Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists | Magazine

Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists
By Steven Levy
April 19, 2010  |
12:00 pm  |
Wired May 2010
Like Bill Gates, some of author Steven Levy’soriginal subjects of Hackers are now rich, famous, and powerful.
Photo:Carlos Serrao
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Gates,Zuckerberg Meet for Wired Cover Shoot
“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in hisoffice. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did themicroprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird howold this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a coupleof fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with atousle-headed Gates more than aquartercentury ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hotcore of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarilyobsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known ashackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOSoperating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; evenWord was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many timesover the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw hispassion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself sawmy reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that Iwas documenting a movement that would affect everybody.
The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the ComputerRevolution, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning daysof 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high,crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case thathackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibilitywithin the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in asweeping digital transformation.
I hadn’t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on myproject, I thought of hackers as little more than an interestingsubculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, aswell as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, ledto the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience formillions of people. Early MIT hackers realized it was possible to usecomputers for what we now call word processing. (Their initial programwas calledExpensiveTypewriter, appropriate since the one machine it ran on cost$120,000.) They also invented the digital videogame. The rebel engineersof the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley were the first to takeadvantage of new low-cost chips to build personal computers. They mayhave begun as a fringe cohort, but hackers alchemized the hard math ofMoore’s law into a relentless series of technological advances thatchanged the world and touched all of our lives. And most of them did itsimply for the joy of pulling off an awesome trick.
But behind the inventiveness was something even more marvelous — allreal hackers shared a set of values that has turned out to be a credofor the information age. I attempted to codify this unspoken ethos into aseries of principles calledthe hackerethic. Some of the notions now seem forehead-smackingly obvious butat the time were far from accepted (”You can create art and beauty on acomputer”). Others spoke to the meritocratic possibilities of a digitalage (”Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria suchas degrees, age, race, or position”). Another axiom identifiedcomputers as instruments of insurrection, granting power to anyindividual with a keyboard and sufficient brainpower (”Mistrustauthority — promote decentralization”). But the precept I perceived asmost central to hacker culture turned out to be the most controversial:“All information should be free.”
Stewart Brand, hacker godfather andWhole Earth Catalogfounder, hacked even that statement. It happened at the first Hackers’Conference, the week my book was published, during a session I moderatedon the future of the hacker ethic. “On the one hand, information wantsto be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” he said. “On the other hand,information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out isgetting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fightingagainst each other.” His words neatly encapsulate the tension that hassince defined the hacker movement — a sometimes pitched battle betweengeeky idealism and icy-hearted commerce.
Though Hackers initially landed with a bit of a thud (TheNew York Times called it “a monstrously overblown magazinearticle”), it eventually found an audience greater than even myoverheated expectations. Through chance encounters, email, and tweets,people are constantly telling me that reading the book inspired them intheir careers. Thumbing through David Kushner’s Masters of Doom,I learned that reading Hackers as a geeky teenagerreassured Doom creator John Carmack that he was not alone in the world.When I recently interviewed Ben Fried, Google’s chief informationofficer, he showed up with a dog-eared copy of the book for me to sign.“I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t read this,” he told me.
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But it was the hackers themselves who inspired a generation ofprogrammers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs — and not just fellow techies.Everyone who has ever used a computer has benefited. The Internet itselfexists thanks to hacker ideals — its expansion was lubricated by adesign that enabled free access. The word hacker entered thepopular lexicon, although its meaning has changed: In the mid-’80s,following a rash of computer break-ins by teenagers with personalcomputers, true hackers stood by in horror as the general public beganto equate the word — their word — with people who used computers not asinstruments of innovation and creation but as tools of thievery andsurveillance. The kind of hacker I wrote about was motivated by thedesire to learn and build, not steal and destroy. On the positive sideof the ledger, this friendly hacker type has also become a cultural icon— the fuzzy, genial whiz kid who wields a keyboard to get Jack Bauerout of a jam, or the brainy billionaire in a T-shirt — even if todayhe’s more likely to be called a geek.
TheHackers: Digital Revolutionaries, the Early Years: 1, 5: Bill Gates,cofounder of Microsoft; 2: Richard Stallman, leader of the GNU Projectand founder of the Free Software Foundation; 3: Steve Wozniak, developerof the Apple II computer; 4, 6: Lee Felsenstein, creator of the Osborne1 computer; 7: Paul Graham, cocreator of Viaweb and cofounder of YCombinator.
Photos: 1: Corbis; 2: Hackersvideo.com; 3: MargaretWozniak; 4: Matt Herron/Takestock; 6: Cindy Charles
In the last chapters of Hackers, I focused on the threatof commercialism, which I feared would corrupt the hacker ethic. Ididn’t anticipate that those ideals would remake the very nature ofcommerce. Yet the fact that the hacker ethic spread so widely — andmingled with mammon in so many ways — guaranteed that the movement, likeany subculture that breaks into the mainstream, would changedramatically. So as Hackers was about to appear in a newedition (this spring, O’Reilly Media is releasing a reprint, includingthe first digital version), I set out to revisit both the individualsand the culture. Like the movieBroken Flowers,in which Bill Murray embarks on a road trip to search out his formergirlfriends, I wanted to extract some meaning from seeing what hadhappened to my subjects over the years, hoping their experiences wouldprovide new insights as to how hacking has changed the world — and viceversa.
I could visit only a small sample, but in their examples I found areflection of how the tech world has developed over the past 25 years.While the hacker movement may have triumphed, not all of the people whocreated it enjoyed the same fate. Like Gates, some of my originalsubjects are now rich, famous, and powerful. They thrived in themovement’s transition from insular subculture to multibillion-dollarindustry, even if it meant rejecting some of the core hacker tenets.Others, unwilling or unable to adapt to a world that had discovered andexploited their passion — or else just unlucky — toiled in obscurity andfought to stave off bitterness. I also found a third group: thepresent-day heirs to the hacker legacy, who grew up in a world wherecommerce and hacking were never seen as opposing values. They arebringing their worldview into fertile new territories and, in doing so,are molding the future of the movement.
TheTitans
Real hackers don’t take vacations. And by thatstandard, Bill Gates is no longer a real hacker.
Gates himself admits as much. “I believe in intensity, and I have toagree totally; by objective measures my intensity in my teens andtwenties was more extreme,” he says. “In my twenties, I just worked. NowI go home for dinner. When you choose to get married and have kids, ifyou’re going to do it well you are going to give up some of thefanaticism.”
Indeed, looking back, Gates says that the key period of hishackerhood came even earlier. “The hardcore years, the most fanaticalyears, are 13 to 16,” he says.
“So you were over the hill by the time you got to Harvard?” I ask.
“In terms of programming 24 hours a day? Oh yeah,” he says.“Certainly by the time I was 17 my software mind had been shaped.”
He still seemed plenty intense when I met him as a 27-year-old, brashbut not given to making direct eye contact. For half of the interview,he stared at a computer screen, testing software with one of thosenewfangled mouses. But he engaged fully with my questions, rattling offhis highly opinionated take on some of the people he worked with — andagainst — in the early days of the PC. That intensity would inform hiswork and his company, helping him turn Microsoft into a softwarebehemoth and himself into the richest human being on the planet (forquite a while, anyway). Gates’ faith in hacking underscored everythinghe did, right down to his staffing decisions. “If you want to hire anengineer,” he says, “look at the guy’s code. That’s all. If he hasn’twritten a lot of code, don’t hire him.”
Gates occupies a special place in the history of hacking. Mostconsider him one of the best coders ever. His first version of Basic,written so efficiently that it could run in the 4-KB memory space of theAltair, was a marvel. (Yes, that’s 4 kilobytes, not mega,giga, or today’s darling, tera.) When people picture a computer geek,they typically think of someone like the young Gates. And yet Gates,along with several other subjects of my book, went on to transcend hishacker roots. This group helped turn hacking from an obscure vocationinto a global economic and cultural force and then reaped the rewards ofthat transition: money, influence, and even fame.
This wouldn’t have happened if Gates had been just another hacker.Indeed, it was only by discarding key aspects of the hacker ethic thathe was able to embrace computing’s commercial potential and bring it tothe masses. Pure hackers encouraged anyone to copy, examine, and improveany piece of code. But Gates insisted that software was no differentfrom otherintellectualproperty and that copying a digital product was just as illegal asswiping a shirt from Kmart. In 1976, he wrote an open letter to computerhobbyists who copied his software, accusing them of theft. His missivewas considered blasphemous by some hackers, who believed that Gates waspolluting their avocation by introducing commercial restrictions thatwould stifle knowledge and creativity. Gates found these argumentsludicrous — this was a business, after all. “I raised the issue in thesense of, jeez, if people paid more for software, I’d be able to hiremore people,” he says more than 30 years later.
That conflict continues to rage. Gates puts the argument inperspective by pointing out that centuries ago, European publishersprinted American writers’ works without compensation. “Benjamin Franklinwas so ripped off — he could have written exactly what I wrote in thatletter,” he says. Today, journalists are trying to figure out how tosustain their business when their product can be copied and distributedso easily — it’s the same dynamic. Gates seems to take some satisfactionin this turn of events. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20years from now,” he says to me. “Or maybe you’ll have to cut hair duringthe day and just write articles at night. Who knows?”
TheHackers: Digital Revolutionaries, the Early Years: 1: Lee Felsenstein,creator of the Osborne 1 computer; 2, 6: Richard Greenblatt, pioneeringmember of MIT's coder elite; 3: Richard Stallman, leader of the GNUProject and founder of the Free Software Foundation; 4: Tim O'Reilly,computer book publisher; 5, 9: Andy Hertzfeld, designer of the firstMacintosh OS; 8: Steve Wozniak, developer of the Apple II computer; 10:Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook.
Photos: 1: BillRoarmor/themonthly.com; 2: Hackersvideo.com; 3,6: Matt Herron/Takestock;7: Corbis; 8: Margaret Wozniak
Gates had to stray from the hackers’ rigid moral code to become amainstream success. All Steve Wozniak had to do wasdon a pair of dancingshoes: While Woz is a hacker legend, best known for designing theoriginal Apple computer, he has become an unlikely pop culture icon,turning up last year on Dancing With the Stars. When I metup with him, he had just reunited with the other contestants for theseason finale. “I was dancing against Jerry Springer and ClorisLeachman,” he says over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant inFremont, California. His early elimination in no way dampened hisspirits. Very little dampens Woz’s spirits, even the fact that realityTV celebrity is overshadowing his genuine accomplishments in technology:“People come up to me and say, ‘Omigod, I saw you on Dancing Withthe Stars!’ I have to say, ‘Well, I did computers, too.’”
Casual fans can be forgiven for overlooking Woz’s tech cred. Thesedays, he’s more likely to get attention for his unique hobbies (Segwaypolo, anyone?) or love life (he had asign-of-the-apocalypseromance with comedian Kathy Griffin, although he has since married awoman he met on a geek cruise) than for any new innovation. Snarky Websites have mercilessly mocked Woz’s celebrity-mag turns and frequentappearances in an Apple store’s first-day lines as indications of sadirrelevance. But Woz shrugs off the ribbing. He recalls the instructionhe gave to Griffin a few years ago: “Hey, you can embarrass me, you canabuse me, you can ridicule me as much as you want — if it makes peoplelaugh it’s worth it.” When I profiled Woz in my book, he was a sociallyawkward and insecure millionaire. Now he is a confident and widely lovedmascot for hacking culture at large.
From time to time, Woz still appears in the news as a force behind astartup with potentially groundbreaking technology.CL 9 was going to devisesuperpowerful remote controls.Wheelsof Zeus promised to let users track their possessions throughwireless technology. But the first never lived up to expectations, andthe second never released a product. Now he works as chief scientist fora storage company called Fusion-io. “I’m doing a lot of sales-marketingwork,” he says. “But I’m also looking at technologies that might becompetitive in the future.”
But even Woz doesn’t expect to create another Apple II. In 2010, hisgreatest contribution is as a role model. His universal renown is acontinuing reminder that brains and creativity can trump traditionalnotions of coolness. He’s the nerd in the computer room whose stature —and happiness — far eclipses that of aging prom kings. And that’s aninspiration for nerds everywhere.
Indeed, one of his protégé, Andy Hertzfeld, remains inspired byhacking. Hertzfeld wasn’t a major figure in my book, but as one ofApple’s early employees and a designer of the Macintosh operatingsystem, he could have been. Today he’s at Google, where his most visiblecontribution thus far is a feature that creates chronologies for GoogleNews queries, so users can see how a story has developed over time. Buthacking in your fifties isn’t as easy as it is in your twenties. “When Iwas hacking on the Mac, I’d be working away and think an hour hadpassed; then I’d look up, and it had been four hours,” Hertzfeld says.“Now when I think an hour has gone by, I look up and it’s an hour.”
It’s not just the passage of years that has changed Hertzfeld’sexperience. He has also had to adapt his individualistic approach toserve the geek-industrial complex that is Google. On one hand, Google isa hacker mecca. It values engineers as its most important assets. “Youare expected to work out of your passion,” Hertzfeld says — definitely ahacker-friendly value. And the company supports open source software.But Hertzfeld can’t duck the fact that Google is also a big company withrigid standards and processes for designing products, which makes theexperience more formal and less fun. “My relationship to my work is thatof an artist to his work,” he says. And at Google, he adds, “I can’texercise my creativity in a way that gives me joy, which is my basicapproach.”
But while he has lost some personal control, he has gained anunprecedented ability to make a mark on the world. Someone at Google canaffect the lives of millions with a few lines of code. And that makesfor a different kind of thrill than Hertzfeld experienced during Apple’searly days, when the potential of every product was unknown andlimitless. “There’s so much more leverage now to make a big impact,” hesays. “This stuff is as mainstream as can be. Google, the iPhone — thesemove the culture more than the Beatles did in the ’60s. It’s shapingthe human race.”
TheIdealists
Richard Greenblatt tells me he has a rant to deliver. Uh-oh.Greenblatt was the canonical hacker of MIT’s Project MAC — theforerunner to the school’s legendary AI Lab — in the early ’60s. In mybook, I described how his fellow MIT hackers, appalled at his hygiene,used the term milliblatts to gauge olfactory unpleasantness. Itwasn’t exactly flattering. Was he finally going to unload on me afterall these years?
To my relief, Greenblatt is more concerned with what he views as thedecrepit state of computing. He hates how the dominant coding languages,like HTML and C++, are being implemented. He missesLISP, the beloved language thathe worked with back at MIT. “The world is screwed up,” he says beforelaunching into a technical analysis of the current condition ofprogramming that I can’t even hope to follow.
But coding is just the beginning. The real problem, Greenblatt says,is that business interests have intruded on a culture that was foundedon the ideals of openness and creativity. In Greenblatt’s heyday, he andhis friends shared code freely, devoting themselves purely to the goalof building better products. “There’s a dynamic now that says, let’sformat our Web page so people have to push the button a lot so thatthey’ll see lots of ads,” Greenblatt says. “Basically, the people whowin are those who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”
Greenblatt is not one of those people. He belongs in a differentgroup: the true believers, who still cling to their original motivations— the joy of discovery, the free exchange of ideas — even as theirpassion has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Despite theirbrilliance and importance, they never launched million-dollar productsor became icons. They just kept hacking.
I am surrounded by similar idealists here at the 25th Hackers’Conference, an annual gathering that celebrates the thrill of buildingsomething really cool. It has been a few years since I last attended,but it’s just as I remember it: 48 hours of hackers meeting deep intothe night at a Northern California resort, discussing everything fromeconomic theory to data storage. The crowd is somewhat long in thetooth, despite an overdue effort to bring in more attendees under age30. The tech industry may be filled with young geniuses, but the oldguys are still going at it, even if most of their efforts remainblithely obscure.
Greenblatt is a regular here, a link to the Mesopotamia of hackerculture: MIT. He arrived at the school just after the members of itsTech Model Railroad Club gained access to a rare interactive computer.Greenblatt became one of the best, a brilliant coder whoseaccomplishments include a sophisticated LISP compiler and one of thefirst autonomous computer chess programs. At MIT, he was known as ahacker’s hacker.
But unlike Gates, Wozniak, or Hertzfeld, Greenblatt’s work never wentmainstream. In the 1980s, he started a company to build LISP machines.It didn’t pan out. He wasn’t much of a businessperson. These days, hedescribes himself as an independent researcher. He moved into hismother’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take care of her and haslived there alone since she died in 2005. “The main project I’ve beenworking on for 15 years is called thread memory, and it has something todo with English-language comprehension stuff,” he says. “It’s basicresearch. It’s not something that works today, but it’s something.”
When Greenblatt looks at the current state of hacking, he sees afallen world. Even the word itself has lost its meaning. “They stole ourword,” he says, “and it’s irretrievably gone.”
Greenblatt is far from alone in his wistful invocation of the past. Ifirst met Richard Stallman, a denizen of MIT’s AI Lab, in 1983. Eventhen he was bemoaning the sad decline of hacker culture and felt thatthe commercialization of software was a crime. When I spoke to him thatyear, as the computer industry was soaring, he looked me in the eye andsaid, “I don’t believe that software can be owned.” I called him “thelast of the true hackers” and assumed the world would soon squash him.
Was I ever wrong. Stallman’s crusade for free software has continuedto inform the ongoing struggles over intellectual property and won him aMacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” He founded theFree Software Foundation and wrote theGNU operating system, which garnered widespread adoption after LinusTorvalds wrote Linux to run with it; the combination is used in millionsof devices. More important, perhaps, is that Stallman provided theintellectual framework that led to theopen source movement, a criticalelement of modern software and the Internet itself. If the softwareworld had saints, Stallman would have been beatified long ago.
Yet he is almost as famous for his unyielding personality. In 2002,Creative Commons evangelist Lawrence Lessig wrote, “I don’t knowStallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like.”(And that was in the preface to Stallman’s own book.) Time has notsoftened him. In our original interview, Stallman said, “I’m the lastsurvivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the worldanymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” Now, meeting overChinese food, he reaffirms this. “I have certainly wished I had killedmyself when I was born,” he says. “In terms of effect on the world, it’svery good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in timeand prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had somuch pain.”
That pain came in part from loneliness, once a common complaint amongthe tiny and obsessive cadre of computer fans. (A 1980 commentary byStanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo implied that hackers wereantisocial losers who turned to computers to avoid human contact.) Butas hacker culture has spread, so has its social acceptability. Today,computer geeks are seen not as losers but as moguls in the making. Theytend not to suffer the intense isolation that once plagued Stallman —thanks, ironically, to the commercialization he so bemoans.
As much now as 25 years ago, Stallman is a fundamentalist, aHutterite of hackerism. Hispersonal Website is a grab bag of appeals for people to boycott various enemiesof the cause, from Blu-ray to J. K. Rowling. He even feuds with hisformer allies, including Torvalds. (”He doesn’t want to defend users’freedom,” Stallman says.) He has particular contempt for Apple, with itsclosed systems and digital rights software. He refers to their productsusing Mad-magazine-style puns. The music player is an iScrod. Itsmobile device is an iGroan. The new tablet computer is the iBad. And heis an equal-opportunity kvetcher. When I tell him that Hackerswill soon be available for the Kindle — which Stallman, predictably,calls a Swindle — his dour demeanor evaporates as he energeticallyencourages me to resist the e-reader’s onerous DRM. “You have to believethat freedom is important and you deserve it,” he says. Despite hisdisillusionment, the fire still burns within him.
FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg says that his company promotes hacker values.
Photo:Carlos Serrao
Lee Felsenstein is keeping the flame aliveas well. Felsenstein was the subversive moderator of theHomebrew Computer Club,the PC industry launchpad whose members — including Woz — were thetarget of Gates’ letter. A veteran of the Berkeley free speech protests,Felsenstein thought that putting cheap computers in the hands of “thepeople” would allow everyone to take information, manipulate it tobetter reflect the truth, and distribute it widely. He was right aboutthe rise of the PC, but he says he’s still waiting for its democratizingeffect. “Lincoln Steffens once commented, ‘I have seen the future, andit works,’” Felsenstein says. “But I’m with the guy who changed that to‘I have seen the future, and it needs work.’” On a personal level,Felsenstein’s career has been checkered. He was celebrated for theOsborne 1 computer, but the company went bust. So did Interval Research,where Felsenstein worked for eight years. “If I wanted to, I could bebitter about it,” he says. “But I don’t want to.”
Instead, Felsenstein is putting the next generation of geeks on thepath of the righteous. He recently helped establish a workspace inMountain View, California, called the Hacker Dojo, which charges each ofits 80 members $100 a month for access to a fully stocked,9,500-square-foot DIY shop with an in-house network. It’s one of several“hacker spaces” across the country — outposts devoted to empoweringformerly isolated and underequipped gearheads. “I am a sensei of thedojo,” he says, a wide grin on his face. “Felsenstein sensei.”
TheNext Generation
Greenblatt, Stallman, and Felsenstein see hacking as a set of ideals.But Paul Graham sees it as a humming economic engine. The 45-year-oldInternet guru, himself a fanatic engineer in his day, is a cofounder of YCombinator, an incubator for Internet startups. Twice a year, hiscompany runs American Idol-style contests to select 20 to30 budding companies for seed funding and attendance at a 10-week bootcamp, culminating in a Demo Day packed with angel investors, VCs, andacquisition-hungry corporations like Google and Yahoo.
How does Graham pick the most promising candidates? Easy. He looksfor the hackers. “We’re pretty hackerly, so it’s easy to recognize akindred spirit,” says Graham, who in 1995 cocreated Viaweb, the firstWeb-based application. “Hackers understand a system well enough to be incharge of it and make it do their bidding — and maybe make it do thingsthat weren’t intended.” The best prospects, he says, are “worldhackers,” people “who understand not only how to mess with computers buthow to mess with everything.” Indeed, Graham says that today, everybusiness is looking to hire or invest in firms run by hackers. “We tellfounders presenting at Demo Day, ‘If you dress up too much, you willread to the investors as a stupid person.’ They’re coming to see thenext Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.”
Stallman would recoil in horror at Graham’s equating hacking withentrepreneurial effectiveness. But Graham has found that hacking’svalues aren’t threatened by business — they have conquered business.Seat-of-the-pants problem-solving. Decentralized decisionmaking.Emphasizing quality of work over quality of wardrobe. These are allhacker ideals, and they have all infiltrated the working world.
A new generation of hackers has emerged, techies who see business notas an enemy but as the means for their ideas and innovations to findthe broadest audience possible. Take Facebook founder and CEO MarkZuckerberg, who has lured 400 million users to share their personallives online. At 25, he has proven to be a master of the art of businessdevelopment — unabashedly opening his site to advertisers andmarketers. Yet he clearly thinks of himself as a hacker: Last year hetold the audience at an event for would-be Internet entrepreneurs,“We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.”
To find out what he meant by that, I visit him at Facebookheadquarters, a large building on California Avenue in Palo Alto — thesame street where in 1983 I rented a room to use as a base whileresearching Hackers. Surprisingly, Zuckerberg, best knownfor wearing North Face fleece, is sporting a tie. He explains that he isnearing the end of a year in which he promised his team that he wouldshow up for work in neckwear every day. It turned out to be a good yearfor Facebook — despite the recession, the site more than doubled itsuser base and finally turned a profit. “Maybe it’s a charm,” he says ofthe tie. “But I think it mostly just chokes me.”
Zuckerberg’s adopted style may not come from the golden age ofhacking, but his work ethic does. “We didn’t start with some grandtheory but with a project hacked together in a couple of weeks,”Zuckerberg says. “Our whole culture is, we want to build somethingquickly.” Every six to eight weeks, Facebook conducts “hackathons,” where peoplehave one night to dream up and complete a project. “The idea is that youcan build something really good in a night,” Zuckerberg says. “Andthat’s part of the personality of Facebook now. We have a big belief inmoving fast, pushing boundaries, saying that it’s OK to break things.It’s definitely very core to my personality.”
In the ongoing competition for talent, Zuckerberg believes that thecompany with the best hackers wins. “One good hacker can be as good as10 or 20 engineers, and we try to embrace that. We want to be the placewhere the best hackers want to work, because our culture is set up sothey can build stuff quickly and do crazy stuff and be recognized forstandout brilliance.”
Unlike the original hackers, Zuckerberg’s generation didn’t have tostart from scratch to get control of their machines. “I never wanted totake apart my computer,” he says. As a budding hacker in the late ’90s,Zuckerberg tinkered with the higher-level languages, allowing him toconcentrate on systems rather than machines.
For instance, when he played with his beloved Teenage Mutant NinjaTurtles, Zuckerberg wouldn’t act out wars with them, like most otherkids. He would build societies and pretend the Turtles were interactingwith one another. “I was just interested in how systems work,” he says.Similarly, when he began playing with computers, he didn’t hackmotherboards or telephones but entire communities — manipulating systembugs to kick his friends off AOL Instant Messenger, for instance.
Like Gates, Zuckerberg is often accused of turning his back on hackerideals, because he refuses to allow other sites to access theinformation that Facebook users contribute. But Zuckerberg says that thetruth is just the opposite; his company piggybacks — and builds — onthe free flow of information. “I never wanted to have information thatother people didn’t have,” he says. “I just thought it should all bemore available. From everything I read, that’s a very core part ofhacker culture. Like ‘information wants to be free’ and all that.”
A previous generation of hackers — and I — worried that the world ofcommerce would choke innovation and stymie a burgeoning culturalmovement. But hackerism has survived and thrived, a testament to itsflexibility. According to computer-book publisherTim O’Reilly— who fosters hackerism through his Foo Camp “unconferences” — hackingculture will always find new outlets. Big business may stumble upon andcommodify their breakthroughs, but hackers will simply move on tounexplored frontiers. “It’s like that line in Last Tango in Paris,”O’Reilly says, “where Marlon Brando says, ‘It’s over, and then it beginsagain.’”
The current frontier for hackers, O’Reilly says, is not the purelymathematical realm of 1s and 0s but actual stuff — taking the sametear-it-down-and-build-it-anew attitude that programmers once took tocompilers and applying it to body parts and wind-energy-harnessingkites. (O’Reilly Media publishes Make magazine and runs theMaker Faire festivals, celebrations of the DIY spirit.) But even thisarea, he says, has begun the shift toward entrepreneurship. The purehackers — the ones who do things for the sheer pleasure of it and areturned off by investors and spreadsheets — are looking elsewhere.O’Reilly says most of the action is in DIY biology — manipulatinggenetic code the way a previous generation of hackers manipulatedcomputer code. “It’s still in the fun stage,” he says.
Just ask Bill Gates. If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d behacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’ssort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates,whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him todevelop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want tochange the world in some big way, that’s where you should start —biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, hesays, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy tocontrol. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’redifferent opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism ofyouthful genius and naèFvetè9 that drove the PC industry — and can havethe same impact on the human condition.”
In other words, hackers will be the heroes of the next revolution,too.
Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) wroteabout tablet computing in issue 18.04.