“Hacker” Ethics And The Christian Vision
By Antonio Spadaro S.J.
[Father Spadaro is an Italian Jesuit priest, journalist, and writer. He has been the editor in chief of the Jesuit-affiliated journal La Civiltà Cattolica and a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Secretariat for Communications. His books include: Cybertheology; Friending God: Social Media, Spirituality, and Community; and Cybergrace.]
Who Are the Hackers?
The term hacker has entered common usage because newspapers and the television, as well as films and novels, have widely associated it with an ample sequence of phenomena such as the violation of secrets, codes and passwords, of protected IT systems, etc., Although the media has imposed this image on the hackers, in reality the so-called “IT pirates” have another name: cracker. The term hacker identifies a much more complex and constructive figure: “hackers build things, crackers break them.”1 This definition was written by Eric Raymond the current editor of Jargon File, a sort of dictionary for hackers.
In 1984 Stephen Levy in his book Hackers wrote down what he called the “seven commandments of the personal computer revolution.2 Levy essentially set down a series of attitudes that had matured years earlier – in the 1960s and 1970s – when a generation of young people with a passion for computers emerged in San Francisco’s Bay Area, the early hackers.
Access to computers should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority–promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking.
You can create art and beauty on a computer
Computers can change your life for the better.
I’d like here to take inspiration from the fourth and the sixth commandments which are about authority and the meaning of creativity in order to understand if, and how, the hacker ethics could be insightful (and also compatible) with the Christian vision, the Christian weltanschauung.
Authority: The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The Levy vision is founded on playful and creative decentralization and on an authority engendered by shared and decentralized knowledge. The classic example is represented by Wikipedia. Clay Shirky is reflecting on this sort of Cognitive Surplus, which is the title of a famous book of his.3 He believes this surplus is distinguishing itself as an emergent and vital force, capable of gathering a delocalized and fragmented knowledge and of aggregating it to something new. This sharing does not answer to any center nor authority. It is a sort of biological process of growth and extension.
In a famous essay entitled The Cathedral and the Bazaar, E. S. Raymond contrasts two research models.4 The first is the cathedral mode in which the program is developed by a limited number of experts based on a hierarchical partitioning. The second is the bazaar mode where development is decentralized, and there is no rigorous division of tasks. The cathedral thus becomes a metaphor of a system where roles are clear-cut, defined and hierarchic. The bazaar, on the other hand, is the metaphor of an open system.
Pekka Himanen, in his seminal The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, takes this distinction relying on other metaphors, the academia and the monastery.5 Once again, a religious reference. The academic model is platonic in origin and stems from a collective research process based on exchange and self-regulation. The monastic model thus appears to be closed and hierarchical, involving only a limited number of people where the target to be achieved is defined once for all.
The Logic of Faith: Network or Communion?
At this point, a question must be asked: isn’t hacker ethic on a collision course with the Catholic mens and its vision of authority and tradition? Are collaborative action and principle of authority in an intrinsically radical opposition?
Why have we to put these questions? Because with the diffusion of social networks the bazaar model is today becoming a mentality. The notion is spreading that sharing on a wide scale is key in the production and dissemination of ideas and knowledge. The success of modern technology available on the Net, which is made up of the web 2.0 ecosystem, is changing our social scenario. Specifically, we note the Net entails the connection of resources, time, ideas to be shared generously and anarchically. The Christian faith is called insistently to relate with this kind of forma mentis. The participation in the digital environment, in a natural way, is not indifferent to the way in which man lives his own spirituality and life of faith. So, it requires a new form of apologetics that cannot but develop from the changed categories of comprehension of the world and access to knowledge.
One of the critical points of the hacker and open source vision lies in the intrinsic limit of all sharing. The Network model, which reflects this dimension most radically is the so- called peer-to-peer (P2P) which possesses no hierarchical nodes such as clients and servers, but a number of open nodes connected to other nodes of the Network which transmit and receive and vice versa.
In other words, the peer-to-peer logic is based on the fact I do not receive something in its entirety from a single source, a depositum. In more general terms: I share what I have at the very moment when I receive it. But I do not receive a content in its entirety: I receive it in a process which makes of me a node on a shared network of exchange, and which in turn makes me richer, so to speak, when I give the gift I have received at the moment of doing so. If this logic of sharing is considered, on a theological level, then we understand that it is problematic because the nature of the Church and the dynamics of the Christian Revelation seem to follow a client-server model which is just the opposite of the P2P. They are not the product of a horizontal exchange, which could be defined more precisely as an ongoing barter, but the opening to an inexhaustible Grace.
It passes through human mediation and ministers of worship; it is communicated through embodied mediations. The logic of Grace, instead, creates face-to-face links, as is typical of the logic of the gift, something which is alien to the logic of the peer-to-peer, which, in itself, is a logic of connection and of exchange, not of communion. And a face can never be reduced to a mere peer, a node. Here lies the challenge for Christian believers: the Net as a place of connection is set to become a place of communion.
We risk reaching a radical incompatibility between the logic of theology and that of the Net. The risk of forma mentis of the hacker kind is to lead to an understanding of the communion as being a connection and the gift as a gratuity because the spotlight focuses on those who take but not those who receive. The gratia gratis data instead cannot be taken but can be received. The Revelation’s knowledge order is peculiar: man cannot reach it by means of his own strength. It is instead by an entirely free decision that God has revealed himself and given himself to man.6 It is a gift.
Ecclesiology, in turn, cannot be reduced to a sociology of ecclesial relations: “The Church is in history, but, at the same time, she transcends it. It is only ‘with the eyes of faith’ that one can see her in her visible reality and, at the same time, in her spiritual reality as bearer of divine life.”7 The Church is not, and will never be, simply a cognitive society, while grace is a notion far different from information. These are the reflections that the Catholic vision of authority poses in a critical manner to hacker culture.
The Surplus of the Spirit and Creativity
In short, in the challenge that hacker mentality is starting to pose to theology and faith, what must be preserved is the human ability for transcendence, for a gift that cannot be lessened, for a grace that goes through the system of relations which is never exclusively the outcome of a connection or a sharing, no matter how extensive and generous. In other words: it is necessary to remind contemporary man that life and its meaning cannot be entirely, and definitely, explained in a horizontal network; mankind continues to aspire transcendence. But having said that, it would be necessary to say also, the hacker community does not reject all forms of authority. E. Raymond himself writes, in fact, that being anti-authoritarian does not mean fighting all authority.8 A hacker-inspired governance can thus help to better understand the basic assumptions and the effects of a distributed authority.
A critical exchange, serious and not complacent, with the hacker spirit may help us understand that the transcendent foundation of faith sets in motion a process that is open, creative, collaborative, and collegial. Appealing to creativity, in addition, can help understand how “the Spirit edifies, animates and sanctifies the Church,”10 living within its body, animating it from within. How?
As the digital society is not understandable only through the broadcast contents, but primarily through the relationships, so the Church: the sharing of contents takes place within relationships. The Church is called to go deeper into the exercise of authority. Witnessing the Gospel is not a matter of "broadcasting" contents, but of “sharing” them in a context of relationships. Maybe we should not talk about “media” anymore. We should talk about “connective texture.”
What Clay Shirky defines as surplus does occur in the ecclesial framework. Nevertheless, the outcome of the effort of believers is not exclusively immanent. It is, rather, a surplus that sanctifies the action of the Spirit, that revitalizes the members of the body mystic. Christ in fact participated with his Spirit, which alone and identical in the head and bodily members, vivifies, unites, the entire body, making it more dynamic.11 The dynamic element of the Church, that which makes it more than just the sum of its parts, is the Holy Spirit.
The Playful Effort of Creation
Is there a place in the hacker theory where the transcendental dimension could be found quite easily? I think we could find it in the hacker’s vision of the meaning of the human life. Pekka Himanen develops a reflection that, starting from these assumptions, one comes into direct contact with theology. As can be read in a key paragraph in the book, the basic issue of the hacker ethic is, in fact, “the meaning of life.”
Himanen articulates a profound criticism of the Protestant ethical approach, intended in Max Weber’s capitalistic sense (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), which imposes what he defines as “the Fridayization of Sunday.” His attack is mainly directed against a certain way to understand life as being totally over-balanced on the optimization of work, dictated by the clock, by performance and by efficiency. It is a vision that, rather than being idealized, is instead, clearly theological in origin. As can be read in a key paragraph in the book, the basic issue is in fact “the meaning of life”: “One might say that Christianity’s original answer to the question ‘What is the purpose of life?’ was: the purpose of life is Sunday.”12
Reflecting on Augustine, who is writing about Genesis against the Manicheans, but also on Dante and other Christian classical writers, Himanen observes the Reformation shifted life’s center of gravity from Sunday to Friday.13 The hacker ethic aims to affirm that the purpose of life is closer to Sunday than to Friday.14 It is not difficult to grasp the intuition of a life blessed in the genetic code of the hacker’s vision of life, the intuition that the human being is called to have another life, to fully realize his humanity.
Obviously, the hacker is not a person who indulges in idleness and inclined to doing sweet nothing. On the contrary, he is active; he pursues his passions, and there is creative effort and knowledge-without-end in his life. Yet he is aware that his humanity is not realized within the framework of rigidly-organized time, but within the flexible rhythm of a creativity that must, once again, become the measure of a truly human work, one which best corresponds to the nature of man.
Tom Pittman, one of the first hacker philosophers, in his manifesto, Deus ex machina, or the true computerist, attempts to give an idea of what a true hacker feels during this creative process: “I, as a Christian, thought I could feel something of the satisfaction that God must have felt when He created the world.”15 Presenting himself as “a Christian and Technologist,”16 Pittman interprets this action as an emotional participation in God’s creative work.
The Saturday of the Global Village
The place in the hacker theory where the transcendental dimension occurs with ease is the radical appeal to the fact that the Shabbat, the Saturday (the Sunday, in Christian terms) is man’s real home, his true existential dimension. The Jewish Saturday or Christian Sunday, of course, must not be reduced to rest. Yet the Sunday of the hacker is not simply a holiday: there lives within it, an implicit reference to God, as creative origin of the world. Here we recognize a fruitful seed of transcendence.
Creation is a position to give to the hacker a vision of the world and of humanity, that transcendental vanishing point without which that vision may end up in a colorful but nevertheless blind alley. Himanen quotes the words of Justin Martyr: “Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior, on the same day, rose from the dead.”17
It is at this point that Himanen asks a question he discovers in St. Augustine: “Why did God create the world?.” He continues: “The hacker’s answer to Augustine’s question is that God, as a perfect being, did not need to do anything at all, but he wanted to create.”18 In the story of the free and irreducible creative action of God, the hacker recognizes the image of his existence: “Genesis can be seen as a tale of the kind of activity that occurs on creativity’s own terms. In it, talents are used imaginatively. It reflects the joy one feels when one surprises and surpasses oneself.”19 Tom Pittman, one of the first hacker philosophers, in his manifesto, Deus ex machina, or the true computerist, attempts to give an idea of what a true hacker feels during his creative process: “I, as a Christian. thought I could feel something of the satisfaction God must have felt when He created the world.”
If the hacker biblical model of creativity is not deprived of its deeper theological value, it is then able to maintain a memory of a beginning that is the outcome of a creative act of God. In this vision, the hacker ethic may even have a prophetical resonance in today’s world which is totally committed to the logic of profit: to remind us that the “human hearts are yearning for a world where love endures, where gifts are shared.”20
Endnotes
1 E. S. RAYMOND, How to become a Hacker in http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
2 Cfr S. LÉVY, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Garden City (N.Y.), Doubleday, 1984.
3 Cfr C. SHIRKY, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York, Penguin.
4 E. S. RAYMOND, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/
5 Cfr P. HIMANEN, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, New York, Random House, 2001, 63-81
6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 50.
7 Ivi, n. 770.
8 E. S. RAYMOND, How to become a Hacker…, cit.
9 Cfr http://www.mozilla.org/about/governance.html
10 Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 145.
11 Lumen gentium, n. 7.
12 P. HIMANEN, The Hacker Ethic..., 13.
13 Cfr ivi,16.
14 Ivi, 18.
15 cit. ivi.
16 Cfr http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/Truth/GodOfTruth.htm
17 Ivi, 150.
18 Ivi, 151.
19 Ivi.
20 BENEDETTO XVI, Message for the 43rd World Communications Day.