The pioneers who started the digital revolution were hackers. These free-spirited computer programmers should not be confused with the narcissistic fraudsters behind the myriad of present-day security breaches that prey upon honest hard-working people. While today the mainstream usage of “hacker” refers to the subversives who commit computer crimes, the original meaning of the term refers to computer enthusiasts who are part of a creative subculture intent on using developments in digital technology to build a better and more collaborative world.
These creatives are the revolutionaries who challenge the established order. They have a distinct distaste for the centralized top-down hierarchies that pervade our social existence and a playful zeal for using digital technology to design distributed peer-to-peer networked applications that radically outperform their bureaucratic counterparts. These hackers are not malevolent marauders, but rather the benevolent missionaries of mass collaboration.
One of the early missionaries of the hacker culture is Linus Torvalds, whose crowdsourced application Linux has revolutionized our ideas about how we build computer operating systems. Thirty years ago—before the internet became an everyday reality—Torvalds, then a graduate student at the University of Helsinki, recognized the possibilities for using mass collaboration to construct sophisticated software applications. Using the long-established Unix language, he created the initial source code for Linux, posted it on an online bulletin board, and invited other programmers to build upon his work. It wasn’t long before a virtual collaborative community of software engineers were creating a first-class product.
As interest in the application grew, Torvalds decided to make the operating system commercially available. However, rather than setting up a centralized proprietary platform that he could control, Torvalds instead solidified Linux as a distributed collaborative network by making it available under a general public license so that anyone could use it for free as long as each user agreed that any changes made to the program remained in the public domain. Today, Linux is a family of open-sourced operating systems that powers 90 percent of all cloud infrastructure and 74 percent of smartphones. Clearly, as Linux grew in popularity, Torvalds remained true to the ethos of the hacker culture and, by his example, showed us that the great enabler of a better and more collaborative world is the willingness to lead without the need to amass control.
Creating a Social Network
A little more than a decade later, the leader of another popular application—whose dubious origins can hardly be held out as a model of the hacker ethos—became embroiled in a proprietary battle with two brothers over who owned the source code. In late 2002, Tyler Winklevoss, his twin brother Cameron Winklevoss, and their Harvard classmate Divya Narendra came up with the idea for a way to use the internet as a vehicle for creating a social network that would connect university students around the country. Throughout 2003, the trio hired a succession of part-time student programmers to build the code for their new venture, which they called ConnectU. Toward the end of 2003, the student entrepreneurs approached Mark Zuckerberg, who had been recommended by a prior programmer, to finish the work. As recounted in the popular movie Social Media, Zuckerberg never completed the code for ConnectU. Instead, about two months after meeting with the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg launched the first iteration of what would become Facebook.
Whether Zuckerberg stole the Winklevoss brothers idea or not, one thing that is clear is the platform Zuckerberg built has not used digital technology to build a better and more collaborative world. The same thing can be said for Twitter, another social media platform that emerged around the same time. Both of these platforms have been prime drivers in creating a bitterly divided world by separating us into fractious tribes. In pursuit of the advertising dollars that drive their business models, these social media applications strive to maximize our time by drawing us into irresistible echo chambers. The more time we spend online, the more money they make.
Unlike Torvalds, who had little interest in exercising personal control over the development of Linux’s code, Zuckerberg and his colleagues at Facebook maintain tight control over the development of their algorithms, and then use these algorithms to strongly influence the behavior of the participants on their platform. While the community of users in Linux freely crowdsources the additions and the deletions of its code, an elite few at Facebook, citing a set of Delphic-like community standards, unilaterally determine what is acceptable content and what speech is to be censored. In contrast to Linux, which over the course of three decades has remained true to the revolutionary hacker ethos, Facebook and the rest of Big Tech have become arguably the most powerful corporations in business history. Big Tech represents the new establishment and, like the old establishment, its corporate titans relish the power and control that they have over their markets.
This is a far cry from what we might have expected when the social media companies were startups led by a bunch of college students. If they ever shared the hacker ethos, it was clearly discarded as these erstwhile novices grew up to become imperious celebrities. Consequently, the social media companies missed an opportunity to become extraordinary socially responsible contributors to a world desperately in need of more collaboration.
Power With vs Power Over
If the Big Tech leaders had designed their algorithms to aggregate our collective intelligence into a melting pot of ideas where we could combine the best contributions from divergent perspectives into breakthrough thinking to solve what appeared to be intractable problems, these leaders could have done what Torvalds did: embrace the new meaning of what it means to be a hero. In a digitally transformed world, heroes are no longer individuals whose extraordinary efforts single-handedly save the universe. Instead, they are the facilitators of mass collaboration who enable peers across communities to experience the joy of collectively solving problems for themselves. That is how hackers, like Torvalds, build a better and more collaborative world.
True heroes understand that real power comes from expanding interpersonal connections rather than from expanding personal control. They invest in “power with” rather than “power over.” This is what Torvalds did when he made Linux available as a shared application. Everyone who contributed value to the crowdsourced system had the opportunity to economically benefit from their efforts as long as their work remained available to everyone. Torvalds created a wealth-generating platform that shared the wealth with all the participants.
While Zuckerberg’s application also created a wealth-generating platform, the vast majority of Facebook’s wealth is hoarded by its founders and shareholders. Although much of Facebook’s value is created by the content contributions of its participants, little of its wealth is shared with the producers of that value. Like feudal landlords, Facebook’s leaders are invested in maintaining a high degree of power over their participants by exploiting their work, censoring their content, and resisting compensation to the creators of content, as we’ve seen recently in the social media company’s much publicized dispute with the Australian government. Clearly, Zuckerberg and his colleagues are not benevolent missionaries of mass collaboration.
The capability to choose between collaboration and control is an increasingly perilous existential problem in a post-digital world. For the first time in human history, private organizations have the unilateral power to cancel individuals, political leaders, and even whole governments should they dare challenge the preferences of its elite leaders. This much concentrated power is unsustainable if we are to maintain free and democratic societies. Perhaps that’s why an anonymous creative hacker designed a game-changing organizational structure that essentially eliminates the ability for any individual to exercise coercive control. That structure is blockchain, and it could very well fundamentally change the way everything works.
Reviving the Hacker Ethos
Blockchain is the creation of an anonymous individual or group of innovators who, using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, published a short paper in 2009 that outlined an unconventional peer-to-peer system that allows users to directly transact business without the need for any intermediaries.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger system that uses a network consensus to record and execute transactions. It’s best known as the platform for the Web currency Bitcoin. Blockchain’s most distinguishing characteristic is that no single agent has the ability to execute control over system activity. In other words, no individual can engage in coercive activity against another person or their property.
What would happen if blockchain were the systems structure used by social media? Almost certainly we would see a renaissance in our ability to challenge the established order. No longer would a small group of self-appointed individuals have the ability to unilaterally decide what is acceptable or unacceptable speech by designing algorithms that reinforce the limited views of an elite establishment. Instead blockchain would provide the opportunity for us to design algorithms that recognize the value of all voices, and, through the application of collaboration mechanisms, cultivate the collective intelligence of all participants.
By designing blockchain as a distributed peer-to-peer network, Nakamoto, like Torvalds, has foregone proprietary control and invested in power with people rather than power over people. Should blockchain become the fundamental architecture for how we build digital systems in the future, we would have the opportunity to revive the hacker ethos that guided the original pioneers of the digital revolution, and hopefully, leverage this revival to build a better and more collaborative world.