|
OK, the end is finally here. Two chunks of reading. One on the free source
movement -- the direct descendent of the original MIT hacker culture, revived
through internet-based collaboration. At the time of writing, free software is
dominant for web servers, mail transmission tools and other chunks of internet
software. Its challenge for desktop computers has faded, and it could yet grab
decent market shares for embedded computing and other kinds of server tasks
(file sharing, databases).
The other is just some fairly recent (90s) futurism, to go along with our
coverage of Berkeley, Evans, Hiltz & Turoff, and so on. You read about
Negroponte before -- in
the Stone reading about the Atari lab. A little bit after the Atari shakeout, he
got industrial funding to set up something very similar at MIT -- the
Media Lab. Through the late 80s and 90s
the lab attracted considerable amounts of money, droves of talented geeks with
an interest in social transformation and still greater amounts of media
attention. It pioneered multimedia techniques, and by the early 90s Negroponte
was the patron saint of the newly formed Wired magazine, writing a prominent
column devoted mostly to communication topics. (He also funded the magazine,
does venture capitalism, and is on the board of Motorola -- nice synergy). In
1995 he collected a bunch of these columns into a book, "Being Digital", which
sold quite a few copies and fuelled a lot of discussion of new paradigm talk
over the next couple of years. I won't make you buy it, so I set a couple of the
columns plus my favorite quote (below).
"Early in the next millennium, your left and right cuff
links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and
have more computer power than your present PC. Your telephone won’t ring
indiscriminately; it will receive, sort and perhaps respond to your calls like a
well trained English butler. Mass media will be refined by systems for
transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. Schools
will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble
ideas and socialize with children all over the world. The digital planet will
look and feel like the head of a pin.
As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a
nation state will give way to those of both larger and smaller communities. We
will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be
irrelevant and time will play a different role. Twenty years from now, when you
look out of a window what you see may be five thousand miles and six time zones
away…" [Negroponte, page 6]
Discussion Questions
- Negroponte clearly has more than a little in common with the earlier
futurists we read. What, if anything, is different in his work? Could be be
right?
- Elite techo-publicists like Negroponte have enjoyed considerable political
influence, especially with Al Gore. They were also name-dropped by corporate
leaders. How much actual impact do you think they have had, and what might it
be?
- In the early 60s, hacker culture was pretty specific and localized to MIT
and a couple of other computer centers. Its values clearly grew out of local
conditions. Now it is being spread globally, via the internet. At the same
time, free software is coming to have enormous economic importance. How does
the Linux development model (as theorized by Raymond) update the Hacker Ethic
to deal with this? What is the difference between the Cathedral and the
Bazaar?
- What advantages does Raymond claim for this model of software development?
Do you believe him? Where does the money come from? Can it apply to all kinds
of software? Is software inherently different from other goods? Is it just
"information," and should information be free?
- Have you ever tried Linux? If not, why not?
Resources
 |
Negroponte includes the
full text of his Wired
columns on his own homepage, which is an earlier way to browse them than
through Wired's interface. For more on Iridium, which is what he is referencing
in the quote above, see this
Wired
story. Despite Negroponte's backing, the thing was a spectacular failure.
|
|
The internet is full of stuff about the free software movement and Linux.
It's a wonder that there is room for anything else. The reasons for this are
obvious. The center of modern hacker (in the old sense) culture is
www.slashdot.org. At heart its an
extremely busy bulletin board, where people post news stories and hundreds of
other people comment.
|
|
Open source has a number of direct connections with the original hacker
culture. Some of these are personal. You can look up the famous names of 90s
technology at Wired magazine's
"Wired 25" people page,
cross-referenced to coverage of them. Andrew Leonard, of the struggling web
magazine Salon.com, spent much of 2000
working on a book about the free software movements and its connections to
earlier hacker culture. You can access the parts of it he wrote
here.
|
|
There's also a book by some kind of Scandinavian technophilosophy prodigy --
P. Himanen, The Hacker Ethic. New York: Random House, 2001. Includes an
intro by Linus Torvalds, who should stick to his day job -- he seems to think he
invented Maslow's pyramid of needs (taught in every management or psychology 101 course of the
last 40 years). Much too much wide-eyed optimism, and philosophical
generalization, and not nearly enough solid historical grounding. Anyway, they
have a home page.
|
|
Richard
Stallman, who you read about in Hackers, spent much of the 1980s running Project
GNU, creating the freeware Unix programming tools now included in Linux
distributions. (In fact, if you even call them Linux distributions then GNU fans
write in to complain). You can read a
Wired interview
with him from its very first issue. His original
GNU Manifesto is also
on-line.
|
|
Raymond is often viewed, even by people who post on slashdot, as eccentric
and arrogant. He's a libertarian with a big gun collection and a flair for self
publicity. His homepage is
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/. One of the things that got talked about a lot
was his rather smug article "Surprised
By Wealth" where he writes of how great it is to become a multi-millionaire
by sticking to hacker principles. (There's a great parody, called
Alfred E.
Programmer - Surprised by Poverty).
|
|
For a critique of what she calles "techno libertarianism" see Paulina
Borsook's essay
Cyberselfish.
|
|
