note 126

A ‘hack’ is finding a solution for a significant part of the problem. Executed curiosity, revealing what is found, sharing knowledge and taking social responsibility were key values that i encountered in the hacker community at the time, which was inspired by the hacker culture of MIT and Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s in the USA. As with all social movements, deep and intense debates go on, accompanied by lots of fun as well, as could be seen at the GHP. In the 1990s the debates about hackers changed. “Executed curiosity’’ was challenged because computer crime and its prosecution were scaled up and as a result a distinction was made between ‘hackers’ and ‘crackers’. Because the internet became a commercial arena of significance the sharing of knowledge was challenged, which is one of the reasons why the Linux open source operating system and free software movement is mentioned as a sort of follow up of hacker ethics in the 1990s. By the end of the 1990s hackers had become the subject of study and analysis. Taking social responsibility for technological developments from an activist perspective remains the character of hacker practice (Himanen 2001). Mckenzie Wark actually argues that hackers have become a class of their own “the hacker class is the class with the capacity to create not only new kinds of object and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form, in which they may be represented, but new kinds of relation beyond the property form” (Mckenzie Wark 2004).