117 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
117 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
THE HACKER PAPERS (PSYCHOLOGY TODAY AUG. '80)
|
||
DRAWN FROM THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY
|
||
LOW OVERHEAD TIME-SHARING SYSTEM(LOTS)
|
||
|
||
|
||
FROM: G. GANDALF (Kenneth Peter)
|
||
TO: BULLETIN BOARD
|
||
SUBJECT:ESSAY ON HACKING
|
||
|
||
|
||
Dedicated to all my friends at LOTS who will live their lives in a alien
|
||
culture surrounded by humanity, and to Ernest, who was too human for it.
|
||
|
||
As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying
|
||
$9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking
|
||
of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values.
|
||
In a large part, it is my own story.
|
||
|
||
There is no one field in particular in academia that has a monopoly on
|
||
production of single-interest people, and this practice can exist almost
|
||
anywhere. There is the political power seeker, all-consumed by climbing up the
|
||
bureaucratic rungs. There is the stereotyped pre-med, ignoring all but his MCAT
|
||
scores. There is the compulsive artist or writer, forever lost in his work.
|
||
Narrowness is widespread. But there is one field that seems to be more
|
||
consistent in this practice. This essay, rooted in personal and painful
|
||
experience, is about the people in computer science.
|
||
|
||
In the middle of Stanford University there is a large concrete- and-glass
|
||
building filled with computer terminals. When one enters this building through
|
||
the glass doors, one steps into a different culture. Fifty people stare at
|
||
terminal screens. Fifty faces connected to 50 bodies, connected to 50 sets of
|
||
fingers that pound on 50 keyboards ultimately linked to a computer. If you go
|
||
further inside, you can discover the true addicts: the members of the
|
||
Establishment. These are the people who spend their lives with computers and
|
||
fellow "hackers". These are the members of a subculture so foreign to most
|
||
outsiders that it not only walls itself off but is walled off, in turn, by those
|
||
who cannot understand it. The wall is built from both sides at once.
|
||
|
||
These people deserve a description. In very few ways do they seem average.
|
||
First, they are all bright, so bright, in fact, that they experienced social
|
||
problems even before they became interested in computers. Second, they are
|
||
self-contained. Their entire social existence usually centers around one
|
||
another. Very, very few remain close to their families. Very, very few
|
||
associate much with anyone who is not at least partially a member of the hacking
|
||
group. While they do sometimes enjoy entertainment unrelated to their field, it
|
||
is almost always with fellow hackers. Third, all aspects of their existence
|
||
reinforce one another. They go to school in order to learn about computers,
|
||
they work at jobs in programming and computer maintenance, and they lead their
|
||
social lives with hackers. Academically, socially, and in the world of cash,
|
||
computers are the focus of their existence.
|
||
|
||
The hacker will probably not strongly disagree with what has been said so far.
|
||
But he will ask the question, "So what?" The answer is: in creating a
|
||
subculture and isolating it, we are destroying the chance that computers might
|
||
be used wisely as an integral part of our society. We are precluding the human
|
||
values so necessary for the wise application of this technological achievement.
|
||
The most brilliant young minds at our top universities are learning how to play
|
||
with multi-million dollar toys first, and how to utilize them constructively
|
||
second.
|
||
|
||
Even if we ignore the costs to society as a whole, we have to look at the
|
||
costs to the people involved. The computer is a modifier of personalities. It
|
||
is highly addictive. People who gain this addiction for a period of several
|
||
months tend never to give it up. And the symptoms are very sad.
|
||
|
||
The first thing to go is other academic interests. Basically what occurs is
|
||
that the hackers motivation to challenge themselves in any field not directly
|
||
linked to computers gradually disint- egrates. On the level of grades,
|
||
straight-A students tacitly accept C's in noncomputer courses. On the level of
|
||
actual learning, the same students shut off outside subjects even more
|
||
completely than their grades would indicate. This is common in many areas of
|
||
specialization, but nothing compares with the incredible consumption of computer
|
||
science students for computer science courses, and their non-chalant attitude
|
||
toward every other class.
|
||
|
||
The second thing to go is a normal living pattern. Eating and sleeping are
|
||
completly rearranged to fit the addiction. The typical hacker thinks nothing of
|
||
eating one meal a day and subsisting on junk food, or of sleeping from 4 a.m.
|
||
to noon almost every day of the week. Families are soon disregarded, to an
|
||
extent uncommon even when one considers the separtion that generally occurs in
|
||
college. It is simply that the parents of hackers are ignorant of the
|
||
subculture and cannot relate.
|
||
|
||
The third thing to go is a balanced social life. The hackers' narrowness and
|
||
strange schedule simply compound the social problems they experienced before
|
||
hackerdom. Soon, no one except a hacker has the capability to understand other
|
||
hackers. No one except a hacker will go out with other hackers. No one except
|
||
a hacker can talk to another hacker.
|
||
|
||
The forth and final thing that happens is also the saddest. The personality
|
||
of the hacker shifts, in order to permanently adjust to the new social
|
||
conditions. Emotions always hurt before so they are effectively isolated.
|
||
Relations with nonhackers become strained, so why force the effort? It is so
|
||
much easier just to accept social rejection and isolation, and to do it with a
|
||
spirit of camraderie that's shared by the rest of the subculture.
|
||
|
||
An essay should make an attempt to resolve the problem it points out. In this
|
||
case, the pointing may be enough, or at least enough to do whatever can be done.
|
||
I know from personal experience what a trauma it can be. I was one of the top
|
||
10 among several thousand LOTS users last spring for the amount of time I spent
|
||
here. I have watched people close to me undergo the transformation. I narrowly
|
||
escaped it.
|
||
|
||
The tragedy is that I am so involved in piecing my personality and social life
|
||
back together that I think I have learned very little about how to prevent this
|
||
from happening in the first place. I am lucky. I will go on to some sort of a
|
||
balanced life (although my hacker friends will laugh at me, since, to them, my
|
||
involvment was never serious enough to make me one of them). Weak-willed
|
||
people, people with unstable social lives, people in formative stages of their
|
||
lives, should not become involved in computer science. It should be left until
|
||
they are truly able to make decisions and be aware of all the consequences.
|
||
Computers are most often used by people who start when they are immature. This
|
||
is what causes the single-minded addiction. This is what takes some of the
|
||
brightest and most capable minds in college today and turns them to narrowness.
|
||
|
||
---------------------------------------
|
||
|