Old Stuff: The Hacker Work Ethic and Personal Development Texts
Note: This is something I wrote 5 years ago that I found the other day, and I think is interestingly relevant. Really interested in the comments anyone might have
In our ever-changing and expanding world we are faced with a constant shift amongst our morals, our technologies, our decisions, our climates and atmosphere. The workplace as we know it is vastly different than it was 5 years ago, and a different world from the office of 30 years ago. The advances in technology experienced have changed the view of the future. In the 1960s, everyone was focused on “What's it going to be like in 2001?” In fact, Stanley Kubrick's film based on the Arthur C. Clarke's Novel 2001: A Space Odyssey was one such vision. In the modern day, our future, as Pekka Himanen points out in his book The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (Random House, 2001) Danny Hillis said in 1993, “When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. How, thirty years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life.” (Himanen, 132)
Hillis' point is not taken softly, in fact, as a society, we aren't able to plan long term (meaning more than 10-15 years) simply because we're unable to see what lies ahead in terms of technology nearly as well as we could two or three decades ago. We've shortened our vision. This new “long now culture” prevents us from getting too far ahead of ourselves. Which brings us to the work ethic that backs this new culture.
Pekka Himanen's text on the new ethic of the information age lays out seven principles that underlie this new ethic. They are passion, freedom, social worth, openness, activity, caring and creativity. They counter the seven guiding principles of the Protestant Work Ethic, best symbolized by Benjamin Franklin, The Monastery, and the modern corporation. These are best summed up by the following seven values: money, work, optimality, flexibility, stability, determinacy and accountability. (139)
While a hacker may seek goals that seem similar to those around them, there's a good chance they are not motivated for precisely the same reasons. The hacker ideal places him in a situation where he can creatively help the world around him. The primacy of the hacker ideal does not lie in financial gain, or goal-oriented activity, instead meaning comes from passion and social worth. Instead of being object-oriented, focused on the optimality and determinacy, the Hacker trades these for activity and creativity. Hackers enjoy working in an environment that fosters their sense of the creative and enjoyment.
Himanen's focus on the difference between the two societal norms the different work ethics espouse also focuses on the rise of the new bibles of the Protestant Work Ethic, Personal Development Texts. Books like Who moved my cheese? and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, can't stay on the shelves, with people rushing to get their hands on a copy. The modern society of workers is different from the 9-to-5 life of 30 years ago.
“[T]he new information professional is, in the words of Castells, 'self programmable' and has 'the ability to retrain itself, and adapt to new tasks...as technology, demand and management speed up their rate of change” (112)
So as such, Personal Development texts that can help a disciple increase their rate-of-change to the level where they attain their goals, as listed by their virtues, become increasingly valuable. However, they are geared toward those seven values of the Protestant Work Ethic. They are constantly focused on optimality, “PD teaches one to make the most focused use of time, so that it always best furthers the work toward the goal. In practice, this means a constant awareness of what use is make of each ”now“ moment.” (114) To a hacker, optimality is an inconvenience that management places on them to fit their schedule. A hacker can be goal-oriented, but it has to fit within his social worth scale, his creative ethic and his passion. Without those three pillars, a hacker cannout find meaning in his work, and that is what they strive for.
PD texts are not, in and of themselves, worthless, it's just that they have not yet been written to match the specifications of the information technology professional who has embraced the Hacker Ethic as a way of life. No one has taken this new ethic to the new level that the Protestant Work Ethic has become, as transformed by Franklin Covey. Once that happens, however, I think you can expect a wave of people to embrace the Hacker Ethic as a lower stress method to success, one that provides people with a great deal of meaning that is non-linearly oriented. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but is that always the best path? Perhaps not for the Hacker.
But this continues beyond just the workplace. Hackers seek out lifestyles that keep them busy, keep them active and creative, so that they can be happy. So in essence, the hacker never stops working, he just switches gears and continues on. That means that a hacker can be incredibly useful if he is working on multiple, different projects. So, hackers never stop being creative about what they seek to do. Hackers, according to Himanen, are defending Sunday against Friday. In essence, toeing the line between the nine-to-five existence of the corporate cube-dweller and the creative artist, working his own schedule. Instead, they exist in both world, a melding of the two.
Why is it important to draw this distinction? Friday is for work, Sunday for play, many say. Not so, says Himanen,
“Hackers do not feel that leisure time is automatically any more meaningful than work time. The desirability of both depends on how they are realixed. From the point of view of a meaninful life, the entire work/leisure duality must be abandoned. As long as we are living our work or our leisure, we are not even truly living. Meaning cannot be found in work or leisure, but has to arise out of the nature of the activity itself. Out of passion. Social Value. Creativity.”(151)
It is this statement that is the crux of the new philosophy of hacking. This is the logical place to start a PD text for the Hacker Culture. Except, that in writing a PD Guide for Hackers, you break all the rules. The Hacker lives in a PD manual. He is constantly in search of that great new piece of information that will make him a more complete individual. He is focused on the creative nature of the society he lives, whether that be writing, music, computer programming, graphic design or sales. Hackers Think Different. They focus on what makes them more valuable intrinsically, by focusing on their skills for social worth, for personal satisfaction in passion and caring. So, in essence, there can be no PD guide for a Hacker, for every book, every technical manual, every painting, or piece of music, is a mini-inspiration for a hacker.
Comments:
This probably needs a bit of work, but I'm going to toss it out there for the sake of discussion.
Cheesy and Kool-Aid drinking as it sounds, I think Getting Things Done might be the balance between the Protestant Ethic and the Hacker Ethic. Let's face it, the need to work for money isn't going away anytime soon, so while it's nice to talk about Hackers doing only what is important to them personally for the sake of Creativity and Social Worth, they still need to eat, no? And it is indeed wonderful when people's means of earning a living mesh with the values of the Hacker Ethic, even when that happens, there will always be an idiot coworker or a problem client to be dealt with who conflicts with those values. Much stress has been expended on trying to manage the conflicting priorities and value systems of one's means of earning a living and how one chooses to spend the time for which they are not being paid.
As such, David Allen of GTD recommends a system whereby all activities are grouped together, no matter which sphere they fall under, and are dealt with while expending the least amount of mental energy thinking about *tasks*.
The David encourages people to drop the false distinction between Work and Leisure, and just think of all the things you want or have to do as Stuff that needs to Get Done. Whether you have to do it or you just want to do it, throw it all in the same pile. And then (this is the oversimplification), you sort it all out into next-actions that get done At Home or At Office or At Computer or With Boss or whatever. The goal isn't getting things done for the sake of doing them, but to get your Stuff divided out and organized so that at any given moment, you know that you're doing exactly the best thing and most effective (in use of time as well as reward for time invested) thing you could be doing.
This frees up your mental RAM, if you will, to think about something other than all that stuff you have to do, so you can be creative and pursue your interests and never feel like there's something else you should be doing. So there's still this idea of "optimal uses of time," but instead of optimality being determined by one's boss, it's determined by, "Well, here I am with a phone. What phone calls do I need to make?" or, "I'm at Home now, so what are the things I want to do that have to be done at home?" It's determined by practicality, I guess, in pursuit of having more time to think about what you're passionate about, instead of having to remember to pick up the dry cleaning.
In other words, "Here's how to decruft your brain, so that you can get to the good stuff."
The need for the Protestant Work Ethic isn't going away, but its demands can be managed effectively against the demands of the Hacker Ethic, and I think that's the way personal development is going.
Posted by Tiffany on February 22, 2006 — 9:15 PM