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"I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization."
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I’ll offer this rather dense definition that I think covers the phenomenology, and unpack it through the rest of the post.
Hacking is a pattern of local, opportunistic manipulation of a non-disposable complex system that causes a lowering of its conceptual integrity, creates systemic debt and moves intelligence from systems into human brains.
By this definition, hacking is anti-refinement. It is therefore a barbarian mode of production because it moves intelligence out of systems and into human brains, making those human brains less interchangeable. Yet, it is not the traditional barbarian mode of predatory destruction of a settled civilization from outside its periphery.
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This compounding rate is very high because the longer a system persists, the more tightly it integrates into everything around it, causing co-evolution. So eventually replacing even a small hack in a relatively isolated system with a better solution turns into a planet-wide exercise, as we learned during Y2K.
Isolated technologies also get increasingly situated over time, no matter how encapsulated they appear at conception, so that what looks like a “do-over” from the point of view of a single subsystem (say Linux) looks like a hack with respect to larger, subsuming systems (like the Internet). So debt accumulates at levels of the system that no individual agent is nominally responsible for. This is collective, public technical debt.
"We asked for contributions to a collectively produced volume that would explore how the academy might be beneficially reformed using digital media and technology."
Melancholy meditations on hackers, wikileaks, and diplomacy by Bruce Sterling.
For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, services and software that could be used for hacking without programming knowledge as a pre-requisite.
Great guide to modifying and adding keyboard bindings to Macintosh programs.
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Like most innovations of the Colonial era, centralized currency is a way to extract value from the periphery and bring it back to the center. People's labor no longer contributes to their own wealth, but to the lender's. Eventually, the lending economy —— central banks and banks —— becomes bigger than the "real" economy of people doing stuff. Today, in fact, over 95% of currency transactions are made between speculators. Our money is used less for real transactions than betting.
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Thanks to interest, everyone must pay back two or three times what they have borrowed in the first place. The central bank loans money to a big bank at one rate of interest, that big bank lends to a smaller one at a higher rate of interest, and so on until it gets to the actual person or business using the money —— who pays the highest rate. As a result, businesses can't be merely sustainable — they must grow. And a world accepting this economic model as reality must submit to the incorrect assumption that this is just the way things are.
As I see it, the hacker exists in a symbiotic relationship with institutions. No institutions, nothing to hack.
The basic problem is that as a student you don't know what you need to know. As we know from Socrates, figuring this out is a kind of passageway into a philosophical life. I think it would be asking a tremendous amount from students to imagine that they can construct their own curriculum or cobble together curriculum from a variety of otherwise unrelated sources.
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