Hacking is Playful

Also central to the Hacker Ethic is playfulness. At a 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny wrote, “Hacking is a playful act. In a primal sense, play is the investigation and experimentation with borders and combinations” (O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, website). Despite early, highly structured approaches to computing in mainframe laboratories in the mid-twentieth century, a computing culture of iterative experimental hacking has evolved that is essentially playful. Hacking as play emerged in response to the Cold War environment where the first “hacks” were parasitic on established systems and at the same time working against the system. Richard Stallman writes about hacking as “playfulness, cleverness, and exploration.” He writes, “Hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible in a spirit of playful cleverness.” Activities that display playful cleverness have “hack value.” Essentially, “Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking” (Stallman, “On Hacking.”)

Gerardo Marti, Hacker Ethics and Higher Learning: The Moral Clash Determining the Future of American Higher Education (2011)

• education
• hacking