As the title of the post here implies, this second section of Steven Levy's book moves into how money became a dividing force in the hacker community. The 1970s saw a move away from the "True Hackers" of MIT, and towards the "Hardware Hackers" who were driven by both wanting to spread access to computers to as many people as possible, and also wanting to commercialize this industry. The "True Hackers" had a purely curious drive towards computers and software and wanting to tinker with things as much as possible. The "Hardware Hackers" like Lee Felsenstein thought more people should have access to computers, and sought to design more of these physical machines, get them out to more people, and eventually introduce a monetary gain here.
Both the "True Hackers" and the "Hardware Hackers" were curious and motivated by the sheer amazement of the computer, but they disagreed on where money played a role, and they disagreed on how to proceed. The "Hardware Hackers" became more business student like in wanting to profit off of the expansion of this industry, but many still seemed to aligned with what maybe could be called a changing Hacker Ethic.
Lee Felsenstein, one of the influential "Hardware Hackers" was said to have "considered the computer itself a model for activism", "giving the people power not only over machines but over political oppressors". I understand his point here, and I think we now can all see how even with everyone having their own computer, there can easily be powers at play against us through this technology. But at the time, his thought was that everyone needs a computer to be able to have power. Lee and others felt that the older MIT hackers were more concerned with the cool, nerdy things they were doing than with his concern of the people, which led him to look for other communities, notably what became the Homebrew Computer Club, for a community of people who aligned with him.
This community eventually became driven completely around making as much of this hardware as best as possible and seeing how they could make money on it. These hackers not only wanted to commercialize this industry, but they also wanted to make it available to the non-computer science people, the non-hackers of the world. Their goal was for everyone to be able to buy a personal computer, which to me feeds into this idea of a newer hacker ethic; that more people can have access to this information, and more free information can be shared once people have this hardware.
Lee Felsenstein, as I shared earlier, believed in technology as a force for good. Efrem Lipkin, another "Hardware Hacker", believed technology was a dangerous tool of oppression. I think both are correct. We have all seen this first hand. In less than a second you can send your grandmother a text across the country and see how she's doing; with the click of a button you can pay a friend back for lunch; at any point you can look up anything you could ever wonder online. This is all great. But the negatives exist here too: the security risks, the data collection, the emerging dangers of technology in war, and the mental health impacts of social media technologies that came alongside mobile phones. So while both sides of this argument may see themselves as correct, I think both sides carry equal importance and weight in discussing. It is fascinating to me that at the early stages of computers these questions were already being asked, of whether it would be a force for good or a dangerous tool... as a technology ethics minor now, we are still asking eachother this question in my classes and nobody seems to know the correct way to answer it. How can it seem like the answer is both? And how do we prioritize the good and mitigate the bad? I think making sure students / future hackers continue reading about this and talking about it is a great place to start.
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