Lit Review: Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic
For this blog post I will be discussing Allison Parrish's keynote at Open Hardware Summit 2016. The talk titled “Programming is Forgetting: Towards a New Hacker Ethic” is a critic of “hacker culture” as described in “Hackers: the hero of the computer revolution” by Steve Levy. “Hackers” presents a very computer-centric view of the world; saying that do be a hacker means believing computing is the most important thing in the world. She goes on to explain that Levy's examples of the hacker ethic in play don't live up to his own standards and how the hacker ethic's core principles are flawed. Specifically, Parrish explains how the hands on imperative, a core piece of Levy's thesis make unfounded assumptions about the world that can lead to harmful conclusions.
I agree with this section of her talk. It baffles me that anyone would believe that computing is the most important thing in the world. In practice, the hacker ethic also seems to be a rather self centered ideology, prioritizing one's own curiosity and learning over other's needs.
Parrish goes on to describe how one of Levy's core assumptions is that the world can be perfectly modeled in a computer system, which I agree isn't the case. In fact, I'd argue it's impossible. This talk helped me future understand that computer systems can have biases.
However I did take issue with a few thing. I think the title, “Programming is Forgetting” is confusing. “You can't model the world” or “Not everything is a Computer System” might have made better titles. I think she should have spent more time explaining and defending her “Hacker Questions” and possibly less time on her explanation of digitization. While I appreciate posing posing questions as opposed to declaring ethical rules, I think there is still value in prescribing what we want to see in our communities. Asking what biases we're introducing is great but that doesn't help us figure out if though biases are bad. I would enjoy seeing a follow up talk.
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/