[Noisebridge-discuss] [drama] My Hair Is On Fire - Current events that are shaping your rights as we speak

[six silberman]

The stakes of this debate seem rather low*†, but a few (old) documents
come to mind, and in the interest of clarity I will reproduce their
salient contents and note their apparent implications.



I

Richard Stallman:

"Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking."

"Lady Gaga's approach to clothing seems like hacking to me."

stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html



II

Various and sundry from the Jargon File:

"The meaning of 'hack'", including the Agre quotation, has already
been reproduced in this thread, as has the follow-on characterization
of a hack as "an appropriate application of ingenuity":

catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html

The Jargon File entry for "hacker" includes

"3. A person capable of appreciating hack value."

"6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy
hacker, for example."

"7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming
or circumventing limitations."

and the entry for "hack" documents a software system (which encodes a
preexisting cultural practice) in which "'I hack foo' is roughly
equivalent to 'foo is my major interest (or project).'" The example
given is "I hack solid-state physics."



IMPLICATION

If we take these documents as historically authoritative — which we
don't have to, and maybe shouldn't, but supposing we do — it
immediately follows that any attempt to restrict use of the term
"hack" to exclude anything non-technical — and certainly anything
non-computer — is elitist historical revisionism and quite simply
wrong.




* That's polite for "trying to police the use of language is usually
pointless and almost always tiresome, and that activity around this
term in particular is old and should probably be dead."

† Instead of asking, "what is the legitimate use of this word?" — or
"who is authorized to label themselves by this word?", "who *owns*
this word?", and why, with the resulting endless descent into varied,
mostly lamentable and necessarily inconclusive argument — can we ask,
"what is achieved by using this word?", "what is highlighted and what
obscured when we use it?", "what is at stake, culturally, socially,
even economically, when one group uses this word or tries to prevent
another from using it?", "what is gained by allowing or even fostering
more inclusive use, and what lost?"