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Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic

I would­n’t be sur­prised to find out that many of us here today like to see our work as a con­tin­u­a­tion of say the Tech Model Railroad Club or the Homebrew Computer Club, and cer­tain­ly the ter­mi­nol­o­gy and the val­ues of this con­fer­ence, like open source for exam­ple, have their roots in that era. As a con­se­quence it’s easy to inter­pret any crit­i­cism of the hack­er ethic—which is what I’m about to do—as a kind of assault.

Geek of the Week: Brewster Kahle

We’re at a thou­sand dol­lars per giga­byte, which is what cur­rent disk dri­ves cost. The twen­ty ter­abytes that peo­ple esti­mate in ASCII that’s in the Library of Congress is just twen­ty mil­lion dol­lars. So that’s not very much mon­ey in terms of being able to store and retrieve the Library of Congress.

Uncreative Writing

With the rise of the Web, writ­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy. And by that I mean writ­ing has encoun­tered a sit­u­a­tion sim­i­lar to what hap­pened uh, to paint­ing with the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy. A tech­nol­o­gy so much bet­ter at repli­cat­ing real­i­ty that in order to sur­vive, paint­ing had to ors— or, uh, alter its course radically.

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