Introduction
In the following I will first
refer to Pekka Himanen analysis of the hacker's passions that gave rise
to the internet. In the second part I will describe how the internet became
the ambiguous place of a cyber-mythology. Taking some insights from Emmanuel
Lévinas I suggest a twist of the hacker ethic into a passionate
"ethic of the Other." In the third part I deal with information technology
from the perspective of the "technologies of the self" (Michel Foucault).
I.
Passions of the Internet
In "A Brief History of Computer
Hackerism" Pekka Himanen tells a story concerning the passions that gave
birth to the internet. He writes:
"The hackers transformed
computers and the Net into a social medium that was not part of either
the governmental nor corporate plans. Email was invented in July 1970 by
Ray Tomlinson, who is also the one to thank (or blame) for the @-symbol
in email addresses. Abbate describes the consequence of this unexpected
innovation: "ARPANET users came to rely on email in their day-to-day activities,
and before long email had eclipsed all other network applications in volume
of traffic." From then on, e-mail has been the most popular use of the
Net." (Himanen 2003)
Himanen stresses how the hacker
ideal of openness influenced the creation of new communication forms such
as chat, invented by Jarkko Oikarinen, a student at the University of Ouli
in Finland, in 1988 or the alt(ernative) news group domain, cofounded in
1987 by California libertarian John Gilmore, and the worlwide hypertext
vision of Tim Berners-Lee, working at particle physics research center
CERN in Switzerland. A key issue in the creation of a free digital
space, which according to Berner-Lee's dream should be "a space in which
anything could be linked to anything," was the elimination of the 'operator'
"comparable in experience to the elimination of telephone operators" allowing
a free and direct exchange between individuals. Personal computers should
be used not to control but to free people (Himanen 2003). At the beginning
of the hacker's tradition during the 1960s at MIT there is a leading passionate
mood namely enthusiasm. Hackers are people who "program enthusiastically."
(Himanen 2003) In the preface of his book Himanen remarks that the concept
of 'hacker' has been applied by hackers themselves to "an expert or enthusiast
of any kind." In other words, a hacker is a person who is enthusiastically
or, as we may also say, passionately dedicated to his/her work (Himanen
2001). The hacker ethic's driving value can be stated as follows:
"The belief that
information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical
duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating
access to information and to computing resources wherever possible." (Himanen
2003)
In the site of his well-known
book "The Hacker Ethic" -- the book was planned as a collaborative work
with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells, authors of prologue and epilogue
-- Himanen makes a difference between 'hackers' and 'crackers' or between
a constructive and a destructive use of computers:
"Here, the word
hacker doesn't refer to computer criminals but what the word originally
meant: a person who wants to do something that one is passionate about,
something in which one can realize oneself creatively, and something in
which one can build things for the good of all. The hacker ethic is a new
work ethic questioning the old Protestant ethic." (Himanen 2001)
It seems prima facie
paradoxical to oppose, as Himanen does, hacker's ethic which is a 'work
ethic' to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
instead of considering it in opposition between to an ethic of leisure.
But, in fact, this is an opposition between two ethics of work. Hacker's
values go, according to Himanen, beyond computer hackerism as they promote
"passionate and freely rhythmed work." Its basis is not just utilitarian
rationality but creative imagination (Himanen 2001). The same can be said
with regard to hacker's money ethic. While in the Protestant ethic, money
is made by "information-owning," hacker's money ethic is based on "information-sharing."
Instead of being based on the efficient rationality of producing (material)
things as a mean to an endless process of economic profit, hacker's activity
is guided by "a desire to create something that one's peer community would
find valuable -- a common attitude." (Himanen 2001) Finally Himanen mentions
a third element of hacker ethic namely their "network ethic or nethic"
a dimension most closely related to modern Protestant ideals to freedom
of expression seen now as freedom of access to the internet. This seems
today's driving passion of the world wide and WWW debate on the so called
digital divide.
According to Himanen, hacker
ethic is passionate Platonic:
"This passionate
relationship to work is not an attitude found only among computer hackers.
For example, the academic world can be seen as its much older predecessor.
The researcher's passionate intellectual inquiry received similar expression
nearly 2,500 years ago when Plato, founder of the first academy, said of
philosophy, "like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born
in the soul and straightway nourishes itself." (Himanen 2001)
The context of the quotation
from the "Seventh Letter" (Ep. VII, 341 c-d) concerns Plato's famous thesis
that true philosophic insight cannot be communicated through writing but
arises "suddenly" ("exaiphnes") when people live together ("syzen")
and talk often and familiarly to each other ("synousias") about such matters.
But hackers are not said to be true Platonists no less than followers of
the Protestant ethic are said to belong necessary to the Western civilisation,
so that for instance, no Japanese could adhere to it. In other words Plato
and Weber are less historic examples than symbols of a specific view of
work and society. Hacker ethic is a passionate or erotic one and, in this
regard, it is the opposite to the kind of ascetic work ethics described
by Max Weber (Weber 2000). Its historical precursor was not the academy
but the monastery. Hackers activity is described by Linus Torvalds in the
Prologue as "entertainment" because it is "interesting, exciting, and joyous"
and goes beyond the realm of surviving or of economic life. Himanen prefers
Eric Raymond's word "passion" instead of "entertainment." (Himanen 2001)
In his essay "The Academy and the Monastery" dedicated to Eric Raymond,
Himanen writes:
"The reason why
the hackers' open-source model works so effectively seems to be - in addition
to the facts that they are realizing their passions and are motivated by
peer recognition, as scientists are, too -- that to a great degree it conforms
to the ideal open academic model, which is historically the best adapted
for information creation." (Himanen 2003a)
Raymond considered the bazaar
instead of the cathedral as model for the spirit of open-source. Himanen
prefers another pair namely the academy and the monastery. Following the
ideal of the academic model hackers abhor plagiarism and submit themselves
freely to the internal sanctions of their peers. Hacker's passion is learning
in an "informal way, following their passions" the task of teaching being
"to strengthen the learners' ability to pose problems, develop lines of
thought, and present criticism." (Himanen 2003a)
Hacker ethic is a Socratic
one. But hacker's passionate learning is not directed as Plato's passionate
search for truth towards a world beyond the appearances. Computer programming
is an embedded activity and near to "flesh life." Sandy Lerner liked riding
naked on horseback. Richard Stallman was a "bearded and longhaired guru."
Eric Raymond liked role-playing games (Himanen 2001). These examples are
as far from Max Weber's monks, protestants, and bureaucrats as they are
from the Platonic contempt of the material world with its sensorial and
sensual pleasures. This kind of work ethic is closer to the Epicurean than
to the Platonic tradition.
The network society as such
does not simply deny or supersede industrial society and its Protestant
work ethics. It would be an illusion to believe that technological advances
would "somehow, automatically, make our lives less work-centered." (Himanen
2001) In other words, it is not the technological passion of the internet
that is going to change society but "an alternative spirit" that may be
able to "crack the lock of the iron cage" which, according to Max Weber,
would be the stage of a lifeless and materialistic work-centered ethic
(Weber 2000, 188). But even if work in the sense of labor will not end,
as Himanen stresses following Manuel Castells, hacker work-ethic is considered
as the opposite to the view of a society in which work has become an end
in itself. If Protestant ethic moved the centre of gravity from Sunday
to Friday, then hacker ethic is itself moved by a "pre-Protestant" ethic.
Why this expression instead of "Catholic ethic"? Answer: because, although
Catholic ethic is more near to Sunday and to joy, it is hierarchical, dogmatic,
and monastic. Hackers take the best of both traditions and meet at
the Academy not at the cathedral. To put it in Greek mythological terms,
their leading gods are not Sisyphus and Ares but Hephaistos and Eros --
working in the Academia. In order to realise their passions, hackers:
"are ready to accept
that the pursuit even of interesting tasks may not always be unmitigated
bliss. For hackers, passion describes the general tenor of their activity,
though its fulfilment may not be sheer joyful play in all aspects. (...)
Passionate and creative, hacking also entails hard work." (Himanen 2001)
We may conclude that the hacker's
passion is this networking of joy and work, of Sunday and Friday that goes
beyond the alternative 'either pure work or pure leisure.' The object of
this passion is life itself, passionate life, creativity. The key issue
is that such a fundamental attitude is not restricted to computer hackerism.
This means that the passion of life is stronger and broader than the passion
of the internet. In order to make sense, the passion of the internet, hacker
ethic in a narrow sense, has to become a passion for life. But there is
an ambiguity in hacker ethic as it seems to blur the difference between
the passion of doing good work with the passion of being good or of joyful
and creative activity. The tension between technical knowledge ('techne'')
concerning how to produce ('poiesis') something and ethical knowledge
('phronesis') dealing with what kind of action ('praxis')
makes ourselves better and happier is, according to Aristotle, a crucial
one. It seems to me as if this tension is particularly difficult
to perceive within the perspective of information technology as far as
we intend to program not just production processes but human action. There
is a tension between ethics and informatics, i.e., between the passion
of programming life and the passions of life itself (Capurro 1990, 2003).
This tension shines forth when we explore them in the internet.
II.
Passions in the Internet
Passions are overall present
in the internet particularly the passions of the body but also, of course,
the ones of the soul. This sounds paradoxical since according to John Perry
Barlow:
"Cyberspace consists
of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing
wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere
and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." (Barlow 1996)
Barlow's "Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace" is based on the dichotomy between body and
thinking or, more precisely, between an ontology of matter and a digital
ontology (Capurro 2002). The exclusion of the body from cyberspace concerns
no less the political and economic life. Barlow proclaims:
"Governments of
the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from
Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of
the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereingty
where we gather. (Barlow 1996)
This kind of digital divide
is, of course, not eliminated in case every human being has access to the
internet and/or a homepage. In contrast to Barlow's proclamation the internet
has become a common place for all kinds of sexual, economic, and political
transactions with their corresponding passions and inequities. The "global
conversation of bits" between "virtual selves" (Barlow 1996) looks like
a parody of an angelic society (Capurro 1995, Esterbauer 1998). The prophets
of the internet promise no less than "salvation in cyberspace" (Niewiandomski
2002). This is indeed a kind of "cyber-gnosis" (Wertheim 1999). The alternative
"bits or bodies" (Frohmann 2000) means no less than the exclusion of the
social and material basis of human existence. The Canadian information
scientist Bernd Frohmann writes:
"Since information
always refers us to materiality and social practices, a leading issue of
information ethics, such as access, cannot be construed simply as access
to something called "information". Access to information refers us to access
to social practices. The problem for the poor, the marginal, the outsiders,
is not that they lack laptops, but that they are unjustly excluded from
the social networks essential for trust in documents, in utterances, in
representations and texts of any kind, in short, for information to emerge
for them at all." (Frohmann 2000, 434)
The leading passion of our time
is the passion of communication which is indeed an angeletic passion. I
use the neologism 'angeletic' in order to draw the attention to the phenomenon
of messages and messengers. According to sociologist Niklas Luhmann, there
is a difference between message ("Mitteilung"), i.e., the action of offering
something (potentially) meaningful to a social system ("Sinnangebot"),
information ("Information"), i.e., the process of selecting meaning from
different possibilities offered by a message, and understanding ("Verstehen"),
i.e., the integration of the selected meaning within the system, as the
three dimensions of communication within social systems (Luhmann 1987,
196). Message and information are related but not identical concepts:
-
a message is sender-dependent,
i.e. it is based on a heteronomic or asymmetric structure. This is not
the case of information: we receive a message, but we ask for information,
-
a message is supposed to bring
something new and/or relevant to the receiver. This is also the case of
information,
-
a message can be coded and transmitted
through different media or messengers. This is also the case of information,
a message is an utterance that gives rise to the receiver's selection through
a release mechanism or interpretation.
The message phenomenon implies
thus a heteronomic structure between sender and receiver. I have suggested
that we need not only a theory of media but a theory of messages and messengers
or an angeletics (Capurro 2003a).
The passion of communication
is a modern one ever since the Enlightenment proclaimed the ideal of censorship-free
production and distribution of messages that culminated in the principle
of freedom of the press. This principle, which can be seen as the
modern version of the principle of freedom of speech in oral societies,
became a basic element of modern democracy. The passion of communication
gave rise in the middle of the 20th century to a new technology of message
distribution and use that we call the internet. With its different possibilities
of distributing messages (one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many, one-to-one)
the internet brought about a paradigm shift with regard to the hierarchical
structure of mass media particularly since the widespread social use of
such tools as e-mail, chat, and mailing lists. With the development of
cellular phones these internet tools became ubiquitous. The question of
freedom of access is seen as a crucial issue as far as networked
mediated communication plays a major role in the economic, political, social,
and cultural development of nations. The involuntary exclusion from the
internet is called the digital divide.
But we live indeed in a time
of "empty angels" or “mediatic nihilism”, in which we forget what message
is to be sent while the messengers multiply as Peter Sloterdijk remarks:
“This is the very disangelium of current times” (Sloterdijk 1997).
Nietzsche's word "Disangelium" (Nietzsche 1999, 211) in contrast
to evangelium, points in this case to the empty nature of the messages
disseminated by the mass media, culminating in Marshall McLuhan's dictum:
"The medium is the message." This is a paradoxical outcome of hacker ethic
with its passions for free, open, and joyful research. Hacker's alternative
spirit that would "crack the lock of the iron cage" (Max Weber) has produced
an invisible cage of surveillance, oppression, and exclusion. Secondly,
the abhorrence of plagiarism has turned into a generalised copy-and-paste
syndrome. People loose the ability and the joy to think by themselves.
This is exactly what Plato
put into the mouth of the Egyptian king Thamus who was not convinced about
how useful the invention of writing was, as suggested by god Theut, the
Hermes of Greek mythology. According to Theut's marketing slogans, writing
was a medicine ('pharmakon') for improving memory and making people
wiser but, in fact, king Thamus was not convinced with this kind of technology
assessment and foresaw that his people would become idle and forget the
capability of remembering and thinking on their own (Phaidr. 275 a-b).
Finally, the message society suffers from the call syndrome. Everyone seems
obsessed with the idea of receiving or not a message that might be of crucial
importance for her life, his business, their business etc., and vice versa,
everyone seems obsessed with the idea of sending messages all the time,
to anybody, and anywhere that might be of no less importance with regard
to all these objectives. The first obsession can be called the apocalyptic
obsession, the second one the prophet obsession. Between them
we can find all possible degrees of passions of and in the internet that
becomes more and more the core of society as it turns to be invisible and
trivial.
The hacker's passion of information
sharing turns into the cult of information protection. The Protestant ethic
of profit takes the lead of the internet and creates for a few seconds
a new economy that immediately blurs and lets the iron cage become even
more powerful as it gets more digital intelligence inside. This seems also
the case with regard to all kinds of 'flesh cages' that become re-engineered
and integrated into a super bio-information system. But, in the meantime,
people are still hungry and suffer in their everyday existence. It would
be misleading to oppose the passion of eating to the passion of speaking
or to believe that there is a simple logic as to what should be done first.
But, obviously, first things first!
"Grand est le manger" - "Eating
is great!" is a slogan of Rabbi Yohanan recurrent in the work of Emmanuel
Lévinas, particularly in his comments to the Talmud or "the oral
law" (Ouaknin 2003). Human beings are not only speaking beings but also
hungry ones. Both passions, the passion of eating and the passion of speaking
belong together. Emmanuel Lévinas' "ethic of the Other" is a heteronomic
or, as we could also call it, an angeletic ethic as it takes the call of
the other, namely 'I am hungry', as the basic one. But, at the same time,
it reflects on this call in order to be able to answer to it not only with
regard to the materiality of her stomach -- usually Lévinas' ethic
is well known for the importance he gives to the face of the other --
but in order to give her a message as well. Humans do not live from bread
only.
The passions of the internet
and the passions in the internet are passions of speaking. Also with regard
to them the ethic of passions, being a pre-Protestant or a Protestant one,
that gives the primacy to our own passions can be ethically twisted
through a reflection and action that gives the primacy to the passions
of the Other, particularly to her stomach, a word whose Greek origin means
at the same time open mouth ('stoma') and stomach.
III. Information
Technology and Technologies of the Self
Michel Foucault distinguishes
the following kinds of technologies, namely:
-
"technologies of production,
which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things,"
-
"technologies of sign systems,
which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or significations,"
-
"technologies of power which
determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or
domination, an objectivizing of the subject,"
-
"technologies of the self, which
permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others
a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain
a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality."
(Foucault 1988, 18)
How can we ensure that the benefits
of information technology are not only distributed equitably, but that
they can also be used by the people to shape their own lives? The first
part of the question refers to legal and institutional aspects. The second
part goes further, and asks not only for living norms but also for living
forms. All three aspects include questions of truth, power and desire,
that is, they include individual and social options concerning these questions.
Under these premises we can ask, How can we ensure that institutional,
normative and "life-forming" options remain open? My answer is that a legal
control of information technology is not enough, but that these normative
aspects should rest not only on a "code-oriented" but also on a "self-oriented"
morality.
Foucault's distinction between
code-oriented and self-oriented morality does not imply a contradiction
between moral rules on the one hand and individual freedom on the other.
It stresses, on the contrary, their complementarity. In order to become
moral subjects, it is not enough to have a code of ethics and to act according
to it. There is another aspect concerning the different options through
which we can put rules into practice within the context of our personal
lives and within the cultural and historical context of different kinds
of communities. In this case we are not simply agents but we become, as
individuals and as communities, moral subjects of our actions. We are not
an unchangeable "I" or "we," but an intersection of possible choices in
a process of becoming, individually and socially, ourselves within a field
of linguistic and institutional practices (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983).
The "self" is not the abstract
subject invented by epistemological theories but a dynamic intersection
of traditions and life projects through which individual and social identity
is permanently created and questioned. But the ethical quest for authenticity
is not only a process through which we become different by mutually recognizing
our differences. It means, more radically, to be interpellated by the other,
"face to face," as Emmanuel Lévinas (1961) says, particularly by
the have-nots. The quest for our "selves" is ethically preceded by the
questioning through the other, and the care of the self would be completely
misunderstood if it were not interpreted as the intersection where we take
care of our mutual relationships in the face of anonymous rules, practices,
and institutions.
If we conceive information
society as a deliberative and an imaginative one where the practice of
advising and consulting plays a key role, as should indeed be the case
in democracies, information networks could become the artificial marketplace
for different kinds of deliberation, dissent and advice, according to the
insight that "in designing tools we are designing ways of being" (Winograd
and Flores 1986 p. xi). We have to learn not just to store, retrieve, and
manage information but to become aware that what we primary do is to handle
with biased knowledge, i.e., that our basic ability in an information society
should be a hermeneutical one, which includes such critical arts as interpretation,
aesthetic or creative design, and responsibility towards our lives. In
other words, we need information technology and technologies of the self:
the art of friendship, the art choosing, the art of silence and the art
of laughter. Let us try to think about these technologies of the self and
about information technology.
The Art of Friendship
in the Face of Power
In a "healing vision," information
technology should be questioned insofar as structures of power and oppression
do not allow its transformation by people who try to help themselves and
to help each other in shaping their lives. This transformation means a
radical change of perspective: information technology is not just the subject
that transforms us and our world, but at the same time, we have to incorporate
it within different projects for saving and promoting the variety of life
on this planet. We have been developing modern technology under the banner
of mastery. Nature is giving us a last chance to do it under the banner
of friendship. Hans Jonas (1984) has shown that we cannot limit friendship
to our present world but have to extend it to the generations to come.
The Art of Choosing in
the Face of Oppression
Information technology gives
us means for reality construction, but it would be fatal if we did not
make our choices dialogically, that is, through awareness of and respect
of people and other living beings. As Christiane Floyd (1992) writes, "An
important aspect of computer science is that it deals with creating reality:
the technical reality of the programs executed on the computer, and the
conditions for the human reality which unfolds around the computer in use.
Therefore, the conceptual categories 'true' and 'false' it relies on are
not sufficient in themselves. We have to go beyond them by finding categories
for expressing the felicity of our choices, for distinguishing 'more or
less desirable' as we proceed in making distinctions and decisions in communal
design processes. This is essential for dealing with quality in software
development and use" (p. 20).
The Art of Silence in
the Face of Verbosity
Information technology is
a loquacious technology. We have to learn the art of silence in order to
hear what others say and have to say and to be able to overcome the art
of taboo-silence issuing from the old paradigm of value-free science and
technology. We need a universal ethical "logos" for coexistence in a common
world. But this "logos" may remain monologic when it takes the technological
shape of mass media. We have to learn to hear the differences between the
"logoi" and to respect them. And we have to learn to hear our silent dimensions,
namely finitude and suffering. To learn the art of silence means, on the
one hand, to learn to confront ourselves with nothingness, i.e., with this
nothingness we call our existence (Goguen, 1992), and, on the other hand,
to feel responsible for the suffering of others, particularly when they
are just a picture on the TV-screen.
The Art of Laughter in
the Face of Fear
Technology possesses some
of the characteristics of religious belief. In his famous novel The
Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco has shown that the art of laughter is
a dangerous art for all dogmatic beliefs. Just as there are many senses
of silence, there are also many kinds of laughter. I am referring now to
a kind of laughter as an expression of insight into the basic weakness
of all our technological projects. In Antiquity, laughter was considered
a sign of madness as well as wisdom. The art of laughter means our ability
to question our personal and social identity. It is a sign of our personal
or social openness for what we are not, or for what we do not understand,
for the Other. This gives us an opportunity to question our values from
a not just "political" but also "poli-ethical" perspective. An "ethics
of care", as Thomas Froehlich (1991, p. 299) remarks, cannot be blind to
the individuality and contextuality of problems and needs, by using Rawls'
technique of a "veil of ignorance". To care is, of course, not the same
thing as to be fair (Rawls 1971). We should make sure that the practices
of information become part of the practices of deliberation, advising,
and dissenting; they should become part of our self-questioning so that
they do not give rise to a new form of power, which strengthens the discourse
of the panopticon into a super-panopticon (Poster, 1990).
Conclusion
I call our being aware of
the relationships between humans, world and technology, i.e., being aware
of the fallacies of humanism, naturalism and technicism, synthetic thinking.
The "care of the self" is synthetic thinking in the sense that we positively
acknowledge our mutual dependencies: dependency of humans on nature and
technology, of technology on nature and humans, and of nature on humans
and technology. How can we ensure that the benefits of information technology
are not only distributed equitably, but that they can also be used by people
to shape their own lives? I think that the technologies of the self are
an essential part of the answer to this question.
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