The Hacker Ethic Audiobook By Pekka Himanen cover art

The Hacker Ethic

A Radical Approach to the Philosophy of Business

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The Hacker Ethic

By: Pekka Himanen
Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
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You may be a hacker and not even know it. Being a hacker has nothing to do with cyberterrorism, and it doesn’t even necessarily relate to the open-source movement. Being a hacker has more to do with your underlying assumptions about stress, time management, work, and play. It’s about harmonizing the rhythms of your creative work with the rhythms of the rest of your life so that they amplify each other. It is a fundamentally new work ethic that is revolutionizing the way business is being done around the world.

Without hackers there would be no universal access to e-mail, no Internet, no World Wide Web, but the hacker ethic has spread far beyond the world of computers. It is a mind-set, a philosophy, based on the values of play, passion, sharing, and creativity, that has the potential to enhance every individual’s and company’s productivity and competitiveness. Now there is a greater need than ever for entrepreneurial versatility of the sort that has made hackers the most important innovators of our day. Pekka Himanen shows how we all can make use of this ongoing transformation in the way we approach our working lives.Executive Producer: Laura Wilson
Producer: Paul Ruben
Original Jacket Design: Kapo Ng
©2000 Pekka Himanen
Prologue Copyright ©2000 Linus Torvalds
Epilogue Copyright ©2000 Manuel Castells
(P)2001 Random House, Inc. Business Ethics Career Success Social Sciences Workplace & Organizational Behavior Workplace Culture Business Leadership Computer Security Capitalism Hacking Philosophy Ethics Professional Ethics

Critic reviews

"Pekka Himanen's theory of the hacker culture as the spirit of informationalism is a fundamental breakthrough in the discovery of the world unfolding in the uncertain dawn of the third millennium."
-Manuel Castells, from the Epilogue

"The Hacker Ethic is one of the most significant political ideas and value systems in history. Hackers are the warriors, explorers, guerrillas, and joyous adventurers of the Digital Age, and the true architects of the new economy. Demonized and often misunderstood, they are changing the world and the way it works. Pekka Himanen explains how and why in a book that is essential reading for anybody who wants to live, work or do business in the twenty-first century."
-Jon Katz, columnist for slashdot.org and author of Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho

"At last we have a book about the ethics of true hackers . . .not the criminals and vandals that the press calls hackers today, but the idealistic pioneers whose ethics of openness, enablement and cooperation laid the cornerstone for our new economy."
-Danny Hillis, Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation and Co-Chairman & CTO, Applied Minds, Inc.
All stars
Most relevant
I loved the structure of this book: how real life hacking and sociology came together in a very friendly way. Manuel Castells chapter was a lovely surprise!

Fascinating

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This book is essentially a sociological study of human resources and managment and how the current business culture does is out of sync with the workers' needs, desires, and personal values. It contrasts the motivations of a programmer coding open source software against the (presumably American) heirarchial business managmement's working environment.

What I found interesting about this title was its recounting of the basis and continual reshaping of cultural attitudes toward working. I liked this because it explored the historical development of the modern perceptions in the importance of work, e.g., issues of how in introducing ourselves to others we self-define ourselves through our work, those with poor work ethics are condemned, etc. I enjoyed the questioning of societal values that are treated as dogma.

While the title does continually pass in and out of feeling didactic and many of the principles are not as novel as the authors may believe, this title presents great context for lively discussions with friends on a subject that affects us all.

NOTE: This title does place a biased dicotomy that, upon continual listening, becomes along the lines that Hackers have the working environment all worked out and those of us that work for a boss are fools. I had to adjust myself to translate upon hearing "Hacker's ethic" into simply meaning "a better way".

Enjoyable Discussion

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Okay, I'm a little concerned about the other reviews this book's been given. They seemed to be from people that either didn't finish reading the book, don't understand the subject material, or just plain don't know what they're talking about.

First, despite rampant media mislabelling, hacking is *not* breaking into computers, and this book won't talk about the ethics of computing exploits. There are a number of books and websites for that, and if you can't find them, you probably don't deserve to know about them.

Second, this is a socio-economic look at a new working ethic, which I doubt any true tinkerer-geek "in the inside" would have had the perspective, time, or the interest to write about. Ethics equals values, not in the sense of whether something is a "good" or "bad" in the moral sense, but the values on which you build your life. Just as historians didn't have to have installed telephone wire in order to comment on the industrial revolution, I don't think the author had to have programmed in Alair BASIC to be able to make a social commentary.

Third, this book isn't going to tell you how to have more free time if you're working 9-to-5, have 3 kids, and eat your meals in front of a TV. It's a shift in perspective and values. I'm not working to play, I'm playing while I work. I'm not trying to find free time in between my day job and leisure time: *All* of my time is free. I work at a game development company and I see the "hacker" culture all around me. Yes, we wear shorts & sandals, show up at 10am to work, and take breaks at work to have Quake III tourneys, but I dare anyone to walk in at 8pm during crunch time and call us a bunch of "slackers". But I guess such misunderstanding are to be expected when we're talking about a complete shift in social values.

If you have a mind open enough for it, this is a fascinating read and worth the effort of digging in.

What?!?

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This was a terribly boring book. The author has taken the term "hacker" and gentrified it into a cookie cutter term for everyone who questions authority. It is impossible to get away from the religious references made throughout this book. Why does the author continually compare the hacker ethic with the protestant ethic? It's as if the author tried writing a 15 page book about Hacker's and his publishers forced him to turn it into a 300 page book about nothing. Not much here and if your listening to it while driving you might run yourself off the road.

Everyone's a Hacker?

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boring.
unrelated to computers, hackers, hacking, etc.
goes on and on about pre modern monk societies and the prodestant work ethic. sais the words (hack, hacker, computer, programming ) maybe four times.
complete jip.

the Protestant ethic

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