It’s Thursday, which means I’m sitting in the Lit Lab for Hackerspace 2 here at Stanford–an attempt to provide a collaborative environment to share expertise in using digital tools to explore humanities topics. I think of this little experiment as a chance to gauge interest among the Stanford community in the Digital Humanities, but of course the Hacker ethos is well-established and documented, and among many people evokes a particular philosophy and practice.
The most pure example of this movement is Eric Raymond’s How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. It is, for me, a rather hard slog to get through, littered as it is with things like Raymond’s simultaneous use-of while complaining-about “primate politics” and his Charlie-Sheen-before-Charlie-Sheen moments like this:
we throw away questions from people who appear to be losers in order to spend our question-answering time more efficiently, on winners
Still, the Raymonds and the Stallmans of the world represent a real and valuable movement, despite their prickliness and eccentricity. And naturally there are other, equally useful but incrementally more civil representations of hacker culture, like Cory Doctorow’s seminal criticism of metadata, lovingly titled Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. Again emphasizing a spirit of pragmatism but this time without the needlessly confrontational tone of Raymond’s piece, Doctorow provides a sober critique studded with gems of wisdom such as,”laziness is bottomless” and “To believe that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate — let alone accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy they’re supposed to be using — is self-delusion of the first water.”
Hacking, in the humanities and otherwise, whether at Stanford or elsewhere, whether in sync with folks that prefer to call it LiGNUx or not, seems like a good experiment even if all it does is make one aware of what hacking is.