Answering to a "Hackers' Manifesto"

"Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed."

That reminds me something.
When Mussolini (at that time) came to pay a visit to Cuneo, the town where I was born (luckily many years after that), they coined a special medal.


On one side they wrote: " The Dux lead us" and on the other side " The Madonna protect us".

"All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class."

You forget to mention the class of the people who live with a daily empty belly, but then, they have something else to care about, more important than the relentless abstraction of the world.

"We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such."

I like it, "hackers of abstraction" sounds much better than "file sharing or "Cyber piracy" or even worst, the old, plain usual way, the word used since centuries "plagiarism".
But at the end of the day, the Hackers of abstraction do nothing else than copying music or movies or whatever and sharing it with somebody else.

And that is the point.
If you want to fight, you first define what you have to fight against, then fire your weapons and deal with the consequences.
No use to hide yourself behind euphemisms, neologisms or whatever other rhetoric you can choose.
Say what you want to do and why and why you think it right and may be how you would change the actual situation and law and why.

Otherwise we go on talking and saying nothing.

"A hacker manifesto: Not the only manifesto, as it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ."

I would agree if the Hacker was a dog, or a bird, or a fish.
But being the Hacker a human, he is condemned to be always a human after all. Oscar Wilde said "It is a humiliating confession, but behind each one of us there is one common thing that goes under the name of : Human Nature."


"and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. Hackers create these new worlds, yet we do not possess them.
That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolies the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us."


I like that "It owns us" it sounds great. A pity it doesn't mean anything.
If I write an essay about something, I hardly can see how it can own me.
May be in certain cases it can haunt the creator, and that is how most of the so called "stupid audience" like to see a poet or a writer or a painter, as somebody who is haunted by his creations.
Rarely is this way.


"We must live with our compromises.(Some refuse to compromise.) "

Holy words!


"Hackers are not joiners. We're not often willing to submerge our singularity in any collective. What the times call for is a collective hack that realizes a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity."

I have another opinion on what the times call.
May be they just call for a fair law about copyrights, a law that would allow who produces something of interest for the collectivity to be paid and the people to enjoy it without having to pay too much and for too long. As simple as that.

"The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied."

At least we agree on that....


Patrizia from a World on IP

http://www.worldonip.com