes the moral high ground where others have failed to do so.

As a student and aficionado of linguistics, I must recognise that words, even the best of them, can deteriorate over time, and 'hacker' has shown that tendency. It may continue to take a downward slide, despite the fact that it began with the best of intentions to describe an enthusiast, a person who had developed an expertise, who was capable of clever solutions to seemingly impossible problems, and indeed the hacker today, certainly in the mind of many people with at least a modicum of technological savvy, is just that – a passionate, enthusiastic, clever individual who will not be beaten by technology but wants to master it, use it, and for the good of the community. Indeed, 'hacker' is really a shibboleth which marks out a membership for what is no longer an exclusive club. As such, the term 'hacker' does not have to follow any inexorable law of linguistics into the mud of meaning. It is up to those who bear the term proudly to lift it on high.

I would go a little further. It is in my interests, for the purpose of many of the things I want to say as we proceed through these chapters, to present a particular side of the hacker which the popular, media-driven view has overlooked. We can characterise the best meaning of hacker today as the following:

* Someone who believes in the importance of a particular kind of work (there are all kinds of specific hackers, some who like hardware, others who like systems, software, and so on) but who is essentially passionate about it. The chief end has little or nothing to do with money. * Someone who has a particular approach to work, which combines a certain freedom and flexibility of individual style with a genuine interest in the community and collaboration. * Someone who believes in efficient, productive communities. * Someone who has a very genuine interest and belief in the aesthetics of the task.

Such individuals are the very opposite to anti-social. The aim here is not to canonise the hacker but to point to the positive social role the hacker has played in building what is now the information society. It is because of hackers that the computer left the huge, closely guarded halls of academia (I recall my undergraduate days in the 60's giving that perforated piece of card to the girl at the desk then coming back later in the day to retrieve the result!) and became the instrument of personal liberation that the netbook is today. The hacker wanted to change life for the better. The hacker wanted to change life for the better. The hacker sought concrete solutions with the intention of sharing them with the widest circle of interested persons possible. And while the hacker might have originally begun with algorithms and esoteric code, with the growth of importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in every area of human existence, he or she has introduced a very wide spectrum of human beings to habits, ways of thinking and working that might once have belonged to 'geeks' (or those original code-wielding hackers) but which are now a part of everyday life.

Maybe it is a bit like driving a car. There was a time, admittedly back in the Henry Ford era, when the holder of a driver's licence was someone rather special, an 'expert' who wore characteristic gloves, scarf and headgear.. Now any Tom, Dick or Henrietta is that expert. The car has become commonplace. So has the computer chip. Possessing and using digital objects have not quite reached the stage of comfort that some technologies (like wearing shoes or using a ballpoint pen) have achieved, but the time is not far off. The mobile phone, no longer 'just' a phone but a tiny computer-cum-camera-cum-TV and lots more, is so ubiquitous that it no longer becomes 'part of the furniture' but something we wear, and indeed becomes part of the personality.

To some extent, then, we have all become hackers, or at least people who may wish to and need to master some aspects of the technology which is an inevitable part of our lives. If we do not master them, we will be exploited by them, we already realise. And if we bear some responsibility for the education of young human beings, then we really do want them to master these aspects too; we certainly will not want them to be exploited by technology if we can help it, and we will want them to understand and use it for their own benefit and the benefit of humankind. In fact, if we are religious educators, we might put all that into a code of our own and say that we wish ICTs to be 'for the glory of God and the salvation of souls'.

I am using 'hacker' and 'hacking' in terms of the passion, cleverness, efficiency, community, aesthetics described above: for ourselves and the young for whom we bear educational responsibility. For a non-believer this would be at the very least an holistic education which attends to all dimensions of the human being, and which empowers young people so they can experience the fullness of life. We can do that despite technology – or we can do it knowing that technology is part of the culture we breathe, indeed helps create that culture. If faith and life are meant to be kept together, and this I do believe, but they fail to be so in the technological aspects of our culture, then something will be badly amiss.

It will be badly amiss especially in the field of education. There is something rather important at stake here. While, as we have already indicated, hackers may be of any age, there is little doubt that many of them are young, and very young! They are hacking at an age when they are still working out a lot of other solutions to life's problems, so they need guidance in this field too. But there is another factor involved here. The adult world understands very well the importance of the computer, software, technology generally, but the adult world does not control it as well as many youngsters do! It is interesting that where often youth will seek to leave 'the system', represented by parents or authority of any kind, to assert their independence, in the case of the digital world they do not leave it, they stay in it and go deep. They attempt to master it and to some extent succeed long before their adult mentors do. That can create a problem. The well-known reference to the 'digital divide' has a place here too: the divide that often exists between digital students and their analog teachers!

And there is something more, something neither the young nor many of the adults are yet fully aware of, I am convinced. Technology, especially digital technology, is no longer something separate, something we can look at dispassionately as an object of study. It has now become so integrated as to become part of the communication act itself, part of the process of creating meaning. Just this alone has enormous implications for us.

A Congregation of hackers? (:nl:)