E-SPEAIT Book Review

 

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age is a book released in 2001, and written by Pekka Himanen, with prologue written by Linus Torvalds and the epilogue written by Manuel Castells. Pekka Himanen is a philosopher. Manuel Castells is an internationally well-known sociologist. Linus Torvalds is the creator of the Linux kernel. Before I started reading the book I myself thought it was going to be delving into famous cases of hackers and the ways performed their activities throughout the years and maybe a delve into the reasoning behind them. I was quite wrong in my in my initial assumption, and the book provides a different view into hacker and their activities with a broader view.
 I believe what I got from the book was that hackers can be represented as those people who, regardless of what area of work they are involved, do what they are doing for self-satisfaction and therefor the inherent rewards of furthering their interests and gaining peer recognition from their social circles. Pretty much, overall, the idea is that hackers are very similar to those that traditionally work in academia, sciences, and the fields of art.
The book delves into seven values of the hacker ethic that are passion, freedom, social worth, openness, activity, caring, and creativity. The author, throughout the book, makes comparisons with seven values of the "Protestant work ethic", developer by Max Weber. Weber, seeing the spirit of capitalist ethic in the Protestant one, gave quite the attention on the work-centered ideal of Protestantism, connected the emergence of the industrial and scientific revolutions with this idea. The title acts as a clear indication of the author's intent to explore Weber's ideas, however at times, I felt as if it was too much like a retreading of Weber's own work rather than a fresher and more personal perspective of the author themselves.
The obvious and underlying moral considerations inherent within the book as to how a society of hackers could be made, I feel weren’t that addressed. If the intent of the book was to keep to the fascinating, historical, and sociological observations without touching on deeper ethical questions brought up, then that’s fine. However, throughout the book the author challenges our views on work, money, fun, creativity, related to the hacker ethic, I felt like addressing some deeper questions. How does someone with few resources and restricted access attain the position that enables them to interact and indulge in self-fulfilling activities? Whose responsibility is it to make sure the necessities of survival are provided for so that people are able to pursue their passions? None of these are given attention at all and I believe the book may have excelled further if it would have been possible to delve more deeply into the ideas of how to get beyond these issues.
Concluding the review, "The hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age" was a very interesting read that attempted to display the values of the hacker ethic and even raises philosophical questions about the meaning of life. I found it quite an enjoyable read and even my minor issues with the book may be attributed to not simply be praising the book all the time. Overall I believe it a very good book to read to give a couple of interesting perspectives of the topic of hackerism and work ethic overall.

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