This is the third in a series of posts about Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters.
If you told the average man on the street that there’s a website called Hacker News, he’d assume that it’s a nefarious launchpad for cyberattacks, hosted on an ancient server deep in the frosted planes of Siberia. It is, in fact, very few of those things, and is widely beloved by the startup types who inhabit it.
Chapter 4 of Hackers & Painters, “Good Bad Attitude” (posted to Graham’s website as The Word “Hacker”) is a brief and digressive meditation that takes that etymological divide as its starting point. Graham looks closely at the two meanings of the word “hacker” and, for that matter, the root noun “hack.” One meaning is favorable, used to praise cleverness, while the other is damning. Why is this? “Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. And there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that’s merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).” He then spends the remainder of the 6-page essay talking about smart hackers’ distrust of authority.
One of the pleasures of reading printed essays as opposed to web-based ones is that you can infer a lot about the intended audience from the references made. In a blog, you’re allowed to make all the obscure references you want as long as they’re hyperlinked to Wikipedia. This essay, by contrast, is clearly one hacker telling other hackers about hackers. He isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know; he’s just expressing it more clearly. “There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project,” he writes, evidently expecting his audience to have already absorbed Richard Feynman’s wonderful autiobiographical adventures. Across the page, he shows a picture with the subtitle: “Jobs and Wozniak with a circumvention device, 1975.” There is no corresponding text. He expects his readers to know enough about the founding of Apple for this picture to evoke the founders’ blue box shenanigans. Nor, when he describes the invention of Unix, does he feel compelled to add: And Unix is a really important operating system!
Graham missteps when he proposes, “It seems to me that there is a Laffer curve for government power, just as for tax revenues.” He then muses in a footnote that he would not object to having such a curve named for him, if only so that people could remember it more easily. The wonderful thing about the Laffer curve is that it captures, in a simple illustration, an important yet counterintuitive fact: Raising taxes can lower tax revenue. Most people don’t consider this possibility, and therefore believe that deficits can always be paid off later by raising taxes. By contrast, just about everyone realizes that an all-powerful government is not a recipe for a vibrant economy; nor, for that matter, is anarchy. We don’t need a Graham curve to express these beliefs.
I’m not sure whether to consider Chapter 5, “The Other Road Ahead,” to be prophetic or merely observant. It was written nearly a decade ago, and asserts that software will one day move en masse to the web. Well, of course! we now say. Whether this was so obvious at the time, in an age when broadband was rare and AJAX not yet invented, I can’t recall. Certainly, it would have been an astonishing essay in 1995, when Graham was developing one of the first webapps, Viaweb. There are some moments that feel especially prophetic—“Clients shouldn’t store data; they should be like telephones. In fact they may become telephones, or vice versa.”—but ultimately the essay is forgettable by virtue of being familiar and, in the year 2010, uncontroversial. The title is a reference to Bill Gates’ book The Road Ahead; with Windows Azure, even Microsoft is going down the other road now.
[Update: In assessing the prescience of “The Other Road Ahead,” I neglected to examine the footnotes in the 2004 book version. One is borderline mind-boggling: “If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.” However, he loses some foresight points when he later adds, “I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn’t. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn’t necessary, and much of it breaks. And when you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or toaster), who knows if they’ll even support it?” Support for JavaScript on the iPhone’s browser was one of its most revolutionary features when it debuted three years later, and Graham acknowledges as much in a footnote to the version of the essay on his site: “In the original version of this essay, I advised avoiding Javascript. That was a good plan in 2001, but Javascript now works.”]
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