When I read this week’s reading by Stephen Kline, what struck me most was the moment of transition from Military to Hacker.  I wish he had spent more probing the circumstances that caused a military study of main-frame computers and the Programmable Data Processor-1, the purpose of which was to beat the Soviets in an arms race, to produce Spacewar (Kline 84-85).

However, though I would have loved a whole chapter about just that moment, Kline did a pretty good job describing the shift: “Hacking was a way of dealing with the tedium of long hours spent in the presence of unforgiving machines and the mind-numbing programming problems of massive main frame computers (87).”  Hacking was born from putting intelligent, creative people together and telling them to solve really, really hard problems.  They solved the problems, but they also started exploring the machines.  This is where Steven Levy’s “Hand-On Imperative” was created- taking things apart and putting them back together in new ways (87).  And as this physically led to new products like video games, it was also the birth of a Hacker Culture, and they had their own code of ethics. (http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/hacker_ethics.html)

1. Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative!
2. All information should be free.
3. Mistrust authority – promote decentralization.
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Kline says the most famous of these is number 2- All information should be free (86).  And a paragraph later Kline says this: “It is in fact the promotion of creativity and the ‘play ethic’ that engineering designers now celebrate when they promote ‘divergent thinking’ as a means of accelerating radical innovation through creativity (87).”

We would never have gotten Spacewar if it wasn’t for that ‘play ethic’- if the problem solvers hadn’t become intensely fascinated with their work and their materials and the possibilities therein, or if they hadn’t been allowed to play.  I think this is why Levy believed that all information should be free.  Essentially, innovation, creativity, and the free flow of ideas go hand in hand in hand.  A flow of ideas will always lead to innovation, and innovation won’t be true without a flow of ideas at its root.  Suppress any of these, and the others will suffer.

We can see the negative effects of restricting creativity at the end of the article, where it describes the period of time where the game industry was in the hands of “the suits” who didn’t fully understand the creative process and pushed for a product- any product- which they then introduced into the market before it was really good. This was the singular cause of the video game crash in 1983 and 1984.  There wasn’t time for new ideas or the “play” that leads to innovation.  The market was flooded with about 200 versions of the same four games, and consumers stopped paying money for them (105).

This leads to me throw out a couple things that I’ve been wanting to discuss in class, although perhaps they’re not as relevant as I think: SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, and this whole idea of internet pirating, if it should really be illegal, and what the limiting of information sharing might lead to.