by Steven Levy
Casual fans can be forgiven for overlooking Woz’s tech cred. These days, he’s more likely to get attention for his hobbies (like Segway polo) or his love life—he had a sign-of-the-apocalypse romance with comedian Kathy Griffin, although he has since married a woman he met on a Geek Cruise. Snarky websites have mercilessly mocked Woz’s celebrity-mag turns and frequent appearances in Apple Store first-day lines as indications of a sad irrelevance. But Woz blithely shrugs off the ribbing. He recalls the instruction he gave to Griffin a few years ago: “Hey, you can embarrass me, you can abuse me, you can ridicule me as much as you want—if it makes people laugh it’s worth it.” When I’d met him in the early 1980s, Woz was a socially awkward and dangerously vulnerable millionaire. Now, he is a bulletproof and a widely loved father figure—a mascot for hacking culture at large.
From time to time, Woz appears in the news as a force behind a startup with potentially groundbreaking technology. CL 9 was going to devise super-powerful remote controls. Wheels of Zeus promised to let users track their possessions through wireless technology. But the first wasn’t successful and the second never came out with a product. Now he works as chief scientist for a storage company called Fusion-io. “I’m speaking for the product, doing a lot of sales-marketing work, but I’m also looking at technologies that might be competitive in the future.”
But even Woz doesn’t expect to create another Apple II. In 2010, his greatest contribution is as a role model. His universal renown is a continuing reminder that brains and creativity can trump traditional notions of coolness. He’s the nerd in the computer room whose stature—and happiness—far eclipses that of fallen prom kings. And that’s an inspiration for nerds everywhere.
Indeed, one of his protégés, Andy Hertzfeld, remains inspired by hacking. Hertzfeld wasn’t a major figure in Hackers, but as one of the brightest early employees at Apple Computer, he could have been. (I first met him in late 1983, when he was one of the designers of the Macintosh operating system.) Today he’s at Google, where his most visible contribution is a feature that creates chronologies for Google News queries so users can see a story in context of its time. But hacking in your fifties isn’t as easy as doing it in your twenties. “When I was hacking on the Mac, I’d be working away and think an hour had passed. Then I’d look up and it had been four hours,” he says. “Now when I think an hour has gone by, I look up and it’s an hour.”
It’s not just the passage of years that’s changed Hertzfeld’s experience. He’s also had to adapt his individualistic approach to serve the geek-industrial complex that is Google. On one hand, Google is a hacker Mecca. It values engineers as its most important asset. “You are expected to work out of your passion,” Hertzfeld says—definitely a hacker-friendly value. But Hertzfeld can’t duck the fact that Google is also a big company with firm standards and processes when it comes to designing products, which makes the whole process more formal and less fun. “My relationship to my work is that of an artist to his work,” he says. At Google, he adds, “I can’t exercise my creativity in a way that gives me joy, which is my basic approach.”
But while he has lost some personal control, he has gained an unprecedented ability to make a mark on the world. Because of the ubiquity of computers and the Internet, with a few lines of code a person at Google or Apple can make a change that improves the life of millions. And that makes for a different kind of thrill than Hertzfeld experienced during the early days at Apple. “Do you know what was exciting about the Apple II?” he says. “We could beep the speaker. But we knew it could one day make music. That’s why it was so exciting—when things are more potential than realization, that’s the maximum excitement. On the other hand, there’s so much more leverage now to make a big impact. This stuff is as mainstream as can be these days. Google, the iPhone—these move the culture more than the Beatles did in the sixties. It’s shaping the human race.”
• • • • • • • •
Richard Greenblatt tells me he has a rant to deliver.
Uh-oh.
After all these years, is he finally going to complain about the way I talked about his personal hygiene in the early chapters of Hackers?
To my relief, Greenblatt is more concerned with what he views as the decrepit state of computing. He hates today’s dominant coding languages like HTML and C++. He misses LISP, the beloved language that he worked with back when he was at MIT. “The world is screwed up,” he says, before launching on a technical analysis of the current state of programming that I can’t even hope to follow.
But coding is just the beginning. The real problem, Greenblatt says, is that business interests have intruded on a culture that was built on the ideals of openness and creativity. In Greenblatt’s heyday, he and his friends shared code freely, devoting themselves purely to the goal of building better products. “There’s a dynamic now that says, ‘Let’s format our web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads,’” Greenblatt says. “Basically, the people who win are the people who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”
Greenblatt is not one of those people. He belongs to a different group: the true believers who still cling to their original motivation—the joy of discovery, the free exchange of ideas—even as their passion glows in the shadow of a multibillion-dollar industry. Despite their brilliance and importance, they never launched a million-dollar product, never became an icon. They just kept hacking.
I am surrounded by similar idealists here at the 25th Hacker’s Conference, which has continued as an annual gathering that celebrates the thrill of building something really cool. It has been a few years since I last attended, but it is just as I remember it: forty-eight hours of hackers meeting deep into the night at a Santa Cruz resort, discussing everything from economic theory to massive data storage. The crowd is somewhat long-in-the-tooth, despite an overdue effort to bring in more people under the age of thirty. The old dogs are still going at it.
Greenblatt is a regular here, a link to the Mesopotamia of hacker culture, MIT. These days, Greenblatt describes himself as an independent researcher. He moved into his mother’s house in Cambridge several years ago to take care of her in the last years of her life and has lived there alone since she died in 2005. He keeps up with some of his colleagues at MIT and for years has tried to get the other great canonical hacker of the Project MAC, Bill Gosper, to come to a Hackers Conference. But the brilliant Gosper, somewhat of a hermit, has never agreed. (Gosper, also still hacking, lives in Silicon Valley and sells math puzzles from his website.) “The main project I’ve been working on for fifteen years is called thread memory, and it has something to do with English language comprehension stuff,” says Greenblatt. “It’s basic research. It’s not something that works today, but anyway, it’s something.”
When Greenblatt looks at the current state of hacking, he sees a fallen world. Even the word itself has lost its meaning. When I ask him the state of hacking today, his reply is instant and heartfelt. “They stole our word,” he says, “and it’s irretrievably gone.”
Greenblatt is far from alone in his wistful invocation of the past. Even when I first interviewed Richard Stallman in 1983, he was bemoaning the sad decline of hacker culture and felt that the commercialization of software was a crime. I’d assumed the world would soon squash “The Last of the True Hackers” like a bug.
Was I ever wrong. Stallman’s crusade for free software has continued to inform the ongoing struggles over intellectual property, and won him a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. He founded the Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU operating system, which found widespread adoption after Linus Torvalds wrote Linux to run it; the combination is used in millions of devices. More important perhaps is that Stallman provided the intellectual framework that led to the open source movement, a critical element of modern software and the Internet itself. If software had its saints Stallman would have been beatified long ago.
Yet he is almost as
famous for his unyielding personality. In 2002, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig wrote “I don’t know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like.” (And that was in the preface of Stallman’s own book!) Time has not softened him. In our original interview, Stallman had said, “I’m the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world any more. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” Now—meeting over Chinese food, of course—he reaffirms this. “I certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born,” he says. “In terms of effect on the world, it’s very good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.”
The pain came in part from loneliness, which was once a common complaint among the tiny and obsessive cadre of computer fans. (A 1980 commentary by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo implied that hackers were antisocial losers who turned to computers to avoid human contact.) But as hacker culture spread, so did its social acceptability. Today, computer geeks are seen not as losers, but as moguls in the making. They tend not to suffer the intense isolation that has plagued Stallman—thanks, ironically enough, to the commercialization that he so bemoans.
Now, as much now as twenty-five years ago, Stallman is a fundamentalist, a Hutterite of hackerism. His personal website is a grab bag of appeals to boycott various enemies of the cause, ranging from Blu-Ray to J.K. Rowling. He even feuds with his former allies, including Torvalds. (“He doesn’t want to defend user’s freedom,” says Stallman.) He has particular contempt for Apple, with its closed systems and digital rights software. He refers to their products using Mad-magazine-style puns. The music player is an iScrod. Its mobile device is an iGroan. The new tablet computer is the iBad. And he is an equal-opportunity kvetcher. When I tell him that Hackers will soon be available on a Kindle—which Stallman, predictably, calls a Swindle—his dour demeanor evaporates as he energetically encourages me to resist the e-reader’s onerous DRM. “You have to believe that freedom is important and you deserve it,” he says. Despite his disillusionment, the fire still burns within him.
Lee Felsenstein is keeping the flame alive as well. Of all the people I wrote of in Hackers, Felsenstein was the one who most explicitly spoke of the political consequences of the computing revolution. But since his triumph with the Osborne, his own career has been checkered. He worked for eight years with the innovation lab Interval Research, but that effort went bust. A number of other projects seemed promising—including an effort to distribute Internet telephone service to Laos that was to be powered by bicycle generators—but for one reason or another that didn’t take off. “If I wanted to, I could be bitter about it, but I don’t want to,” he says.
Though Felsenstein foresaw the rise of personal computers, he’s still waiting for the kind of democratization that he hoped would accompany it, when cheap computers in the hand of “the people” would allow everyone to take information, manipulate it to better reflect the truth, and distribute it widely. “It’s beginning to happen, but not the way I had assumed,” he says. "Lincoln Steffens once commented, ‘I have seen the future and it works,’ but I’m with the guy who changed that to, ‘I have seen the future and it needs work.’”
Felsenstein saw with dismay the erosion of the term “hacker” but thinks that it is now on the upswing. “Hacker now has the connotation of someone on the edge and more likely be able to do good than bad. So I think we’re winning the cultural war that everybody thought we lost back in the 80s.” For his part, Felsenstein is putting the next generation of geeks on the path of righteousness. He recently helped establish a workspace in Mountain View, California, called the Hacker Dojo, which charges its eighty members $100 a month for access to a 9500-square-foot space with an in-house network and weird tools like IR readers. It’s one outpost in a growing number of "Hacker Spaces" across the country devoted to empowering formerly isolated and underequipped gearheads. “I am a sensei of the dojo, which as you may know is a grand revered master,” he says, a wide grin on his face. “Felsenstein sensei.”
• • • • • • • •
Greenblatt, Stallman, and Felsenstein see hacking as a set of ideals. But Paul Graham sees it as a humming economic engine. The forty-five-year-old Internet guru, himself a fanatic engineer in his day, is a cofounder of Y Combinator, an incubator for Internet startups. Twice a year, his company runs American Idol-style contests to select twenty to thirty budding companies to participate in a three-month boot camp, culminating in a demo day packed with Angel investors, VCs, and acquisition-hungry companies like Google and Yahoo.
How does Graham pick the most promising candidates? Easy. He looks for the hackers. “We’re pretty hackerly so it’s easy to recognize a kindred spirit,” says Graham, who in 1995 co-created Viaweb, the first web-based application. “Hackers understand a system well enough to be in charge of it and make it do their bidding, and maybe make it do things that weren’t intended.” The best prospects, he says, are “world hackers”—people “who not only understand how to mess with computers, but mess with everything.” Indeed, Graham says that today, every company is looking to hire or invest in companies run by hackers. “We tell founders presenting at Demo Day, ‘If you dress up too much, you will read as a stupid person to the investors.’ They’re coming to see the next Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.”
Stallman would recoil in horror at Graham’s equating hacking with entrepreneurial effectiveness. But Graham has found that hacking’s values aren’t threatened by business—they have conquered business. Seat-of-the-pants problem solving. Decentralized decision making. Emphasizing quality of work over quality of wardrobe. These are all hacker ideals, and they have all infiltrated the working world. The kind of tension I saw between hackers and bosses in Sierra On-Line has largely been resolved, not just at start-up companies but bigger ones like Google, as the hacker mentality has been incorporated as a value within the firm. (Ken Williams, by the way, has left the business after Sierra was snapped up by a conglomerate. “Both Roberta and I have completely ‘dropped out’ of the game business, or even playing games,” he writes in an email. A sailing enthusiast, he’s written three books on his cruising adventures, and Roberta is working on a nonfiction novel about the Irish immigration.)
A new generation of hackers has emerged, techies who don’t see business as an enemy but the means through which their ideas and innovations can find the broadest audience. Take Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has drawn four hundred million users to share their personal lives online. At twenty-five, he has proven a master at the black art of business development—deliberately and purposefully opening his site to advertisers and marketers. Yet he clearly thinks of himself as a hacker; last year, he told the audience at an event for would-be Internet entrepreneurs that “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.”
To find out what he meant by that, I visit him at Facebook headquarters, a large building on California Avenue in Palo Alto—the same street where I rented a room in 1983 to research Hackers. Surprisingly, the CEO, best known for wearing North Face fleece, is sporting a tie. He explains that he is nearing the end of a year in which he promised his team that he would show up for work in neckwear every day. It turned out to be a good one for Facebook—despite the recession, it doubled its user base and made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. “Maybe it’s a charm,” he says, of the attire. “But I think it mostly just chokes me.”
Zuckerberg’s style may not come from the golden age of hacking, but his work ethic does. “We didn’t start with some grand theory, but a project we hacked together in a couple of weeks,” Zuckerberg says. “Our whole culture is we want to build something quickly.” Every six to eight weeks, Facebook conducts “hackathons” where people have one night to dream up and complete a project. “The idea is you can build something really good in a night,” says Zuckerberg. “And that’s part of the personality of
Facebook now. We have a big belief in moving fast, pushing boundaries, saying that it’s OK to break things. It’s definitely very core in my personality.”
In the ongoing competition for talent, Zuckerberg believes that the company with the best hackers wins. “One good hacker can be as good as ten or twenty engineers, and we try to embrace that. We want to be the place where the best hackers want to work, because our culture is set up so they can build stuff quickly and do crazy stuff and can be recognized for standout brilliance.”
Unlike the original hackers, Zuckerberg’s generation didn’t have to start from scratch or use assembly language to get control of their machines. “I never wanted to take apart my computer,” he says. As a budding hacker in the late 90s, Zuckerberg tinkered with the higher-level languages, allowing him to concentrate on systems, rather than machines.
For instance, when he played with his beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he wouldn’t act out wars with them like other kids did. He would build societies and pretend the Turtles were interacting with each other “I was just interested in how systems work,” he says. Similarly, when he began playing with computers he didn’t hack motherboards or telephones but entire communities—exploiting bugs to kick his friends off AOL Instant Messenger, for instance.