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Viewing comments for "Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic"
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Corbin commented [8]:
I'm not claiming to be a hacker or to speak on behalf of
hackers.
I'll claim to be a hacker and to speak on behalf of hackers.
This talk should be carefully considered. It would be easy
to debate its points into the ground, and somebody already
tried last time this was shared; however, the breadth of the
author's argument really deserves better than a fisk.
> bomp commented [5]:
Agree. I give talks I think of (and sometimes call)
"closing off" talks and "opening up" talks.
Closing off talks are for when I think I've solved a problem
and I want to claim that I've got this fairly precise
statement that everyone should agree with.
Opening up talks are for when I've noticed a problem and I
have some suggestions about solutions but I know they're too
vague (but I think other people are doing even worse than
me - there are some aspects of the problem they haven't even
noticed or are dead wrong about).
Seems to me that this talk about Hacker ethics is clearly
positioned as an opening up talk. Not just because of
the title, but also because of the way the examples are
treated as tentative, and because of the deliberately vague
conclusion.
ahelwer commented [6]:
I think this is a basically good talk. It mirrors the
distinction between libertarian & anarchist conceptions
of freedom. The former is purely individualistic - you
are free if you can do what you want, others be damned -
while the latter acknowledges you are only free because the
collective work & actions of others enables you to be
free; a reciprocal responsibility exists for you to work
& behave so others can experience the same freedom.
Irene commented [3]:
I agree with some of this, not all of it. In particular I
really want to formulate a version of this that loses the
deontology but keeps the anarchy, but I think I have a lot
of reading ahead of me if I want to do that.
I really love the replacing answers with questions aspect of
it though.
Plus it is a much-needed exposition of some serious problems
that have been around for a long time. A lot of gendery
people in tech have had to grapple with this stuff but I
haven't seen anyone attempt to actually convince a general
audience of it before, let alone this well.
> Diana commented [1]:
You may find some of the work from Safety science,
particularly Resilience Engineering, to be useful.
In particular, Steven Shorrock has great blogposts like
this one
https://humanisticsystems.com/2016/12/05/the-varieties-of-
human-work/
sjamaan commented [1]:
It's a good talk that raises important problems with
software development culture, and the intention is certainly
good. Programming is forgetting is a good way to frame the
fallibility of (computerized) systems, but the premise and
the rest of the talk seems to be mostly about programming
or creating. i.e., the docile, meek and modern Silicon
Valley tech culture definition of "hacking". I.e, the
type of "hacking" that occurs in hackathons organized by
large corporations who want to appear cool and scout for
talent, where the participants provide labor in exchange
for inexpensive, unhealthy food and the possibility of a
job offer.
The hacker culture from the book was much bigger than that.
The more naughty parts of hacker culture - making systems do
things that they weren't intended to do (like making phone
calls for free), breaking into systems etc. wasn't about
making things for others, but about curiosity, freedom and
self-expression.
And one should not forget that it was also about "sticking
it to the man". Freedom from oppression by intentionally
destroying the neatly arranged order enforced upon the world
by electronic systems. This talk does not address that part,
and in fact it seems to think hacker culture was responsible
for this kind of oppression! Yes, hackers make things and
write code, but so did corporate suits who programmed the
systems the hackers were trying to subvert. If you focus
only on the "making things" side of the coin you lose that
important aspect of the hacker culture.
The posed questions as alternative to the "answers" from the
book seem to focus mostly about being a good citizen and not
causing trouble for others. That's about as close as you can
get as the opposite of what hackerdom is about.
Having said that, framing programming as forgetting and
posing the questions the author came up with are excellent
ways to get started to think about the flaws in a system and
to find ways in which to break them.
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