Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

A protest march that climaxed at Tech Square dramatically indicated how distant the hackers werefrom their peers. Many of the hackers were sympathetic to the anti-war cause. Greenblatt, forinstance, had gone to a march in New Haven, and had done some phone line hookups for anti-warradicals at the National Strike Information Center at Brandeis. And hacker Brian Harvey was veryactive in organizing demonstrations; he would come back and tell in what low esteem the AI labwas held by the protesters. There was even some talk at anti-war meetings that some of thecomputers at Tech Square were used to help run the war. Harvey would try to tell them it wasn't so,but the radicals would not only disbelieve him but get angry that he'd try to feed them bullshit.The hackers shook their heads when they heard of that unfortunate misunderstanding. One moreexample of how people didn't understand! But one charge leveled at the AI lab by the anti-warmovement was entirely accurate: all the lab's activities, even the most zany or anarchisticmanifestations of the Hacker Ethic, had been funded by the Department of Defense. Everything,from the Incompatible Time-sharing System to Peter Samson's subway hack, was paid for by thesame Department of Defense that was killing Vietnamese and drafting American boys to dieoverseas.The general AI lab response to that charge was that the Defense Department's Advanced ResearchProjects Agency (ARPA), which funded the lab, never asked anyone to come up with specificmilitary applications for the computer research engaged in by hackers and planners. ARPA hadbeen run by computer scientists; its goal had been the advancement of pure research. During the late1960s a planner named Robert Taylor was in charge of ARPA funding, and he later admitted todiverting funds from military, "mission-oriented" projects to projects that would advance purecomputer science. It was only the rarest hacker who called the ARPA funding "dirty money."Almost everyone else, even people who opposed the war, recognized that ARPA money was thelifeblood of the hacking way of life. When someone pointed out the obvious that the DefenseDepartment might not have asked for specific military applications for the Artificial Intelligence andsystems work being done, but still expected a bonanza of military applications to come from thework (who was to say that all that "interesting" work in vision and robotics would not result in moreefficient bombing raids?) the hackers would either deny the obvious (Greenblatt: "Though ourmoney was coming from the Department of Defense, it was not military") or talk like MarvinMinsky: "There's nothing illegal about a Defense Department funding research. It's certainly betterthan a Commerce Department or Education Department funding research ... because that would leadto thought control. I would much rather have the military in charge of that ... the military peoplemake no bones about what they want, so we're not under any subtle pressures. It's clear what's goingon. The case of ARPA was unique, because they felt that what this country needed was people goodin defense technology. In case we ever needed it, we'd have it."Planners thought they were advancing true science. Hackers were blithely formulating their tidy,new-age philosophy based on free flow of information, decentralization, and computer democracy.But the anti-military protesters thought it was a sham, since all that so-called idealism wouldultimately benefit the War Machine that was the Defense Department. The anti-war people wantedto show their displeasure, and the word filtered up to the Artificial Intelligence lab one day that theprotesters were planning a march ending with a rally right there on the ninth floor. There, protesterswould gather to vividly demonstrate that all of them hackers, planners, and users were puppets ofthe Defense Department.Russ Noftsker, the nuts-and-bolts administrator of the AI lab, took the threat of protesters very