Hacker, pirates and trolls

Transcription

Observatoire du Management Alternatif
Alternative Management Observatory
__
Essai
The community of the free:
Hacker, pirates and trolls
Claudia Pöpperl
29 janvier 2009
Majeure Alternative Management – HEC Paris
2008-2009
: Hackers, pirates and trolls» – Janvier 2009
1
Genèse du présent document
Cet essai a été réalisé sous la forme initiale dans le cadre de la Majeure Alternative
Management, spécialité de troisième année du programme Grande Ecole d’HEC Paris.
Il a été dirigé par Thanh Nghiem, professeur du cours « Métabolisme » et soutenu le janvier
2009.
Origins of this research
This research was originally presented as a research essay within the framework of the
“Alternative Management” specialization of the third-year HEC Paris business school
program.
The essay has been supervised by Thanh Nghiem, (Professor in HEC Paris) and delivered on
January, 29th 2009.
Charte Ethique de l'Observatoire du Management Alternatif
Les documents de l'Observatoire du Management Alternatif sont publiés sous licence Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/fr/ pour promouvoir l'égalité de partage des ressources intellectuelles
et le libre accès aux connaissances.
L'exactitude, la fiabilité et la validité des renseignements ou opinions diffusés par l'Observatoire du Management
Alternatif relèvent de la responsabilité exclusive de leurs auteurs.
2
La communauté des logiciels libres: Hackers, pirates et trolls
Résumé : Dans cet essai, la communauté des hackers est examinée. Après une définition de
ce que sont les hackers, nous abordons l’évolution de ce groupe en donnant des exemples
illustrés. Nous décrivons le contexte actuel ainsi que les tendances évolutives de ce groupe.
Nous présenterons ensuite brièvement le style de vie des hackers, avant de terminer en
analysant le phénomène de « peer production » ainsi que son importance pour l’avenir.
Mots-clés : Hacker, Troll, Peer Production
The community of the free : Hackers, pirates and trolls
Abstract : This essay represents a personal view and tries to describe the hacker community .
Starting with a definition of these terms, its evolution is consecutively presented showing
some illustrating examples. Furthermore, the actual context and existing transitory tendencies
are highlighted, as well as the hacker lifestyle. Finally, the phenomenon of “peer production”,
as well as its importance for the future is explained.
Key words : Hacker, Troll, Peer Production
3
Remerciements
I would like to thank my professor Thanh Nghiem as well as Tom Bouillut (a living example
of the hacker community) and my friend Felix Husse.
4
Table des matières
Claudia Pöpperl........................................................................................................................1
Genèse du présent document...................................................................................................2
La communauté des logiciels libres: Hackers, pirates et trolls.............................................3
Remerciements .........................................................................................................................4
Table des matières ....................................................................................................................5
Introduction...............................................................................................................................6
Partie 1.Hacker – A Definition...............................................................................................8
Partie 2.Evolution of the hacker community..........................................................................9
Partie 3.A state of transition..................................................................................................13
Partie 4.Peer production........................................................................................................18
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................23
Bibliographie...........................................................................................................................25
5
Introduction
This essay is exploring a subject which so far has rarely been studied. Thorough
information on this topic is hard to obtain and the main sources can be found on the internet.
Yet, these sources are difficult to validate and therefore, I’d like to underline that this essay
represents rather a personal opinion than a scientific study.
Nevertheless, this essay is treating a subject with quite fundamental implications for the
whole society. Today, we see ourselves confronted for the first time with a technology that
allows spreading information at basically no costs – except the cost for equipment. This could
implicate essential changes: Access to education might no longer be a question of financial
means, nor of social standing. The way of learning might also be a different one since auto
didacticism is fostered by this new technology. We can already observe these phenomena in
the hacker society and it was therefore my concern to explore the same in order to deduct
possible influences on the whole society and on our ways of creating.
Once upon a time, there was a man who dedicated his whole life to overcome ignorance.
His firm belief was that individuals only do wrong because they lack information, because
they don’t know better. So in order to live a righteous life, he demonstrated that you first must
question your knowledge and start learning. For this belief he even accepted to be executed.
This individual I am describing here is no fictional character; the man I am talking about is
Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers of all times and one of the first representatives of
what we call “hackers” today.
To associate Socrates with the expression “hackers” might be a bit surprising since in the
mind of the general public, hackers are pirates, irresponsible computer geeks and a real threat
to today’s society. Movies like “Wargames” and personalities like Karl Koch, alias Hagbard
Celine who tried to sell information he had obtained illegally through hacking to the KGB, or
Kevin Mitnick, the world famous cracker, have contributed to create this negative image.
Without doubt, personalities like these are part of the hacker community, but the concept of
“hackers” is broader. It is not necessarily negative, nor positive.
In this essay, I will first have a closer look at what we call hackers and I will try to give a
more accurate definition for this term. Secondly, I will try to show where hackers come from,
6
how this movement evolved over time in order to illustrate the motivation behind the concept.
The next step will be to describe today’s situation, how things are changing and what role
hackers may take in this world. And finally, I will examine something called peer production,
a derivate of the hacker ethic, and its impact on the future.
7
Partie 1. Hacker – A Definition
Looking up the term “hacker” on the internet within my research led to a variety of
confusing concepts and names which describe all kinds of special subcultures. You can find
any expression linked to the subject, from script kiddies to black or white hats, i.e. “the good
and the bad” hackers. So in order to define hackers, let’s first try to identify the smallest
common denominator of all the existing descriptions. Consequently we will see that hackers
are extremely curious individuals who are looking for knowledge, who want to understand
and are destined to create. They look for an intellectual challenge, they want to experiment
and they are fascinated by innovation and technology. The field of expertise they want to
explore might be the latest technology, but it might as well be the field of social studies. The
aim is to appropriate oneself a particular knowledge and then to use it in order to gain peer
respect.
Their culture is deeply anchored in science fiction and the world of role plays. In these
fictional worlds, they can fully develop their imagination, they can be whoever they want to
be and even though certain rules exist, there are no such boundaries as those we are
confronted with in our society. This influences the main credo that all hackers share which
states that all information should be available to everybody, hence every individual should be
able to decide for itself if it wants to access a piece of information. In a world where elites
decide what kind of information is available to which person, this credo provokes
confrontation. But I will deepen this problematic at a later point of this essay.
Given this definition we will now examine history in order to identify famous hackers and
trolls and to follow the evolution of this term.
8
Partie 2. Evolution
of
the
hacker
community
As already mentioned in the introduction, one of the first hackers in human kind history
was Socrates. Not only did he advocate the search for knowledge, he also rebelled against
prevailing structures limiting access to knowledge. In ancient Greek society, education and
therefore knowledge, was limited to the people who had a certain position in society and the
money necessary to pay tutors and teachers, the Sophists. Socrates opposed these methods as
well as the idea of paid education, and he regarded the knowledge the Sophists taught as
being superficial. He claimed that a perpetual search for knowledge and truth was the only
way to live up to the moral obligations human beings have. This claim influenced his method
of teaching, which actually was not so much a way of teaching somebody, but rather the
collective questioning of existing knowledge or what was thought to be knowledge. This
technique, the Socratic dialogue, aimed to evaluate how much an individual actually knows,
where knowledge has to be improved and finally to foster peoples’ modesty and to clarify that
it's all about "learning to learn".1
Another philosopher one can mention in this context is Immanuel Kant, one of the
founding fathers of the German “Aufklärung” who lived more than 2000 years after Socrates.
Like his predecessor, he embraced the idea of developing knowledge through constant
questioning. Furthermore, he demanded the emancipation of the human being in the field of
knowledge where the individual should dare to know, as he put it.2
Of course, I am well aware that these are only two brief examples of a variety of
representatives of the hacker spirit before the upcoming of telecommunication technologies,
but I chose them specifically to underline some of the most important philosophical aspects of
the hacker ethic.
1
Skills, Socrates and the Sophists: Learning from History Author(s): Steve Johnson Source: British Journal of
Educational Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 201-213 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of
the Society for Educational Studies
2
Kant and the End of the Enlightenment in Prussia Author(s): Steven Lestition Source: The Journal of Modern
History, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 57-112 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
9
With the upcoming of the telecommunication technology, notably the telephone, the world
entered a new era, globalization became more tangible and people all over the world were just
a phone call away from each other. It was the beginning of a time of easy information
exchange which should find its consecutive continuation in the invention of the internet. In
the 1950s this technological development provoked the appearance of a group of people who
can be considered the inspiration and forefathers for today’s hackers, the phreakers. Phreakers
developed methods to infiltrate the telephone network which therefore became for them a
place to meet like-minded people. Probably the most famous representative of these phone
phreakers is the notorious John Draper, alias Captain Crunch, who demonstrated the use of a
simple gimmick sold with a cereal brand that allowed manipulating and entering the
telephone network.
But creating technological devices, like the notorious blue box, in order to hack the
telephone network was only one part of phreaking. Additionally, this movement gave rise to a
technique that one might even call the “art” of social engineering as phreakers accessed
crucial, mostly confidential information by interacting in a manipulative way with their
conversational partner on the phone. So when phreaking became known to the public through
an article written by Ron Rosenbaum in the early seventies, it caused enormous paranoia,
especially regarding the latest political incident, the Watergate scandal. This set an end to
phone phreaking, but could not avoid the rise of another group, the hackers.3
To understand the hacker movement, one first has to remember the computer technology’s
origin. The first computers were constructed in the context of war like the famous ENIAC, a
computer weighing over 30 tons which had been constructed on 14th February 1946 by John
Atanassof, professor at the State University of Iowa. Another famous example is the
electronic device “Colossus” which had been created in 1942 during the Second World War
by the British secret service in order to crack the communication code of the German
military.4 They were impersonal, hard to understand and not to be touched. But when Steve
Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple computers, read the article about phreaking mentioned
above in the 1970s, things were about to change. More and more people, may it be at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or in the famous Homebrew computer club, a
gathering of people interested in technology who tried to develop practical and accessible
3
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1mez1_history-of-hacking-1-of-3_tech
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1mf0k_history-of-hacking-2-of-3_tech, visited Saturday, 3 January 2009
4
« Il y a 50 ans, l'ordinateur » by Marie SANZ, published on 14 février 1996 in the ORIGINE-DEPECHE:
WASHINGTON
10
computers and software, and used the club as a place to exchange ideas and to help each other
with problems occurred during the developing process5, started to explore computers adapting
it to their needs and therefore democratizing computer technology. Technology became
accessible to the public and as a consequence, the hacker community grew steadily. During
this time of innovation, another tendency became visible. Some computer geeks started to
realize the business potential behind their activity and tried to sell the software they came up
with. As a result, they opposed the hacker community which they considered as competition
and thieves since the geeks did not have the same philosophy of non existing property of
ideas6. This led to several confrontations between them and hackers, one famous example
being a letter from Bill Gates, one of the founders of Microsoft, addressed to the Homebrew
computer club. In this letter, Bill Gates accused the members of stealing his ideas, an
understanding that the hacker community did not share.
The hacker society evolved over time and gave rise to such remarkable personalities like
Richard Stallmann, a researcher at the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT who started the
Free Software Foundation and who is a passionate advocate of the concept of copy left,
something we will explore in more detail later on, or Mitch Kapor, the famous author of
“Lotus Software”. These two personalities are representatives of two different current
tendencies in the hacker community: The former advocating the complete liberation of
information in order to achieve an educational goal, the latter movement consists of hackers
who rather posses an entrepreneurial spirit and favour a certain extent of confidentiality of
private information in order to avoid manipulation. Even though these two tendencies
contradict themselves in certain points, they both stand for the liberation of general, public
information. This also involves software and the information included in the program’s object
code.
So far, I have only listed bright and righteous examples of hackers. But in order to reflect
the whole truth, I also have to portray those who fell for the "dark side", the pirates. Two
famous examples I’d like to mention here, are Karl Koch and Kevin Mitnick. The former sold
information he had obtained infiltrating computer systems to the KGB, the latter was the most
wanted computer criminal in the late 1990s due to his social engineering and computer
5
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php, visited Friday, 20 March 2009
Let the Hackers Hack: Allowing the Reverse Engineering of Copyrighted Computer Programs to Achieve
Compatibility Author(s): Gary R. Ignatin Source: University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 140, No. 5
(May, 1992), pp. 1999-2050 Published by: The University of Pennsylvania Law Review
6
11
cracking activities. Why some hackers decide to use their abilities in a malicious way, is a
difficult question. Of course, one might argue that they see themselves as outlaws in an
artificial world they try to conquer like the Wild West.
However, I personally believe that the choice to use your knowledge for criminal acts
depends almost completely on a being’s personality. But as I progress with this essay, I hope
to give more indications to answer the question mentioned above.
In the following part, I will describe the actual situation today, i.e. the legal situation for
software development, the changing partition of power, as well as an exemplary lifestyle of a
hacker I have interviewed.
12
Partie 3. A state of transition
Today, the people we call hackers are mainly developers of free software. Yet, this term
can be used for people being active in so many other fields, like social sciences, arts or
research – just to name a few possibilities. As shown above, the definition given here is quite
broad. Nonetheless, we will now have a look at hackers being active in the field of software
development. Their software is special insofar that you can study it, modify it and copy it
(sometimes with certain restrictions). Free software is embracing a new concept of sharing
ideas which conventional software does not and represents therefore a break with established
norms.
Legislation regarding conventional software and the intellectual property associated with
it is a quite complex topic. When computers and corresponding software came up, legislators
had to decide how exactly to protect such items and what jurisprudential concept to use. In
order to give an incentive to continue creating and innovating, most governments decided to
apply the concept of copyright. This concept is usually applied to literature and written work,
whereas technology usually is covered by the concept of patents. The reason for choosing
copyright as a legislative frame might be the artistic character of producing software.
Furthermore copyright legislation is supposed “to foster the growth of learning and culture for
the public welfare, and the grant of exclusive rights to authors for a limited time is a means to
that end."7 Within this legal framework, ideas as such are not protected, but only the way they
are expressed.
So theoretically, a software developer who wishes to develop a program which is
compatible with existing prevalent software, i.e. to use a common structure in order to enable
exchange between these programmes, can access to the idea behind the existing software and
adapt his work to it.
In practice, however, it is only possible to access the idea behind software via something
called reverse engineering, a method to translate the unreadable binary code of which
software is composed. Yet ironically, this procedure is considered to be copyright
infringement. So practically, copyright applied as in the case of software is overprotective and
7
Let the Hackers Hack: Allowing the Reverse Engineering of Copyrighted Computer Programs to Achieve
Compatibility; p.17; Author(s): Gary R. Ignatin Source: University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 140, No.
5 (May, 1992), pp. 1999-2050 Published by: The University of Pennsylvania Law Review
13
therefore harmful to the actual idea behind it. This fact has led to a market situation where
only a few big actors have real influence. Their products have become a standard that clients
follow because they want to ensure the compatibility with a maximum possible of other
additional products on the market. Of course, this development did not foster, but actually
harm innovation.
Hackers oppose the idea of copyright since it is incompatible with their credo of free
access to information. They - in particular Richard Stallman and his Free Software
Foundation - advocate another solution, the concept of copyleft which enables modifications
and distribution of software as it is classified as a public domain.
As a consequence, the rule of copyright becomes more and more questionable and the
success of the copyleft concept among software developers starts to become evident.
Currently, about 80% of the projects distributed via Sourceforge, a large Open Source
applications and software directory on the internet, are under the copyleft license.8 A reason
for this success is certainly the prevailing mentality amongst software developers, but also the
enormous costs associated to defend one’s copyright. In an interview conducted with a
representative of the hacker community, he explained that legal prosecution is only logical if
there is a lot of money at stake. Moreover, he stated that it is really hard, almost impossible to
prove implementation of reverse engineering to an extent big enough to be considered
copyright infringement. So de facto, copyright is rather a mean to threat and hardly ever
applied.
As we have seen, the legal perspective of software and its development are in a state of
transition. But is this the only change that is taking place? If you have a look at our society,
you can see that from its beginning, a strong hierarchy determined every day’s life. Social
status determined a citizen’s rights, his way of living, the choice of sources of income and
even who to marry. As I have illustrated already, this sociological and political structure
existed during ancient times, but if you have a closer look, you’ll see that it actually is still in
place today despite the emergence of democracy. Even though we have the concept of equal
rights, it is still a small group of persons, the so called elite, which is in fact leading the world,
not the people. Let’s just have a look on a paper released by the U.S. census bureau in august
2008, called “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007”
8
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/copyleft_has_no_impact_project_activity, visited Tuesday,
27 January 2009
14
which is one of the current population reports.9 Here, you can see that “[t]he official poverty
rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent” and that “[a]t 8.2 percent, the 2007 poverty rate for nonHispanic Whites was lower than the rate for Blacks and Asians—24.5 percent and 10.2
percent, respectively.” To measure the depth of poverty the “Income-to-poverty ratio” is used,
“a percentage that compares a family’s or an unrelated individual’s (people who do not live
with relatives) income with their poverty threshold.” And this ratio indicates quite obliviously
that not only is the percentage of people suffering from poverty in the United States in not
negligible, but also that the poverty becomes more and more intense.
10
So already the
income discrepancy becomes more and more evident. But due to this fact, the access to higher
education – which in so many states you have to pay for - is also limited to only a small group
of people. Of course, one might easily argue that the difference in income is easily
compensated by the amount of scholarships proposed.
Here again, we can consult the
statistics, this time published by the U.S. Department of Education in their “Mini-Digest of
Education Statistics 2008”.11 Here, they show that even though “[t]he percentage of American
college students who are minorities has been increasing[, it is still only ]32 percent in 2007.”12
One has to remember that minorities includes several groups, such as Hispanics, Asian and
Afro-Americans who do not only represent just a small community in the United States.
Of course one cannot deduct from only these numbers that social injustice is still
prevailing. But if you have a look around you just cannot deny the fact that the poor
population increases and that the access to knowledge is still limited to a very small group of
people.
And naturally this also has consequences for the world of business. In companies, strong
hierarchies are prevailing and rules frame every single action taking place there and of course
your education defines one’s place in this structure. The interesting question now is who
actually dictates these rules? It is evident that in conventional firms this is not object of a
democratic process, but the role of the management and the entrepreneurs. For years, this way
of functioning was working quite well – until we suffered an enormous shock: In the year
2007 a financial has shaken the world and finally led to an economic crisis whose dimension
9
“Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007” by Carmen DeNavas-Walt,
Bernadette D. Proctor and Jessica C. Smith, issued in August 2008
Seen on http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf, visited Friday, 20 March 2009
10
“Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007” by Carmen DeNavas-Walt,
Bernadette D. Proctor and Jessica C. Smith, issued in August 2008, p. 23
11
“Mini-Digest of Education Statistics 2008” by Thomas D. Snyder at the National Center for Education
Statistics, issued in March 2009,
Seen on http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009021.pdf, visited Friday, 20 March 2009
12
“Mini-Digest of Education Statistics 2008” by Thomas D. Snyder at the National Center for Education
Statistics, issued in March 2009, p. 13
15
is yet to be determined. Right now, numerous economists are trying to explain what reasons
exactly have created such an enormous impact.
I don’t have the audacity to claim that I have an answer to this question. Yet, in the process
of research for this essay, I began to question myself. At this time, where information is so
relevant to master all challenges with which we are confronted on a daily basis, could it be
possible that our old way of doing business and traditional structures are just not efficient
anymore? Of course, I do not advocate a radical change of doing business here, but regarding
the challenges we face in our times, is it perhaps time to treat information differently? Should
we leave more space to individuals to develop their creativity?
But let’s be a bit more concrete and have a closer look at an example, the software
industry. Today, the need for new and more adapted software solutions becomes more and
more urgent and therefore developmental periods are reduced as well. To keep up with such
an intense speed is not easy for the hitherto big players like Microsoft since their
organizational structure is in line with a strongly developed hierarchy because this hierarchy
can be harmful as it tries to control and consequently slows down the developing process.
Indicators for the shift in power in the software industry are easy to find: just remember the
failure of Microsoft Vista for example.
Other big companies, like Google, have recognized the importance of free software, which
now represents an important part of their offer in order to overcome problems which are
associated with their hierarchical structure.
In this changing environment, the hackers now take a special place. With their behaviour
and beliefs they exercise an important influence on today’s IT economy, and perhaps even on
society, or at least on knowledge society.
They already managed to transform the IT industry. They managed to decentralize existing
power and introduced a new concept, the one of free software. We have already discussed the
legal aspects, but the idea behind this concept is strongly rooted in the history of the hacker
movement. Still today, you can find the prevailing spirit of collaboration and exchange of
ideas, the same values that were at the origin of the hacker community. The advantage of free
software is the fact that the resulting product is not only more adapted to customer needs, as it
is highly individualized depending on personal requirements. This, however, guarantees a
16
minimum risk of virus infiltration since a virus is normally designed to infect a large amount
of computers, i.e. standard software.
In this context it might be interesting to have a closer look at those specimen called hackers
in order to get a more complete picture of what we actually talk about and to understand how
important an exchange of ideas is for their culture. During my research, I conducted an
interview with Tom Bouillut, an active member of the hacker community which permitted me
to gain a deeper inside in this world.
When I first chose this topic, I associated hackers with the romantic image of cowboys
who live in a new world, where conventional rules hardly apply. I then discovered that a life
of a “professional” hacker - as I have interviewed somebody whose profession is software
development - is yet different: those who have managed to become freelancers can organize
their schedule themselves, they receive the whole value added created during their activities,
they are contributing depending on their motivation and most of them perceive software
development rather as a passion, not as a job. As stated in an interview I have conducted, the
process of developing something is an art, where the ultimate goal is producing something
beautiful. For this, they work together, they are not, as one could imagine, lonely artists. Even
though, they are not necessarily living close by, the fact that the only things they need to work
are their notebooks, telephones and an access to the internet, allows them to communicate
easily among each other in order to solve problems that occur during the creation of free
software or just to find new ideas. Furthermore, this strong community helps them to keep
their clients loyal who on the other hand address them because of their reputation and because
of the fact that most hackers share clients and project development as a group, so they hardly
encounter any commercial costs. These conditions allow hackers to develop the extent of
creativity which is essential to foster innovation and which are easily compatible with their
beliefs.
17
Partie 4. Peer production
As we now have tried to illustrate how hackers live, what their philosophical inspiration is
and how society and the IT industry are changing, we will now have a closer look at a
phenomenon which has occurred as a logical consequence of the hacker mentality: peer
production. The idea of information liberalization has reached society as we have seen.
Here, we do not talk about software development any more, but rather of collaboration
using the internet. As mentioned in the introduction, human kind is for the first time
confronted with a medium which does not generate exorbitant costs, which enables the
exchange of ideas (one of the cornerstones of the hacker spirit) and which creates a whole
new way of learning. Hence, this medium combined with conception of free information and
creation through cooperation has lead to what will now be described in more detail.
The most famous example for a peer production is the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia that
is a project of the non-profit Wikipedia foundation. Here, over 12 million articles “have been
written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be
edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website”13, except for some countries where
the Wikipedia website is blocked. But Wikipedia is only one of numerous examples of peer
production even though it might be the one that attracts the biggest attention of the general
public. Another interesting and perhaps more illustrating example is Nasa Clickworkers, "an
experiment that showed that public volunteers (clickworkers), many working for a few
minutes here and there .. . can do some routine science analysis that would normally be done
by a scientist or graduate student working for months on end.” 14 To be more specific, the Nasa
Clickworkers project is conducted via a website on which volunteers from all over the world
are encouraged to spend only short amount of time in order to “mark craters on maps of Mars,
classify craters that have already been marked, or search the landscape of Mars for
"honeycomb" terrain”.15 The astonishing result of this project was that “[i]n its first six
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia, visited Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm" Author(s): Yochai Benkler Source:
The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 112, No. 3 (Dec., 2002), pp. 369-446 Published by: The Yale Law Journal,
Company, Inc.; p. 384(17),
15
Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm" Author(s): Yochai Benkler Source: The Yale Law
Journal, Vol. 112, No. 3 (Dec., 2002), pp. 369-446 Published by: The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc.;
14
18
months of operation, more than 85,000 users visited the site, with many contributing to the
1.9 million entries recorded (including redundant entries of the same craters used to average
out errors)”16 So apparently the motivation to participate was given amongst volunteers.
Furthermore, the quality which resulted from these six months is surprisingly high as “the
automatically-computed consensus of a large number of clickworkers is virtually
indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars
craters.”17
But how is this possible in our society where rules and obligations or financial incentives
are the most common way to ensure collaboration, and where intrinsic motivation is still
considered insufficient without the complementaries of financial stimulus? And how come
that quality can be kept at a certain level?
Conclusively, we encounter the following main issues which peer production has to
manage in order to be successful:
1)
Motivation: How can you motivate people to work for free when afterwards they are
not able to appropriate the results and benefits?
2)
Organization: How should a project be organized so that resources are used
efficiently if none of the members has the power to control collaboration?
3)
Quality: How can you ensure integration of good contributions at low costs and how
can you filter out bad ones?
I will therefore try to answer these questions, mainly based on Yochai Benkler’s analysis
of these problems in his essay “Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm"”.
The questions that are displayed here necessitate a closer look at human nature. Human
beings are creative: they like to create, construct and solve problems. However human beings
often lack patience, so their creative urge is naturally quite short unless motivational factors
can prolong the phase of interest. This theory can be easily illustrated by the example of a
person trying to solve a riddle. The first hours, this person might be extremely passionate and
16
p. 384(17),
17
p.384(17),
19
even enthusiastic. After a while however, if she or he doesn’t see any advancement, the being
can easily become discouraged. But when you have peer production, there are only limited
motivational factors: you do not get pay for your work; you are only one amongst many
contributors and your work can be modified, which means that the outcome of your work is
not your property. So how do projects like the NASA clickworkers overcome this
disadvantageous situation? If you go on the website and have a closer look at it, you will see
that marking a crater only takes about five minutes, a time slot short enough to ensure
sufficient motivation. As a conclusion one might draw that in order to guarantee peer
production, you have to break down a task into small modules, i.e. components which should
be as small as possible. This guarantees that participants only have to sacrifice a short amount
of time which avoids a negative, tiring association affiliated with the project.
Another important aspect which has to be taken into consideration is the different
motivational levels of volunteers. Not every individual displays the same amount of devotion
to a task and therefore the size of the mentioned components has to vary in order to adapt to
every individual’s willingness to work. In the Clickworkers project for example one can
choose how many craters he wants to mark, how much time one invests in this activity. So the
contributors can adapt their workload to their motivational level and their schedule – a fact
that guarantees a lot of freedom in their way of working.
But the granularity of tasks, as Benkler puts it, also helps to answer the second question.
Just imagine you have a variety of components from which you can choose. Your personal
choice will of course depend on your motivation, but also on your capabilities, or to be more
precise on your own evaluation of your capabilities. In companies or markets, this process of
evaluation is up to a second person who is going to judge your inner motivation and
capabilities based on criteria that are visible to the outside environment. But all criteria not
visible to the outside world, but kept inside of a person, are neglected so that the result of such
an evaluation is not necessary valid. On a long run, an assignment based on personal
evaluation, i.e. a democratisation of task assignment will probably lead to better results. This
also overcomes the problem of dilution of power in such a project, since every individual has
to power to decide in what form and to what extent it desires to participate.
But all the statements made so far are based on a postulate which so far has not been
mentioned concerning the second resource used in existing peer production, the first one
being human creativity. This resource is a special one and has an extremely important role in
20
our society, it is information. Its nature is insofar particular since information is nonrival 18,
which means its use does not imply its consumption, it can even be used at the same time by
several persons. Naturally, this is an extremely important premise to ensure that this special
form of task assignment can actually work because it spares the necessity to include the
assignment of information into his considerations. The efficient distribution of an additional
resource would in fact necessitate somebody to coordinate, which is not the case when human
creativity is the only factor to think about.
Finally, to solve the third problem stated above, it is advisable to facilitate tasks, make
them easy to integrate in their construction and to install a mechanism to sort out qualitatively
inferior contributions. This mechanism can take two different forms. Either one uses the mean
of results which perquisites a certain redundancy as in the case of the clickworkers. Here,
craters have been marked several times by different volunteers in order to average out flawed
contributions. The other option is peer monitoring as carried out in other peer production
projects. In this case volunteers get to edit their collaborators’ work. This option can be quite
refined to the extent where ratings of volunteer’s work can be adopted to create peer pressure
due to recognition. For example, if I know that my work will be graded after it has been
displayed, I will necessarily put more effort into it. And even if this incentive fails to promote
quality, the rating will still make it possible to identify bad work or even qualitatively bad
participants in the project.
This way of production is clearly rooted in the Hacker mentality which encourages
collaboration without hierarchical structures and puts a strong emphasis on recognition from
peers. Nevertheless, there are some limits to this way of group effort. As we have already
seen, the possibility of fractioning a project and the nonrival nature of information are two
important conditions for the success of such an endeavour. Additionally, another prerequisite
is indispensable to foster such collaboration. Since volunteers are not supposed to appropriate
the profit resulting from their activity, it is necessary that nobody else does as well. If one of
the actors in the project tries to monopolize the project, it will immediately lead to a decline in
motivation amongst the other participants.
18
p. 377(10),
21
The same decline in motivation will occur if the project inscribes itself in a business
framework, which means that results are used to achieve a profit by its initiators or
administrators.
22
Conclusion
As we have seen now the model of peer production, how it functions, what has to be
ensured in order to guarantee that it will work, we also have to admit that it is not applicable
to every sort of project. But could it still revolutionize our way of producing value? Or more
daring - is this even an indicator for the change in our society?
One of the major keys to a better life is education, but so far, this key has mostly been in
the hands of those who actually already are in a good position. Until the rise of the internet
and its various applications, one always had to pay for information, so basically the basis for
education. Information was conceived as a good which should only be consumed by the few
who could afford this. This, however, is completely against its nature since information is
nonrival
Moreover, it is also completely against a fundamental right every single one of us has, the
right to learn. In a society where we claim to respect human rights, can we really think that we
can neglect the right to learn and the free access to knowledge? Isn’t it knowledge which
makes us become better, more fulfilled human beings as Socrates suggested it?
So if we know that due to the internet, information can be spread at basically no costs and
if we know that due to movements like peer production the exchange of information is even
more facilitated, is it too daring to imagine that education is entering a new era? If someone
on the other end of the world can explain how to analyse a problem, how to even solve it –
and this only thanks to the fact that this person and you can communicate via the internet at
very low costs, isn’t it possible to imagine that more and more people will use this possibility
in order to educate themselves? Can education actually turn from a privilege into a right
which everybody can exercise?
The answer to this question could be a yes, but one should not neglect the threats to this
movement. Quite recently we have witnessed how governments have tried to censor contents
which could be disadvantageous for their purpose: May it be China, who tries to silence
critical voices on its policies, or Burma, which tries to avoid involvement of other states in its
inner politics by controlling what kind of image of its government is transmitted via the
internet, censorship is not something unusual, even at the age of internet.
23
But censorship is never something which cannot be circumvented. There is always a way
to get hold onto information.
A bigger threat to this whole educational revolution is of another, more subtle kind. When
we transmit knowledge, we also always transmit values, ideas and basic convictions which
influence our way of seeing things. If someone is a firm believer in democracy for example,
he or she will defend his convictions and therefore interpret facts in a way that they will
strengthen his beliefs. And if asked to explain a problem linked to this topic, it is just natural
that he or she will pursue an argumentation favourable to his or her cause.
So if we access information on the internet, it should be our natural reflex to question this
information, to ask ourselves what ideas and values are linked to it and if these values are
compatible with our own values, ideas or if perhaps they challenge our beliefs.
However, this questioning is not necessarily a reflex for someone who has never been
confronted with this kind of duty, who is not what I have described as a hacker. But how can
someone in this position learn how to analyse what might be called meta-information? Since
the internet is a great, yet rather impersonal source of information, this task can be quite a
challenge. Yet again, I would like to point to the previous chapter of peer production where
reputation and peer control help to sort out such a problem. Nevertheless, a consumer of
information has to be careful in this case since it might as well be the case that the publisher
of information and his peers might just share the same convictions, values, ideas, or whatever
you may call this.
So, as a consequence, the constant questioning of what we seem to know and the motives
behind displayed information cannot only be left to the internet, but should be something that
our environment fosters. Yet again, who exactly is this environment? It is our family, our
teachers, our professors, the educational system. I therefore advocate adapting our existing
educational system to these needs. We should not only be taught facts, but rather should we
be guided in our process to develop a critical and questioning mind which will enable to use
the internet in a prosperous and positive way.
Only if we learn about the fragile character of information, we will be able to profit from this
abundant source of information, the internet. We should all embody the hackers’ spirit, this
rebellious quest for truth implicating a constant questioning of facts and rules so that we can
start learning and consequently become better human beings.
24
Bibliographie
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Skills, Socrates and the Sophists: Learning from History Author(s): Steve Johnson Source:
British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 201-213 Published by:
Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Society for Educational Studies
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University of Chicago Press
Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm", Author(s): Yochai Benkler
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Published by: The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc.
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A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Nov., 2005), pp. 684-685
Published by: American Sociological Association
Le prophétisme hacker et son contenu politique par Nicolas Auray
Mise en ligne le vendredi 29 octobre 2004
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to Achieve Compatibility; Author(s): Gary R. Ignatin
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A Bleak First for Microsoft: Layoffs; In Sign of Deeper Recession, Tech Giant to Cut 5,000
Jobs, Peter Whoriskey and Annys Shin, Washington Post Staff Writers, 23 January 2009 The
Washington Post, FINALD01, Copyright 2009, The Washington Post Co. All Rights
Reserved
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04 (c) 2009
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Author(s): Roy Rosenzweig
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Published by: American Historical Association
25
Quieting the Virtual Prison Riot: Why the Internet's Spirit of "Sharing" Must Be Broken
Author(s): Albert Z. Kovacs
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modèle social pour l’ère post-industrielle
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Publié le vendredi 25 mai 2001. Mis en ligne le mardi 6 mai 2003.
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Mise en ligne le vendredi 29 octobre 2004
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/copyleft_has_no_impact_project_activity,
visited Tuesday, 27 January 2009
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March 2009
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3 January 2009
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3 January 2009
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2009
26

Hacker, pirates and trolls

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