In fact, maybe it's more so, because there's a historical thread connecting it to guys crawling through the ceiling to steal keys out of desks. It does make the underlying ethos of Facebook make more sense, although not any less repellent. What does all this mean to the things I've ranted about on my blog? (I had that in the back of my head while I was reading, based on an email conversation with the person who sent me the book.) I'm still not sure. I'd never really thought about the hacker ethos/community as also being a creation of that generation. Didn't occur to me until reading the last afterword, and the conversation between Levy & Gates, that all these hackers were boomers. A lack of balance?Īlso possibly related: a quote about Stallman (p 438) - 'He recognized that his personality was unyielding to the give-and-take of common human interaction.' (That line? Made me bust up laughing.)Īnother somewhat random observation: baby boomers. Possibly related: the overwhelming maleness of the hacker culture throughout the entire book. I found that most true of the MIT hackers and the gamers, FWIW. Not just unpleasant individuals, but a repellent culture. So they were the ones who got computing and the hacker ethos out into the world.Īnother thing that I kept running into: I'd be excited about the hackers' excitement, totally understanding that sense of flow.and then: ugh, thoroughly unpleasant people. And of course the gamers were out to make money.

Whereas the hippies - or at least some of the influential folks in that scene - actually cared about the rest of the world. (There's some interesting moments of cognitive dissonance of the radical openness within the lab vs the military funding for the lab.) Which meant they were doing fascinating crazy stuff, but it didn't necessarily have any effect on the masses. Those MIT guys really got to lock themselves away from everything, and they really liked it that way. My pet theory is that it relates to engagement with the rest of the world. Shockingly, the hippie hacker community actually manage to get more shit done. The first section is all MIT hackers, the other two are west coast focused (hippie hackers and the gaming biz). Note: this is a really long and somewhat rambling review.Ī few themes stick out, notably West coast vs East coast. (the goodreads entry says this has more pages than the copy I have, btw.)

All the status updates I posted are notes I wrote on paper while I was reading, alas I ran out of scraps while sick in bed, somewhere around pg 350. I'm still sort of processing this book a week later.

Heroes of the computer revolution