Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

month he rented a room. It was below sewer level, had no running water, was filthy. For Lee it wasperfect "I was going to be an invisible servant. Part of this machine."But Resource One failed Lee, who was far ahead of the group in realizing that the social uses oftechnology would depend on exercising something akin to the Hacker Ethic. The others in the groupdid not grow up yearning for hands-on technology ... their connection to it was not visceral butintellectual. As a result, they would argue about how the machine should be used instead ofthrowing back the sheets and using it. It drove Lee crazy.Lee later explained: "We were prigs, we were intolerable es-thetes. Anybody who wanted to use themachine had to come argue their case before our meeting. They had to plead to use it." Lee wantedto change the group's outlook to a more hacker-like, hands-on openness, but did not have the pluckto make the social effort his self-esteem had hit a low point. He rarely even had the courage toventure out of the building to face the world when he did, he'd glumly note that the tenderloindistrict bums looked cleaner, more prosperous than he did. Other people in the collective tried toopen him up; once during a meeting they borrowed a television camera from a video collectiveupstairs, and every time there was laughter in the group they would zoom in on Lee, invariablypoker-faced. Looking at the tape afterward, he could see what he was becoming heartless. "I feltlike I couldn't afford to have a heart," he later said. "I could see this happening, but I was pushingthem away."After that experience, he tried to become more active in influencing the group. He confronted onegoldbricker who spent most of the day slowly sipping coffee. "What have you been doing?"Felsenstein demanded. The guy began talking about vague ideas, and Lee said, "I'm not asking youwhat you want to do, I'm asking what have you done?" But he soon realized that calling peopledown for their bullshit was futile: like an inefficient machine, the group's architecture itself wasflawed. It was a bureaucracy. And the hacker in Lee could not abide that. Fortunately around thattime, the spring of 1973, Efrem Lipkin came to Resource One, to rescue Lee Felsenstein and getCommunity Memory off the ground.Efrem Lipkin was the kind of person who could look at you with hooded eyes in a long, Semiticface, and without saying a word let you know that the world was sadly flawed and you were noexception. It was the air of a purist who could never meet his own exacting standards. Efrem hadjust gotten back from Boston, where he had been on the payroll of a computer consulting company.The company had been doing military-related contracting, and Efrem had stopped going to work.The idealistic programmer did not inform his employer he just stopped, hoping that the projectwould grind to a halt because of his nonparticipation. After nine months during which the companyassumed he was hacking away, it became clear that there was no program, and the president of thecompany came to his cockroach-infested Cambridge crash pad and asked him, "Why did you dothis?" He told Efrem that he had started the company after Martin Luther King had died to do good.He insisted the projects he took on would keep the country strong against the Japanesetechnological threat. Efrem saw only that the company they were under contract to had beeninvolved in anti-personnel weapons during the war. How could he do work for that company? Howcould he be expected to do any computer work, considering its all too often harmful uses?It was a question that had plagued Efrem Lipkin for years.Efrem Lipkin had been a hacker since high school. His affinity for the machine was instant, and hefound programming "the ultimate disembodied activity 1 would forget to speak English. My mind