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Hackers, however, as a community claim their innocence, and most of them are innocent of breaking into systems, and have attempted to re-educate the world to understanding that a different word, "cracking," means breaking into systems, and not hacking.They have preserved their "hack" culture, they think, and advertise it as being hugely beneficial to humanity, as the "hack culture" practices e-mutualism, an extension of the compassionate mutualist culture. Commonly known as the open source community, but more accurately as a public domain effort, the hacking community created such computer staples as the Linux system and the Apache web server, which together do at least 90% of the world's interent services. On the desktop, the free and open Foxfire Internet browser has gained on the "monopoly mandated" Microsoft IE browser. Google, the biggest Internet operation, has long operated using Linux, yet, perhaps hypocritally, operates as a purely proprietary adversting supported corporation.
Hacks are geeks, as they will tell you, slightly differing from nerds. Nearly every computer professional in the US, Canada, and much of Europe was drawn into the geek culture during the hey-day of technology in the West, the 1990s, as I was. While I accepted the description, I did not resemble a geek in any way except in that I worked hard at coding, spending long hours in the office. Geeks, or hacks, have recognizable specific traits: they do not wash, ignore nutrition, and are divorced from normal humanity. During professional period of the 90s, the majority of "geeks" did not fit this description, especially the poor hygiene, and shared mostly a talent for computer development.
Almost precisely timed with the new Millennium, the round number of the year 2000, the hey-day of Western technology ended as the American capital markets worked with close precision to eliminate the creative geeks from technology positions, crash technology stock values, and then ship technology to the nation of India as a gift to the Indian upper-caste. Most technologists then lost their jobs. I attempted to continue my technology work and to join with other technologists using the Internet, but I experienced many frustrations, especially the inability to work due to the tech market crash, and eventually had to reduce my efforts to more resemble a hobby than profession.
I am certain that the majority of technologists experienced the same frustrations and left the industry and did other things, letting go of the commitment to technology. But many did not, and continued to work in isolation connected through digital technology with other hacks creating publicly open software.
There are many things that have long confused me about the "hack community." How can they work endlessly in isolation without benefits from their work, and why do they deliberately detach themselves in such a way that they have no representation in the political areana, where they need desperately to validate their efforts so that they can be absorbed by the very big public domain operation, the US government.
And most importantly, why do they grasp to the terms "hacks" or "geeks" for self-identification.
At the close of the 1990s, I came to understandings about the Interent and computer operations that perhaps extend the adage that "the network is the computer" from Sun's Scott McNealy. That was the ThinMan Model that, for the most part, extended the extremely important language (and accompanying systems): Perl. It literally made the system the network, by allowing each individual computer device to work many factors faster with factors less hardware through a pure sharing paradigm. But I met resistance everywhere, and this idea as obvious as it seems to me to be, seems to be unique to me; nowhere else can I find examples of pure sharing systems, except in Perl. And the Perl community was unique in its resistance: it was nearly violent, and at times resembled "hacking" in the very worst sense.
To describe the ThinMan Model a little further, the central object is the data you are working with; it is data-centric. I use the simple example of a pastoral picture with poetry text in it. To view the picture only viewing software is needed. A window surrounds your "data," the picture, and then a code module is drawn to the data and encased in the window to render the picture. There may be tabs added to the window so that the work done by the viewing module can be customized. Extending the idea further in the direction of actual work, drawing software may be drawn to the "data" to be controlled by tabs, and text manipulation software and even a thesaurus may be drawn to the data to work with the poetry.
These modules, in the ThinMan Model, can be had from the Internet, either from nearby similar systems, or from supporting servers.
Nearly a decade later, there exists no other similar plan, though I swear that the concept is a "no brainer." Why?
The Perl community today flounders, have acheived none of its goals of a decade ago, primarily because it over-reached.
The question is "why can't the hack community change?" The answer to the inability to change in psychology is the obsessive compulsive disroder. And it is related to theft, gambling, and obsessive neatness, though no hack, or geek, exhibits these characteristics.
The community of hacks proved that mututalism, highly collaborative based largely on compassion, can operate with efficency and creativity previously unknown to humanity, yet it cannot conceptualize about itself enough to evolve to adapt to the challanges presented to it. If it cannot self-conceptualize, how did it come into being in the first place? Where their parental figures that guided the normally isolated hacks into community formats, something they themselves could not do? If so, perhaps these figures grew old and passed on.
What can be done to help this community? How can they be taught to listen? For the benefit of humanity, whose cultures are in suicidal decline, how can they be guided back into mutualist groups, with forward leaning purposes? How can they be helped to move beyond the idea of the "kludge" and towards their destiny which is fully open modular systems, and not the present-day application-centric, and hence proprietary,arrangement.
The first thing to recognize, is that there is something a little wrong with the geek. These are different people, and it might be that without their e-mutualist communities, they have have turned out differently, maybe many more would have been arrested for computer crime.
There is no question in my mind that no hack is reading this, and if he is, he cannot grasp it. If anything, a million "top down" excuses beam towards the screen filling, for him (and they are mostly hims), full of evidence that this writing is pure lie.
