Technology isn’t an industry, it’s a method of transforming the culture and economics of existing systems and institutions.
12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech – Humane Tech – Medium

Hacker modes of social organization are entering more and more organizations. Agile teams, distributed collaboration, and the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and rapid iteration are useful literacy for the modern world. The ed-tech cronyism of the past decade–driven by greed, assessment, bad metrics, and algorithmic cruelty–is a culture ill-suited to collaboration.

Software eats industries and networks eat geography, bringing collaborative hacker culture along with them. Education’s turn is now. Software matters. If you’re going to get eaten by software, choose indie ed-tech over corporatist ed-tech and deficit model greed. Engage with the digital commons, and educate for massive software-driven change. While navigating a society-transforming wave of automation, fluency in hacker ethos, distributed collaboration, and loosely coupled, tightly aligned teams will be helpful.

In the past, when teachers, parents, students asked me to describe what my job was like as a software developer or ask what skills I most needed for the job, I said:

Rapid subculture acquisition
Crushing learning curves

Repeatedly ascending learning curves while rapidly acquiring subculture is a huge part of surviving in this increasingly freelance world where individuals and small teams must handle all parts of business themselves.

Learning is the process of combining knowledge assets, but those assets are constantly becoming obsolete. In the long run, an enduring and adaptable learning process is more valuable than the perishable knowledge assets themselves.

But here’s the irony of innovation: even though it’s built on knowledge assets, it’s the learning process that brings them together to create value in new ways.

Key concept: In the process of innovation, learning is more important than knowing.

Source: Clark, Timothy R.. The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety (pp. 107-108). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

The need for digital sociology is now.

The need for created serendipity is now.

The cost of relevance is fluency.

Key concept: Innovation is the process of connected people connecting things.

Source: Clark, Timothy R.. The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety (p. 108). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Chance favors the connected mind.

It doesn’t matter if you are writing software or writing music, innovation usually has a social origin.

Source: Clark, Timothy R.. The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety (p. 109). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

It’s important to remember that innovation is interdisciplinary. Your success will depend, not on independent action, but on your dependent interaction.

Source: Clark, Timothy R.. The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety (p. 112). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Remember that innovation is the process of connected people connecting things. When we say connecting things, we mean things that are not normally connected.

Clark, Timothy R.. The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety (p. 114). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

The speed of change outside an organization now favors the leader who explores, monitors the periphery, and extends the field of vision for the entire organization.

Source: The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation

Design is tested at the edges. It’s tested by we peripheral minds. Rapid subculture immersion is an important part of working at the edges.

In fact, a core element of the hacker ethos is the belief that being open to possibilities and embracing uncertainty is necessary for the actual future to unfold in positive ways. Or as computing pioneer Alan Kay put it, inventing the future is easier than predicting it.
Towards a Mass Flourishing

In our Tale of Two Computers, the parent is a four-century-old computer whose basic architecture was laid down in the zero-sum mercantile age. It runs on paperware, credentialism, and exhaustive territorial claims that completely carve up the world with strongly regulated boundaries. Its structure is based on hierarchically arranged container-like organizations, ranging from families to nations. In this order of things, there is no natural place for a free frontier. Ideally, there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. It is a computer designed for stability, within which innovation is a bug rather than a feature.

We’ll call this planet-scale computer the geographic world.

The child is a young, half-century old computer whose basic architecture was laid down during the Cold War. It runs on software, the hacker ethos, and soft networks that wire up the planet in ever-richer, non-exclusive, non-zero-sum ways. Its structure is based on streams like Twitter: open, non-hierarchical flows of real-time information from multiple overlapping networks. In this order of things, everything from banal household gadgets to space probes becomes part of a frontier for ceaseless innovation through bricolage. It is a computer designed for rapid, disorderly and serendipitous evolution, within which innovation, far from being a bug, is the primary feature.

We’ll call this planet-scale computer the networked world.

The networked world is not new. It is at least as old as the oldest trade routes, which have been spreading subversive ideas alongside valuable commodities throughout history. What is new is its growing ability to dominate the geographic world. The story of software eating the world is the also the story of networks eating geography.

There are two major subplots to this story. The first subplot is about bits dominating atoms. The second subplot is about the rise of a new culture of problem-solving.
A Tale of Two Computers

So here we go. Toward a new hacker ethic. So, the approach in which programmers acknowledge that programming is in some sense about leaving something out is opposed to the Hands-On Imperative as expressed by Levy. Programs aren’t models of the world constructed from scratch but takes on the world, carefully carved out of reality. It’s a subtle but important difference. In the “programming is forgetting” model, the world can’t debugged. But what you can do is recognize and be explicit about your own point of view and the assumptions that you bring to the situation.

So, the term “hacker” still has high value in tech culture. And it’s a privilege…if somebody calls you a hacker that’s kind of like a compliment. It’s a privilege to be able to be called a hacker, and it’s reserved for the highest few. And to be honest, I personally could take or leave the term. I’m not claiming to be a hacker or to speak on behalf of hackers. But what I want to do is I want to foster a technology culture in which a high value is placed on understanding and being explicit about your biases about what you’re leaving out, so that computers are used to bring out the richness of the world instead of forcibly overwriting it.

So to that end I’m proposing a new hacker ethic. Of course proposing a closed set of rules for virtuous behavior would go against the very philosophy I’m trying to advance, so my ethic instead takes the form of questions that every hacker should ask themselves while they’re making programs and machines. So here they are.

Instead of saying access to computers should be unlimited and total, we should ask “Who gets to use what I make? Who am I leaving out? How does what I make facilitate or hinder access?”

Instead of saying all information should be free, we could ask “What data am I using? Whose labor produced it and what biases and assumptions are built into it? Why choose this particular phenomenon for digitization or transcription? And what do the data leave out?”

Instead of saying mistrust authority, promote decentralization, we should ask “What systems of authority am I enacting through what I make? What systems of support do I rely on? How does what I make support other people?”

And instead of saying hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position, we should ask “What kind of community am I assuming? What community do I invite through what I make? How are my own personal values reflected in what I make?”

So you might have noticed that there were two final points-the two last points of Levy’s hacker ethics that I left alone, and those are these: You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better. I think if there’s anything to be rescued from hacker culture it’s these two sentences. These two sentences are the reason that I’m a computer programmer and that I’m a teacher in the first place. And I believe them and I know you believe them, and that’s why we’re here together today. Thank you.
Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic – Allison Parrish | Open Transcripts

Stimpunks Foundation

Hacker Ethos

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