Reading
04: Manifest Hackery
Paul
Graham was gunning from the first page. I get America has the most incarcerated
people in the world, but there is no need to throw in middle and high schoolers
into that data point. All jokes aside, Graham’s comments that high school was
useless and causes kids to become savages make a lot more sense after reading
the chapters “What You Can’t Say” and “Good Bad Attitude”. It was almost as if he was distinctively
polarizing to make us see why he outlines the techniques for denouncing conventions;
in the case of “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”, was denouncing the American High
School system because he believed no other Adult felt it was proper to do so.
Paul
Graham depicts Hackers in High School quite differently than Steven Levy in how
they view the Hacker upbringing. While Levy portrayed the young Hacker as
someone who simply was not interested in the same mundane interests as their High
School peers, Graham portrays the young Hackers as being forced into the Fringes
of society almost unwillingly. For Levy, a Hacker never cared about fitting in but
for Graham a Hacker despised it but was not willing to conform to his dumber
classmate’s primal activities. I believe Levy is more accurate in his depiction
of Hackers in this case simply because it’s way less dramatic. Being a Hacker is
not a curse for the first 18 years of your life then you suddenly show it to
your high school classmates by becoming way more successful than them. You simply
want to learn by doing. While I do feel bad for Graham’s childhood, could he
not take solace he had friends and just be happy? Why did they have to compound
on their misery by making a popularity ranking where they were one table above
the “retards”? It might be that high school society has become more tolerant of
nerds in the last 20 years since Paul Gram published Hackers & Painters,
but I feel that he just blamed everyone around him for having a bad time
instead of just accepting of being a nerd and having confidence to own up to
it.
Aside
from this point of contention, I feel both Levy and Graham have very compatible
descriptions of Hackers: social outcasts who forgo traditional classroom
learning in favor of learning by doing with an emphasis on community. Furthermore,
I agreed incredibly with the “Hackers and Painters” chapter as it reinforced
how I not only code but complete anything in life as if I was constantly
debugging. It is why I hate writing because I feel I am ‘debugging’ every
sentence I write and get stuck writing a paragraph for 45 minutes. I want everything
I create to be incrementally better than the last project I made, learning as I
go. There is where both Levy and Graham are in agreement. In Hacker: Heroes of
the Computer Revolution, Hackers like Gosper worked to incrementally improve
upon the game of LIFE just because he found the patterns displayed on his CRT
beautiful.
Its weird.
I agree with everything positive Graham describes Hackers as but none of the
negatives. I completely agree with the “Bad Attitude” chapter as well as I view
every person should not conform to those around them by sacrifing your civil
liberties. After going abroad (another point I relate to Graham with), I see
the beauty of hacking in America. Studying CS in Spain felt like the stone age.
While in class here in Notre Dame, I am used to being of average interest in coding
side projects, no one in my classes in Spain seemed to have any interest outside
of the classroom to code. I felt proud to be an American coder, one who looked down
on Europe’s stifling legislation against technological progress. This is the
truest sense of both Hackers from Levy’s and Graham’s point of view: no lock
(whether physical or digital) will stop us from treading westward to hack. This
belief is both as obvious and certain to any hacker in America. Hacking a good
piece of software, copyright be damned, would make our founding fathers prouder
than any IRS or ATF agent ever will.
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