Reading 01: To hack or not to hack

It’s incredible to think about how one of the dominoes in the path to modern computing was teenagers and model trains at MIT. Despite trains being an excuse to just build relays and circuits, model trains are what got hackers like Peter Samson and Alan Kotok to stop wandering around aimlessly Building 26 at 3am and to dive headfirst into becoming a “True Hacker”.

I was genuinely surprised at how novel hacking initially was. Fledgling hackers would join the TMRC because they wanted to be a part of its P&S division and naturally learned that to continue hacking, authority would have to be ignored, and no one could stop you until the hack was completed. I was envious of this innate curiosity to explore a passion as far as you can because I am certain if I walked in Tech Square in Cambridge, I would instantly be labeled a loser.

I live my life under the “jack of many trades, master of none” philosophy. Once I learn the basics of a hobby or interest, I move on to the next. While I have hacked in many mediums, from building an electric guitar from scratch to following a ‘how-to’ guide to set up a cloud-based Minecraft server, I have never focused on one hack to perfect. Both hacks I left at a stage of satisfactory; the electric guitar can play any note (just ignore the interference), and the Minecraft server can only run vanilla Minecraft with three players at a time.

My jealousy of hackers is solely with their passion to perfect and delve deeper into their area of interest. I wish for at least some period of my life I could convince myself to work on a project until I have no ideas left on how to improve it. Everything else that comes with being a true hacker, I find kind of just sad.

Aside from their achievements, I do not appreciate the hacker lifestyle as I view it limits happiness to just purely a project-based endeavor. If you are a hacker and you weren’t producing, then ed Fredken would employ some “social engineering” and move that hacker far away to another company or lab for the sake of both his previous location and him. Hackers were judged solely by work done, not by who they were. Even in the world of baseball, where stats define if you are employed or not, there exists the “clubhouse guy”: a player whose value isn’t really how good he plays baseball but the good vibes and energy he brings the team.

Moreover, there was the typical hacker way of life. Reading about Richard Greenblatt’s legendary stench, so powerful it had to be measured using a new olfactory measure of “milliblatts”, makes my previously held assertions of poor hacker hygiene look downright clean. The saddest part to me is that the stench is a byproduct of the concentration hackers require to complete a cycle of 30 hours of work. Poor hygiene and 30-hour work cycles then lead to no social life aside from hacking Chinese menus with your fellow lab mates.

However, most hackers were happy with these sacrifices.

“All the while, Silver was soaking up knowledge in this Xanadu above Cambridge. It was a school no one else knew about, and for the first time in his life he was happy"

While I could never live the hacker lifestyle, I find it important to respect the choice of those brave hackers. Much like beauty, happiness is decided by the beholder. While I do not and cannot be labeled a true hacker, I will try my best to integrate the passion for hacking into my life.