7. The Joy of Hacking
In making this `reputation game' analysis, by the way, I do not mean to
devalue or ignore the pure artistic satisfaction of designing
beautiful software and making it work. We all experience this kind
of satisfaction and thrive on it. People for whom it is not a
significant motivation never become hackers in the first place, just
as people who don't love music never become composers.
So perhaps we should consider another model of hacker behavior in
which the pure joy of craftsmanship is the primary motivation.
This `craftsmanship' model would have to explain hacker custom as a way
of maximizing both the opportunities for craftsmanship and the quality
of the results. Does this conflict with or suggest different results
than the `reputation game' model覺警
Not really. In examining the `craftsmanship' model, we come back to
the same problems that constrain hackerdom to operate like a gift
culture. How can one maximize quality if there is no metric for
quality? If scarcity economics doesn't operate, what metrics are
available besides peer evaluation覺警 It appears that any craftsmanship
culture ultimately must structure itself through a reputation game
-- and, in fact, we can observe exactly this dynamic in many
historical craftsmanship cultures from the medieval guilds onwards.
In one important respect, the `craftsmanship' model is weaker than the
`gift culture' model; by itself, it doesn't help explain the
contradiction we began this paper with.
Finally, the `craftsmanship' motivation itself may not be
psychologically as far removed from the reputation game as we might
like to assume. Imagine your beautiful program locked up in a drawer
and never used again. Now imagine it being used effectively and with
pleasure by many people. Which dream gives you satisfaction覺警
Nevertheless, we'll keep an eye on the craftsmanship model. It is
intuitively appealing to many hackers, and explains some aspects of
individual behavior well enough.
After I published the first version of this paper, an anonymous
respondent commented: ``You may not work to get reputation, but the
reputation is a real payment with consequences if you do the job
well.'' This is a subtle and important point. The reputation
incentives continue to operate whether or not a craftsman is aware
of them; thus, ultimately, whether or not a hacker understands his own
behavior as part of the reputation game, his behavior will be shaped
by that game.