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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.
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