Here's my theory: the outlaw strand of American culture is a more-or-less unbroken line from the Mayflower runaways to the Polish and Irish and Swedish (and [insert your country of origin here]) n'er-do-wells of the 19th Century and the Kropotkinists, Bolshevists and other Euro-troublemakers of the Twentieth all the way up to the Black Panthers and Yippies and now the hackers and greens and cyberactivists of the 21st. Americans are good people and obedient but they come from twisted stock. Perfect conformity and an edgy refusal of authority coexist happily.
Hacking, like jazz music, is an indigenous American form – a gift to the world from the people who brought you rock and roll, personal computers and aerosol cheese. Hackers are engineers, problem solvers. They're impatient with what came in the box, they just won't read the manual and they think your retarded efforts to keep them out of your corporate network or your gated community or your DRM system are an impediment to the proper movement of knowledge.
Hackers are freedom lovers (usually, but not always, libertarians), rational (usually atheist, often militantly so), individualist (they hate collectivism but love motivated cooperation), analytical (they're the enemies of received wisdom), obsessive (often autistic) and oh so clever. They will – it seems inevitable to me – pretty soon be ruling the planet (at least the parts of it not ruled by their polar opposites, the fundamentalists). They're approaching the right age (40-ish) – although, of course, every generation knows its hackers, back to the dawn of time. Who do you think figured out you could heat clay to make waterproof vessels or extract iron from red dirt or control a loom with a punched card?
The hackers' generation is ready for power. The pioneers are already in place: examine closely your National legislature: see if you can spot them: swapping scientific calculators for ministerial briefs; jobs in management consultancies for elected office. Soon they'll have totally displaced the previous political cohort: the post-war meritocrats, the Eng Lit and PPE graduates, the lawyers and self-made men. The geek shall inherit the earth – and not a moment too soon, if you ask me. They may be reductive, sometimes pedantic, often annoying but they have an irreverent, probing, undogmatic attitude to political reality and a love of truth. The hacker generation is perfectly adapted to the post-political, hyper-democratic era we're entering. Hackers are rebels with a cause.
I'm glad the hacker generation is raady for power because I've just about had enough of the punk generation being in power - especially as I never saw any of it.
Posted by: Ivan Pope | March 03, 2005 at 10:07 PM
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