Digital Pilgrims’ Podcast Episode 4: Hacker Culture and Its Legacy

Discover the origins of the Digital World we know today and how digital pioneers shaped it.

Discover the fascinating world of “Hacker Culture” in Episode 4 of our podcast series as we delve into the early days of digital pioneers like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Uncover the impact of their “hacker ethic” on the tech industry and how their collaborative approach fueled the creation of the Digital Environment we know today.

This captivating journey into the history and future of technology showcases the power of imagination and innovation, shedding light on the origins of the tech culture that continues to shape our world.

Don’t miss out on this enthralling exploration into the roots of the digital revolution!

Listen now

Or save it on all the main apps:

Read the episode transcript right here:

Episode 4: Hacker culture

In 1984, in his book Hackers, Steven Levy defines this group as “digital explorers” and their way of working as a “philosophy of exchange, openness, and decentralization.” Jobs’ and Wozniak’s first development was a small device that altered telephone connections and allowed people to make long-distance calls for free. They called it the Blue Box and sold it for one hundred dollars at the university from which Jobs would soon drop out. “The hacker ethic,” according to Levy, “is their gift to the world.” This mode of organization would later be adapted as such a highly lucrative form of doing business that it would be implemented even by companies who did not operate in the field of technology. All these elements created the hotbed that gave rise to pioneers at the head of one of the most important aspects of this 1.0 cultural movement: the arrival of computers in the home.

In 1980, the first commercial for a microprocessor was filmed. This was a landmark event: the power of computation was available, and, as the rad states, it had an influence on people’s lives. The voiceover describes the object and is amazed by a simple conclusion: “they do the drudgery, freeing us to use our imagination.” In other words, fomenting new ways of thinking about the world was always at the center of digital development.

Many computer enthusiasts met in clubs where they exchanged everything from the latest innovations on the subject to parts and methods for building their own machines. One example is the famous Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, which was the origin of more than twenty companies. These kinds of clubs, as their organizers said, brought together a very heterogeneous spectrum of people: workers from the electronics industry, physicists, and amateur radio operators looking for more dynamic technologies. They were not the people carrying out the big institutional changes, but they did share a very powerful common desire: they wanted to have access to computers and make them accessible. They imagined the impact that access would have and the possibilities of this new technology.

In historical terms, it is important that this cultural movement began with a process centered on the power of human imagination. Many disciplines study how our ability to project into the future is one of the characteristics that distinguish us as a species, and how this ability to project actions and states into the future holds the key to our continuing evolution. There are semiologists, for example, who maintain that the origin of language is related to the ability to develop aim with stone weapons. According to this hypothesis, it is crucial to have the cerebral capacity necessary to draw an arc in space, anticipate the trajectory of an object, and execute a throw. This is associated with the mental operations necessary to build a series of sounds that can be given meaning and have effects on communication.

The model for configuring something new seems to exist as a duality: we precede the unknown, anticipating its possibilities. Before we act, we must build symbolic images of our world, and, in so doing, we project a trajectory toward the unknown. Likewise, this relationship is contained in the etymology of the noun “project.” It comes from the Latin verb proicere, which is made up of the prefix “pro-,” forward, and “iacere,” to throw. In a sense, imagining is a way of throwing ourselves toward the future.

What does the science of today imagine? Qu antum physics opened the doors to a new understanding of atomic matter and its behavior in space, just as Galileo’s telescope did in its own historical moment. We have discovered that atoms, like the bits that make up digital matter, appear before us in probable states of reality: behind each state in which matter exists, which is determined by one’s observation, there are different combinations of possible realities. This idea, which can be difficult to digest from a rational point of view, can be experimentally manipulated, even outside the laboratory.

What is interesting about the ability to imagine is that when this capacity is activated at the group level, the results surpass any kind of idea that might have arisen individually. What happens when many people imagine the same thing at the same time? One effervescent group took the first steps in what we understand today as the Digital Environment and unleashed a change that no one had imagined before. It is interesting to consider whether the Zeitgeist that inspired a whole generation and awoke a process that is still current and active today could become something else. Did reality itself change? Or at least its meaning and its form?

The theoretical development of quantum bits, or qubits, began many years ago, but its material implementation is a fact today. It has revolutionary implications for our belief systems and our idea of the universe, and it gives rise to a reality in which the paradigmatic relationship between space and time dissolves. A new conception of our relationship to space and time emerges with our encounter with the Digital Environment. As we assign meaning to this new reality, we have imagination, perhaps our greatest asset when it comes to exploring our abilities. Power to the imagination and the power of imagination in the service of human beings.

In the next episode

Explore the impact of digital technology on our society and how it’s reshaping the way we live and communicate.