Technology in the Deep South
A Sprite’s Guide
Neither of my parents are computer people, yet when it comes to the question of what is a hacker, I like to think of my father as an accidental hacker.
Our family’s Pentium 486 computer was the second computer we owned. The excitement of incrementing your x86 prefix digit was all the rage in the early 90s and CD-ROM drives were just beginning to become popular. I was smitten. Disks were out and discs were in. You could have an entire encyclopedia on a single CD. After some weeks, I talked my dad into purchasing one these compact disc drives for our home computer. Everything was going smoothly with the installation until we placed the plastic drive railings against the CD-ROM and slid it into the drive bay. It didn’t fit. I was temporarily heartbroken.
My dad solved this with a hacksaw. There are no guides that recommend taking a hacksaw near your home computer, so it fit the hacker ethos quite well. A few minutes and the plastic rails fit perfectly. Problem, plan, and unconventional solution — hacking at its core. Sometimes the solutions are clean and elegant, and other times they are so dirty you feel embarrassed to share them. In the end though, what works, works.
The first time I ever heard the word hacker spoken in the South was from a middle school computer teacher. She insisted she was not a hacker and to never ever call her one. In this she was adamant. Her point of view was that hacking implied you did not know enough about how a system worked. She considered it a term of disrespect for someone such as herself. She was a skilled computer engineer, not a hacker.
The problem with technology in the rural South is trickle-down poverty. People cannot afford the newer technologies and the telecoms are all monopolies. These companies find no reason to run Internet into the rural South and where it exists, it is slow. Bandwidth becomes a luxury that, even if wanted, you may not be able to buy.
Internet is the modern day railroad; the transport of ideas as freight. Without trading ideas as goods, the intellectual economy of a culture stagnates. And so, because of the lack of demand and poverty, technology in the South lags behind. It is difficult to describe something like Twitter to someone who does not have an email address. It is not that people here are ignorant when it comes to technology, they just never had the opportunity to learn and therefore, no fondness for what they’re missing.
As for programming, I am mostly self-taught. I am, in the disrespectful use of the term, a hacker. I do not always know exactly what I am doing. I stumbled through PHP and a MAMP setup before sampling Python. All I needed was a sample, I was a Pythonista at heart. Since my PHP days, I have tried different frameworks including Drupal, Ruby on Rails, Flask, and Django. I have written HTML, Javascript, and CSS. I have learned concepts on Arduino and enriched my Linux abilities on Raspberry Pi. I have been puzzled over web development’s lack of standards adoption. I am, at times, a late casualty of the browser wars. “It’s not me, it’s my browser” can be a difficult thing to debug for a fledgling programmer.
I have tried to teach myself concepts of Database Normalization, Database Migration, Production and Development Servers, Source Control, Model View Controller Architecture, Ajax, and Object-Oriented Programming. For Python and Django, I taught myself Vim and installed a PEP 8 plugin that keeps me writing neat code. However, there are not many programmers in the South that share the same languages and can share ideas locally. I had one conversation with someone who had database expertise primarily in Filemaker, whereas mine is abstracted PostgreSQL queries from a web-based framework. Between explaining a concept in your favored programming language and doing it in a Southern accent, something or everything can get lost in translation. There are always many programming languages represented, but seldom are there two random Southern programmers working in the same one.
The grand theme of technology in the South is that you teach yourself. Another central tenant of the hacker ethos. You try and fail until eventually you succeed. Without an Internet connection, it is education in a vacuum. The nearest hacker space is likely in another state, so you will also need your own tools. The importance of cheap technology, like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, is essential for those needing a hacker space at home. Most importantly, the Internet and a decent search engine are the lifeblood of technology in the South. Six megabits per second is the absolute fastest Internet I, personally, can get. Drive twenty miles, and that could be dial-up.
In closing, don’t take this as a condemnation of the South. There are all sorts of rare people in the South that seem to exist as hacker refactorings of Southern Gothic themes. A William Faulkner script with a Daft Punk Soundtrack. The way we do things is gothic and self-taught and strange. Yet, it is often the strange at the core of the evolution of technology. The most important task for the South in the coming future will be to desegregate those of us divided by access to technology. That future of the South will be measured per second, and here is to hoping for gigabits.
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