17. Acculturation Mechanisms and the Link to Academia
An early version of this paper posed the following research question:
How does the community inform and instruct its members as to its
customsıĵ Are the customs self-evident or self-organising at a
semi-conscious level, are they taught by example, are they taught by
explicit instructionıĵ
Teaching by explicit instruction is clearly rare, if only because few
explicit descriptions of the culture's norms have existed to be used
up to now.
Many norms are taught by example. To cite one very simple case, there
is a norm that every software distribution should have a file called
README or READ.ME that contains first-look instructions for browsing
the distribution. This convention has been well established since at
least the early 1980s, but up to now it has never been written down.
One derives it from looking at many distributions.
On the other hand, some hacker customs are self-organizing once one has
acquired a basic (perhaps unconscious) understanding of the reputation
game. Most hackers never have to be taught the three taboos I listed
in Section Three, or at least would claim if asked that they are
self-evident rather than transmitted. This phenomenon invites
closer analysis -- and perhaps we can find its explanation in the
process by which hackers acquire knowledge about the culture.
Many cultures use hidden clues (more precisely `mysteries' in the
religio/mystical sense) as an acculturation mechanism. These are
secrets which are not revealed to outsiders, but are expected to be
discovered or deduced by the aspiring newbie. To be accepted inside,
one must demonstrate that one both understands the mystery and has
learned it in a culturally approved way.
The hacker culture makes unusually conscious and extensive use of such
clues or tests. We can see this process operating at at least three
levels:
-
Password-like specific mysteries. As one example, there is a USENET
newsgroup called alt.sysadmin.recovery that has a very explicit such
secret; you cannot post without knowing it, and knowing it is
considered evidence you are fit to post. The regulars have a strong
taboo against revealing this secret.
-
The requirement of initiation into certain technical mysteries. One
must absorb a good deal of technical knowledge before one can give
valued gifts (e.g. one must know at least one of the major computer
languages). This requirement functions in the large in the way hidden
clues do in the small, as a filter for qualities (such as capability
for abstract thinking, persistence, and mental flexibility) which are
necessary to function in the culture.
-
Social-context mysteries. One becomes involved in the culture through
attaching oneself to specific projects. Each project is a live social
context of hackers which the would-be contributor has to investigate
and understand socially as well as technically in order to
function. (Concretely, a common way one does this is by reading the
project's Web pages and/or email archives) It is through these project
groups that newbies experience the behavioral example of experienced
hackers.
In the process of acquiring these mysteries, the would-be hacker
picks up contextual knowledge which (after a while) does make the
three taboos and other customs seem `self-evident'.
One might, incidentally, argue that the structure of the hacker gift
culture itself is its own central mystery. One is not considered
acculturated (concretely: no one will call you a hacker) until one
demonstrates a gut-level understanding of the reputation game and its
implied customs, taboos, and usages. But this is trivial; all
cultures demand such understanding from would-be joiners. Furthermore
the hacker culture evinces no desire to have its internal logic and
folkways kept secret -- or, at least, nobody has ever flamed me
for revealing them!
Respondents to this paper too numerous to list have pointed out that
hacker ownership customs seem intimately related to (and may derive
directly from) the practices of the academic world, especially the
scientific research commmunity. This research community has similar
problems in mining a territory of potentially productive ideas, and
exhibits very similar adaptive solutions to those problems in the ways
it uses peer review and reputation.
Since many hackers have had formative exposure to academia (it's
common to learn how to hack while in college) the extent to which
academia shares adaptive patterns with the hacker culture is of more
than casual interest in understanding how these customs are
applied.
Obvious parallels with the hacker `gift culture' as I have
characterized it abound in academia. Once a researcher achieves
tenure, there is no need to worry about survival issues (Indeed, the
concept of tenure can probably be traced back to an earlier gift
culture in which ``natural philosophers'' were primarily wealthy
gentlemen with time on their hands to devote to research.) In the
absence of survival issues reputation enhancement becomes the driving
goal, which encourages sharing of new ideas and research through
journals and other media. This makes objective functional sense
because scientific research, like the hacker culture, relies heavily
on the idea of `standing upon the shoulders of giants', and not having
to rediscover basic principles over and over again.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that hacker customs are merely a
reflection of the research community's folkways and are actually
(for most) acquired there. This probably overstates the case, if
only because hacker custom seems to be readily aquired by intelligent
high-schoolers!
There is a more interesting possibility here. I suspect academia and
the hacker culture share adaptive patterns not because they're
genetically related, but because they've both evolved the one most
optimal social organization for what they're trying to do, given the
laws of nature and and the instinctive wiring of human beings. The
verdict of history seems to be that free-market capitalism is the
globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency; perhaps, in
a similar way, the reputation-game gift culture is the globally optimal
way to cooperate for generating (and checking!) high-quality creative
work.
This point, if true, is of more than (excuse me) academic interest.
It suggests from a slightly different angle one of the speculations in
The Cathedral
And The Bazaarthat, ultimately, the industrial-capitalist mode of
software production was doomed to be outcompeted from the moment
capitalism began to create enough of a wealth surplus for many
programmers to live in a post-scarcity gift culture.