Counteracting alienation with technological arts and crafts

The alienating effects of modern technology have been discussed a lot during the past few centuries. Prominent thinkers such as Marx and Heidegger have pointed out how people get reduced into one-dimensional resources or pieces of machinery. Later on, grasping the real world has become increasingly difficult due to the ever-complexifying network of interface layers. I touched this topic a little bit in an earlier text of mine.

How to solve the problem? Discussion tends to bipolarize into quarrels between techno-utopians ("technological progress will automatically solve all the problems") and neo-luddites ("the problems are inherent in technology so we should avoid it altogether"). I looked for a more constructive view and found it in Albert Borgmann.

According to Borgmann, the problem is not in technology or consumption per se, but in the fact that we have given them the primary importance in our lives. To solve the problem, Borgmann proposes that we give the importance to something more worthwhile instead – something he calls "focal things and practices". His examples include music, gardening, running, and the culture of the table. Technological society would be there to protect these focalities instead of trying to make them obsolete.

In general, focal things and practices are something that are somehow able to reflect the whole human existence. Something where self-expression, excellence and deep meanings can be cultivated. Traditional arts and crafts often seem to fulfill the requirements, but Borgmann becomes skeptical whenever high technology gets involved. Computers or modern cars easily alienate the hands-on craftsperson with their blackboxed microelectronics.

Perhaps the most annoying part in Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become A Hacker" is the one titled "Points For Style". Raymond states there that an aspiring hacker should adopt certain non-computer activites such as language play, sci-fi fandom, martial arts and musical practice. This sounds to me like an enforcement of a rather narrow subcultural stereotype, but reading Borgmann made me realize an important point there: computer activities alone aren't enough even for computer hackers – they need to be complemented by something more focal.

Worlds drifting apart

So far so good: we should maintain a world of focal things supported by a world of high-tech things. The former is quite earthly, so everything that involves computing and such belongs to the latter. But what if these two worlds drift too far apart?

Borgmann believes that focal things can clarify technology. The contrast between focal and technological helps people put high-tech in proper roles and demand more tangibility from it. If the technology is material enough, its material aspects can be deepened by the materiality of the focal things. When dealing with information technology, however, Borgmann's idea starts losing relevance. Virtual worlds no longer speak a material language, so focal traditions no longer help grasp their black boxes. Technology becomes a detached, incomprehensible bubble of its own – a kind of "necessary evil" for those who put the focal world first.

In order to keep the two worlds anchored together, I suppose we need to build some islands between them. We need things and practices that are tangible and human enough to be earthed by "real" focal practices, but high-tech enough to speak the high-tech language.

Hacker culture provides one possible key. The principles of playful exploration and technological self-expression can be expanded to many other technologies besides computing. Even if "true focality" can't be reached, the hacker attitude at least counteracts passive alienation. Art and craft building on the assumed essence of a technology can be powerful in revealing the human-approachable dimensions of that technology.

How many hackers do we need?

I don't think it is necessary for every user of a complex technology to actively anchor it to reality. However, I do think everyone's social circle should include people who do. Assuming a a minimal Dunbar's number of 100, we can deduce that at least one percent of users of any given technology in any social group should be part of a "hacker culture" that anchors it.

Anchoring a technology requires a relationship deeper than what mere rational expertise provides. I would suggest that at least 10% of the users of a technology (preferrably a majority, however) should have a solid rational understanding of it, and at least 10% of these should be "hackers". A buffer of "casual experts" between superficial and deep users would also have some sociodynamical importance.

We also need to anchor those technologies that we don't use directly but which are used for producing the goods we consume. Since everyone eats food and wears clothes, every social circle needs to have some "gardening hackers" and "textile hackers" or something with a similar anchoring capacity. In a scenario where agriculture and textile industry are highly automated, some "automation hackers" may be needed as well.

Computing needs to be anchored from two sides – physical and logical. The physical aspect could be well supported by basic electronics craft or something like ham radio, while the logical side could be nurtured by programming-centered arts, maybe even by recreational mathematics.

The big picture

Sophisticated automation leaves people with increasing amounts of free time. Meanwhile, knowledge and control over technology are held by ever fewer. It is therefore quite reasonable to use the extra free time for activities that help keep technology in people's hands. A network of technological crafters may also provide alternative infrastructure that decreases dependence on the dominant machinery.

In an ideal world, people would be constantly aware of the skills and interests present in their various social circles. They would be ready to adopt new interests depending on which technologies need stronger anchoring. The society in general would support the growth and diversification of those groups that are too small or demographically too uniform.

At their best, technological arts would have a profound positive effect on how the majority experiences technology – even when practiced by only a few. They would inspire awe, appreciation and fascination in the masses but at the same time invite them to try to understand the technology.

This was my humble suggestion on a possible way how to counteract technological alienation. I hope I managed to be inspiring.

A new propaganda tool: Post-Apocalyptic Hacker World

I visited the Assembly demo party this year, after two years of break. It seemed more relevant than in a while, because I had an agenda.

For a year or so, I have been actively thinking about the harmful aspects of people's relationships with technology. It is already quite apparent to me that we are increasingly under the control of our own tools, letting them make us stupid and dependent. Unless, of course, we promote a different world, a different way of thinking, that allows us to remain in control.

So far, I've written a couple of blog posts about this. I've been nourishing myself with the thoughts of prominent people such as Jaron Lanier and Douglas Rushkoff who share the concern. I've been trying to find ways of promoting the aspects of hacker culture I represent. Now I felt that the time was right for a new branch -- an artistic one based on a fictional

world.

My demo "Human Resistance", that came 2nd in the oldskool demo competition, was my first excursion into this new branch. Of course, it has some echoes of my earlier productions such as "Robotic Liberation", but the setting is new. Instead of showing ruthless machines genociding the helpless mankind, we are dealing with a culture of ingenious hackers who manage to outthink a superhuman intellect that dominates the planet.

"Human Resistance" was a relatively quick hack. I was too hurried to fix the problems in the speech compressor or to explore the real potential of Tau Ceti -style pseudo-3D rendering. The text, however, came from my heart, and the overall atmosphere was quite close to what I intended. It introduces a new fictional world of mine, a world I've temporarily dubbed "Post-Apocalyptic Hacker World" (PAHW). I've been planning to use this world not only in demo productions but also in at least one video game. I haven't released anything interactive for like fifteen years, so perhaps it's about time for a game release.

Let me elaborate the setting of this world a little bit.

Fast-forward to a post-singularitarian era. Machines control all the resources of the planet. Most human beings, seduced by the endless pleasures of procedurally-generated virtual worlds, have voluntarily uploaded their minds into so-called "brain clusters" where they have lost their humanity and individuality, becoming mere components of a global superhuman intellect. Only those people with a lot of willpower and a strong philosophical stance against dehumanization remained in their human bodies.

Once the machines initiated an operation called "World Optimization", they started to regard natural formations (including all biological life) as harmful and unpredictable externalities. As a result, planet Earth has been transformed into something far more rigid, orderly and geometric. Forests, mountains, oceans or clouds no longer exist. Strange, lathe-like artifacts protrude from vast, featureless plains. Those who had studied ancient pop culture immediately noticed a resemblance to some of the 3D computer graphics of the 1980s. The real world has now started to look like the computed reality of Tron or the futuristic terrains of video games such as Driller, Tau Ceti and Quake Minus One.

Only a tiny fraction of biological human beings survived World Optimization. These people, who collectively call themselves "hackers", managed to find and exploit the blind spots of algorithmic logic, making it possible for them to establish secret, self-relying underground fortresses where human life can still struggle on. It has become a necessity for all human beings to dedicate as much of their mental capacities as possible to outthinking the brain clusters in order to eventually conquer them.

Many of the tropes in Post-Apocalyptic Hacker World are quite familiar. A human resistance movement fighting against a machine-controlled world, haven't we seen this quite many times already? Yes, we have, but I also think my approach is novel enough to form a basis for some cutting-edge social, technological and political commentary. By emphasizing things like the role of total cognitive freedom and radical understanding of things' inner workings in the futuristic hacker culture, it may be possible to get people realize their importance in the real world as well. It is also quite possible to include elements from real-life hacker cultures and mindsets in the world, effectively adding to their interestingness.

The "PAHW game" (still without a better title) is already in an advanced stage of pre-planning. It is going to become a hybrid CRPG/strategy game with random-generated worlds, very loose scripting and some very unique game-mechanical elements. This is just a side project so it may take a while before I have anything substantial to show, but I'll surely let you know once I have. Stay tuned!

We need a Pan-Hacker movement.

Some decades ago, computers weren't nearly as common as they are today. They were big and expensive, and access to them was very privileged. Still, there was a handful of people who had the chance to toy around with a computer in their leisure time and get a glimpse of what a total, personal access to a computer might be like. It was among these people, mostly students in MIT and similar facilities, where the computer hacker subculture was born.

The pioneering hackers felt that computers had changed their life for the better and therefore wanted to share this new improvement method with everyone else. They thought everyone should have an access to a computer, and not just any kind of access but an unlimited, non-institutionalized one. Something like a cheap personal computer, for example. Eventually, in the seventies, some adventurous hackers bootstrapped the personal computer industry, which led to the the so-called "microcomputer revolution" in the early eighties.

The era was filled with hopes and promises. All kinds of new possibilities were now at everyone's fingertips. It was assumed that programming would become a new form of literacy, something every citizen should be familiar with -- after all, using a computer to its fullest potential has always required programming skill. "Citizens' computer courses" were broadcasted on TV and radio, and parents bought cheap computers for their kids to ensure a bright future for the next generation. Some prophets even went far enough to suggest that personal computers could augment people's intellectual capacities or even expand their consciousnesses in the way how psychedelic drugs were thought to do.

In the nineties, however, reality stroke back. Selling a computer to everyone was apparently not enough for automatically turning them into superhuman creatures. As a matter of fact, digital technology actually seemed to dumb a lot of people down, making them helpless and dependent rather than liberating them. Hardware and software have become ever more complex, and it is already quite difficult to build reliable mental models about them or even be aware of all the automation that takes place. Instead of actually understanding and controlling their tools, people just make educated guesses about them and pray that everything works out right. We are increasingly dependent on digital technology but have less and less control over it.

So, what went wrong? Hackers opened the door to universal hackerdom, but the masses didn't enter. Are most people just too stupid for real technological awareness, or are the available paths to it too difficult or time-consuming? Is the industry deliberately trying to dumb people down with excessive complexity, or is it just impossible to make advanced technology any simpler to genuinely understand? In any case, the hacker movement has somewhat forgotten the idea of making digital technology more accessible to the masses. It's a pity, since the world needs this idea now more than ever. We need to give common people back the possibility to understand and master the technology they use. We need to let them ignore the wishes of the technological elite and regain the control of their own lives. We need a Pan-Hacker movement.

What does "Pan-Hacker" mean? I'll be giving three interpretations that I find equally relevant, emphasizing different aspects of the concept: "everyone can be a hacker", "everything can be hacked" and "all hackers together".

The first interpretation, "everyone can be a hacker", expands on the core idea of oldschool hackerdom, the idea of making technology as accessible as possible to as many as possible. The main issue is no longer the availability of technology, however, but the way how the various pieces of technology are designed and what kind of user cultures are formed around them. Ideally, technology should be designed so that it invites the user to seize the control, play around for fun and gradually develop an ever deeper understanding in a natural way. User cultures that encourage users to invent new tricks should be embraced and supported, and there should be different "paths of hackerdom" for all kinds of people with all kinds of interests and cognitive frameworks.

The second interpretation, "everything can be hacked", embraces the trend of extending the concept of hacking out of the technological zone. The generalized idea of hacking is relevant to all kinds of human activities, and all aspects of life are relevant to the principles of in-depth understanding and hands-on access. As the apparent complexity of the world is constantly increasing, it is particularly important to maintain and develop people's ability to understand the world and all kinds of things that affect their lives.

The third interpretation, "all hackers together", wants to eliminate the various schisms between the existing hacker subcultures and bring them into a fruitful co-operation. There is, for example, a popular text, Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become A Hacker", that represents a somewhat narrow-minded "orthodox hackerdom" that sees the free/open-source software culture as the only hacker culture that is worth contributing to. It frowns upon all non-academic hacker subcultures, especially the ones that use handles (such as the demoscene, which is my own primary reference point to hackerdom). We need to get rid of this kind of segregation and realize that there are many equally valid paths suitable for many kinds of minds and ambitions.

Now that I've mentioned the demoscene, I would like to add that all kinds of artworks and acts that bring people closer to the deep basics of technology are also important. I've been very glad about the increasing popularity of chip music and circuit-bending, for example. The Pan-Hacker movement should actively look for new ways of "showing off the bits" to different kinds of audiences in many kinds of diverse contexts.

I hope my writeup has given someone some food of thought. I would like to elaborate my philosophy even further and perhaps do some cartography on the existing "Pan-Hacker" activity, but perhaps I'll return to that at some later time. Before that, I'd like to hear your thoughts and visions about the idea. What kind of groups should I look into? What kind of projects could Pan-Hacker movement participate in? Is there still something we need to define or refine?