he term I tend to think that one of the biggest problems in politics is that words become shibboleths within subcultures, and people in these communities don’t even know it. I recently had that starkly brought to my attention with the word “hacker”. My girlfriend was talking about setting up some home automation idea, and I said, “I can do it. I’m a hacker.”
She was confused. To her hacking means software intrusion through exploitation of security vulnerabilities. To me it means repurposing existing systems to do something not originally intended. I tend to think of her definition as “movie-style hackers”, or the white-hat/black-hat hackers.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I was one of the fortunate kid’s that had access to computers, and the ability to learn from reading manuals, and my own experimentation. I naturally fell into the, what we might now call the Maker culture. To people like us, (e.g. Adam Savage, and Corey Doctorow), “hacking” is a creative and explorative exercise.
I use like, “I can hack something together,” meaning “I can make it by repurposing some stuff I have laying around.” Or like, “that’s a clever hack,” meaning, “that’s not how things are supposed to work, but you found a clever work-around.” It’s even bled into mainstream US culture with terms like “life-hack” and “hardware-hacker.”
We in the community would call intrusion “cracking.” As in a “safe-cracker” or a “password cracker”. We use other words differently too, like “autodidact” being a term of pride as someone who learns on their own through exploration and research, rather than through formal instruction, which I’ve learned in the research community is a pejorative, ironically in this instance as a synonym for “a hack,” meaning not of professional quality.
So when my girlfriend and I had this disagreement, we went to several dictionaries. All of them supported her definition, and didn’t even list mine. I didn’t see my usage until I saw the “Hacker Culture” on Wikipedia. That’s when I realized what was going on: I had been using the term as a shibboleth.
Once I realized that, tabooing the word in our discussion got us back on track, but it really highlighted how invisible subtle differences in definitions can make communication difficult and cause disagreements. I think that most political disagreements suffer from this. I’m really trying to keep an eye out for that feeling of confusion that comes from talking with someone using the same words differently, and the hubris that comes from insisting that my definition is right.
Well, this comment is long enough. I’m in the weeds with work, and I really need to hack my way out of. 😉
You aren’t looking for professional. That takes systems and time, and frankly, king power. Hackers/Makers are about doing despite not going that route, with a philosophy of learning from failure. Now you may be interested in subjects that are more rare in the community, but your interests will inspire others.
I’m a software engineer by trade. I kind of think of myself as an artificer: taking a boring bit of silicone and enchanting it with special abilities. I always tell people the best way to become a wizard like me is to make shitty software. Make something you know, something small, and that sounds like fun. It’ll be terrible and barely functional, but it’ll be yours, and the next one will be a little less shitty. Keep at that, until you can start thinking at higher levels of abstraction. eventually, your work will be less and less shitty, and before you know it it’ll be good.
Hackers/Makers encourage amateur work, because that’s where most people are, because they’re just starting out. Make no mistake, there are professionals in the community, but no one expects you to be up to their standards. Instead, they’ll help you make things a little less shitty.
Make it. Then make it work. Then make it right.
Failure is your teacher.