Andy Greenberg

Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff

Covering the worlds of data security, privacy and hacker culture.

7/02/2010 @ 2:00PM

Steven Levy On Mark Zuckerberg And The Hacker Spirit

Before the Romanian cybercriminals, before Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller breached the Gibson mainframe, before even Matthew Broderick accessed the WOPR military supercomputer and narrowly averted launching World War III, the word “hacker” meant something very different. As Steven Levy chronicled in his 1984 book Hackers, the word was invented as a term of high praise by a group of MIT misfits trying to tame early computers like the PDP-6, finagling the hulking machine into doing things that seemed magical at the time: playing chess, running primitive videogames, emitting music-like sounds that vaguely resembled Bach.

Those Cambridge geeks invented a culture of free information, hands-on experimentation and disregard for all bureaucracy that Levy labeled the Hacker Ethic. The revolution they began spread across the country, producing figures like Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak who changed technology forever.

Twenty-five years after it became mainstream, hacker culture seems to have been driven underground again. The company Bill Gates founded has become a symbol of buggy, locked-down software and Apple now sells proprietary iPhones and iPads that can’t even be opened to repair or replace parts.

But Levy argues that the spirit of hacking is on the rise again, hidden within start-ups and even big corporations. Following the reissue of his now-classic book, Forbes spoke with Levy about the renaissance of classic hackerism, the place of the hacker ethic in the business world, and whether Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg deserves the hacker mantle.

Forbes: In the afterward of the 1995 reissue of Hackers, you wrote that you considered changing the name of the book because of the negative connotation of the word. Did you consider changing it for this re-release?

Steven Levy: No. The word means its original meaning more now than it did 10 years ago. The word hacker has circled back to a certain degree and I think it’s once again a badge of honor and wizardry, not maliciousness. The negative term is still in the majority usage. But there are a pretty substantial number of people who use it in its original sense.

You see start-ups bragging again that they have the hacker spirit. In the new afterward for the book, for instance, I wrote about how Zuckerberg told me that Facebook was a hacker’s company.

Do you really think that Zuckerberg believes in tenets of the hacker ethic, like “information wants to be free”?

In a crazy way, he’s arguing that people should share everything. He’s like the early hackers at MIT such as [open source advocate Richard] Stallman who fought for people not to have passwords or secrets. Of course Zuckerberg has a commercial interest in this. But he’s basically saying that it’s better for society if people share things.

But he won’t share his company’s own information. You can’t easily move your Facebook information to another site.

Totally true. But I’m not saying you have to follow some set of strict rules to be a hacker. Zuckerberg has that hacker DNA. Look at how he grew up, the sorts of hacking he did as a kid. Just like Bill Gates: Gates didn’t think that information should be free. But he’s a hacker who saw a commercial thing and took advantage of it.

Gates had to push against a prevailing ethic at the time in fighting the unauthorized copying of his software, because then information really was free. But today it’s not a conflict. Hackers have been woven into the economic infrastructure of the software industry so deeply that this kind of argument was already an antique when Zuckerberg came of age.

Stories like Bill Gates’ raise the question of whether true hackers really change the world. It seems in Hackers the really successful characters are the ones who stop tinkering and giving things away and start focusing on revenue.

Well, the hacker ethic isn’t a manifesto that someone wrote down. It’s my interpretation of what goes on in a hacker’s head.

At a company like Apple, there are hackers, and they work within the company’s closed strategy. Steve Jobs wasn’t a central character in my book, but Steve Wozniak was a true hacker at Apple. Woz had his view of how a company should work, but Steve Jobs set the tone for how the company would operate commercially. Wozniak didn’t care what kind of case the computer came in, but for Jobs it was a big deal.

So you can have hackers in a company, and they keep up their ethic and are very influential, but they might not quit just because the company doesn’t give software away like Richard Stallman does.

By your definition of hackerism, it seems Apple has gone from one extreme to another. The first Apple PC was completely reconfigurable. The iPad doesn’t even have any screws.

In my book, Apple became a symbol for this kind of transformation. Running a company by the hacker ethic isn’t sustainable. I’m not saying that you have to run a company by the hacker ethic to be righteous. We’re not talking about murdering people when we close off a system. It’s a business strategy. And it remains to be seen whether open or closed is more successful.

Jobs would argue that the Apple system is more righteous because users are served better, and Google would say the opposite. Google, for its part, has created a kind of dualism where it’s pretty transparent inside the company–everyone shares in what everyone else is doing–but it’s very opaque from the outside.

Do you see Larry Page and Sergey Brin as hacker types?

I wouldn’t say that Larry and Sergey are classic hackers, but they have a lot of the hacking spirit. They’re geeks, and their values drive Google.

A true hacker like Wozniak would never have that kind of ambition. Let him create his stuff and he’s fine, but he would never want to run a company. Woz may have changed the world, but he never set out to. Whereas Larry had big ideas about how to change the world from the get go.

Your book can be read as a rise and fall of the hacker ethic. Is that how you intended it?

I was very pessimistic when I finished the book about the future of hacker culture. But I was surprised to see how lasting and sustainable and successful the hacker influence has been on the world.

So many of your true hackers were domesticated by big companies, or never cashed in on their ideas–like hacking heroes Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt.

They didn’t go to the Valley and get rich. But their ideas were still influential and are still alive.

Take the Internet. When I wrote the book in 1984, the Internet was just for governments and institutions. Who knew that 10 years later it would turn into something we’d all access. It was totally based on hacker principles. Just as the personal computer was an ambassador for hacker principles because it put this protean device into peoples’ homes, the Internet was even more so, because it was built completely on openness.

Napster is another good example of something that sprang out of hackerish impulses. Getting people to share music–a lot of people thought that was malicious. But it wasn’t. It was a terrific hack that changed the music industry forever in a way that I think ultimately will be beneficial for the world.

Where is the hacker culture now?

It exists in a self-conscious sense in hacker development spaces like the FooCamp conference run by O’Reilly. It’s almost become a truism that in a company, you need some hackers. In a sense, what I was writing about is stronger than ever.

When I was writing the story that led to doing the book, in Rolling Stone, one of the only documents I could find about these guys was a collection of letters called the Hacker Chronicles. Basically it described them as asocial losers who gravitated to the computer just like an obese person gravitates to the refrigerator–as if there was something wrong with them.

People have come to me over the years and told me that they’d read my book and realized they weren’t alone. They found people like themselves and made a living and had great lives because they turned this ‘handicap” into a true advantage.

But isn’t one of the lessons of your book that for hackers to be influential, they have to be subordinated to big institutions and corporations?

I wasn’t trying to teach a lesson. I was really just telling a story. That’s a lesson you might draw from the story. But I saw the book as a true narrative that was trying to explain an important force coming from these amazing people. As a writer, I just wanted to tell these important stories that hadn’t been told.

So who are the hacker hobbyists today that are playing with something that will turn into the next revolution, just as the Homebrew Computer Club turned into the PC industry?

People like Bill Gates talk about biological hacking. Data mining is a very big and controversial area, another one where this question of how open data should be is still a big question.

There’s plenty of room in the Internet world for people to come in and change things completely. Every change stands on the shoulders of the last one. If you go to an incubator like YCombinator, you see hugely ambitious start-ups. We have these enabling technologies that allow people who have grown up unpolluted with old ideas of what’s possible to understand.

Every change stands on the shoulders of the last one. Google could only do what it did because someone invented the personal computer and someone else invented the Internet. Now there’s the social part of the Internet, and because Google was created before the social Internet really existed, Facebook is ahead of Google as Google is ahead of Microsoft . And the mobile Internet may bring about something that’s beyond Facebook, something like Foursquare that does something that Facebook doesn’t.

Robot hacking is another area where big things are happening. I went to a session at FooCamp about cloud robotics, [the idea of connecting robotics to computing resources over the Internet.] One talk was called “What if your Roomba had a million processors?” What a hack that would be.

You’ve watched some characters in your book gain wealth and power while others kind of disappeared. What’s your advice for hackers who want to become Bill Gates instead of Richard Greenblatt or Bill Gosper?

You mean how do you become rich? Greenblatt doesn’t consider himself a failure. Just like in anything, if you spend your life doing something you love, that’s success.

It’s bad policy to start by comparing yourself to Bill Gates. The real lesson is that you should try to do the impossible. We’re at the best time ever in history to do the impossible, and we have amazing tools to do it. We’ve created a technological platform where imagination is your only boundary.

So imagination is still more important than politics or marketing or business plans?

Absolutely. The best laid business models are overturned by a kid in a dorm room, more now than ever.

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See Also:

No Hacker Left Behind

The Fab Life

Making Future Headlines

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