The Hacker Ethic

I noticed several references to Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic in The Information Society and the Welfare State: the Finnish Model. The topic intrigued me so I picked up a copy at the USF library. Himanen, as many others, makes a clear distinction between the older use of hackers ("passionate programmers") and crackers ("computer criminals"). Unfortunately, the latter use has become so pervasive that this distinction needs explaining with the title.

The crux of the text is comparing industrial society's "Protestant Ethic" to the information/network society's "Hacker Ethic". Himanen states hackers require flexible time, non-monetary motivations (i.e. interesting or important work), ...

What struck me most, was how much the protestant ethic has influenced my direction in life. Lately, I've been saying that I'm living the 70/20/10 philosophy. 70% of my time is spend researching remote sensing of water quality, 20% on ubiquitous and context aware application development, and 10% on preparing to move to Helsinki. The 70% is my "work" and the 20% "play". Himanen has helped me to realize that,although uncompensated, that 20% is also "work".