So what really is a Hacker? Their image has been disguised in the ideology of a digital rebel who follows Steven Levy’s “Hacker Ethic.” This is a person who believes that information must be free to everyone who seeks it in the first place. After reading Paul Graham’s essays, we get a new perspective on what these Hackers really look like. Graham’s hacker isn’t really driven by a political agenda, but rather by an obsessive, creative urge for success. This perspective is very similar to Levy’s depiction of a “Hacker” and what a modern creative mind might entail.
Graham’s most interesting argument specifically from “Hackers & Painters,” where is compares Hackers to painters since they are fundamentally the same to him. Graham writes, “they’re both makers.” This idea is very similar to how I understand what and who “Hackers” really are. Programming anything can/be complicated, and we have been taught that there are steps to writing a program. It is a purely logical exercise, but it can turn into a messy and deeply creative process. You don’t have to follow all the steps to come to a working solution. Although it may take longer, it is about the journey of creating this program the way you envisioned it.
Both Graham and Levy see creation as a journey that can change along the way. It isn’t a static plan. When working on a coding project, it rarely follows a clean plan that was well thought out. Problems interfere, and the method of attack changes since one angle may be easier to build upon. For example, for the Notre Dame Pokémon game, at first, Melcin and I believed that we would just be able to copy and paste our sprites into the Assembly language files, but we ended up needing a whole new software that would organize the assembly files and display live sprite modification. Very similar to this art aspect of our project, coding in Graham’s eyes should feel more like sketching, laying down a rough idea, and smudging it around, to slowly refine it until it materializes. This focus isn’t on following specific instructions, but rather it is based on creativity to bring something new into the world.
Creativity is beautiful, but it can also lead to problems. In the passage “the word hacker”, Graham says that the ideal hacker is “unruly”. But this unruliness isn’t just born; it’s created from intense focus on their ideas. Rules and conventional methods are just obstacles that get in the way of solving interesting problems. This connects to his description of nerds in “Why Nerds are Unpopular”. Nerds aren’t unpopular because they fail at the game of social acceptance; They are just unpopular because they are too busy playing a different game. The game of trying to be smart and building things.
There is a main difference between Graham’s vision and Levy’s vision of a “Hacker.” Levy’s Hacker ethic is a specific idea for a specific community. Graham pushes for a much broader form of intellectual rebellion. Not only focusing on the specific Hacker community, but general society. He urges us to question the “moral fashions” of our time and to actively “train [ourselves] to think unthinkable thoughts.” People are too interested in their iPhones/AI creating content when our human brains were the first to do it in the first place. A true Graham-style hacker doesn’t just question technology; they would question everything (morality, religion, etc).
Graham’s vision of a “Hacker” is something I feel closer to than Levy’s “Hacker.” I don’t eat, breathe, and dream in code, and I don’t feel a burning need to liberate all information. But I do enjoy the creative spark that Graham explains is within a true “Hacker”. The depiction that hackers are just painters is more relatable and more desirable. It highlights that the “Hacker” identity is just about adopting a mindset and being a nerd; it’s about curiosity and creativity. When it comes to class projects or just self-projects, planning/creating the initial designs is my favorite part, because it is the part that I can claim as really my own. (Building it with my own two hands is a close second.)