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

[jim]

<wild_applause> 


On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 11:18 -0700, six silberman wrote:
> 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?"
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