Pekka Himanen: The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (2001) [EN, DE]

“In The Hacker Ethic, Himanen is trying to understand the core of informationalism, the post-industrialist paradigm, extending the ideas of Manuel Castells’ Information Age. As an alternative to the industrial-capitalist protestant work ethic he proposes a hacker ethic as something like a cyber communitarianism. The structure of the information society is a web, which in contemporary business world manifests itself, for instance, in dynamic outsourcing and even cooperation with one’s competitors. The “knots” of such a web get activated according to the needs and opportunities.

According to Himanen, the three main features of hacker ethic are:
* enthusiastic, passionate attitude to the work that is enjoyed
* creativity, wish to realise oneself and one’s ability, often in teams that are formed spontaneously (project orientation)
* wish to share one’s skills with a community having common goals, along with the need to acquire recognition from one’s “tribe”; one is motivated by inner zeal rather than external awards: the fruits of one’s work are donated to everybody for their advances and further developments

Manuel Castells thinks that the innovations produced by hackers are the foundations of the development of the whole culture. According to Himanen, the social hackerism begins from such things as vegetarianism, whereas the opposite of it is represented by Microsoft and the licensing of computer programs. Himanen thinks that in the information society we need a radical lack of prejudice, such as he has met in philosophy lessons to children. A critical challenge of the Internet era is the ability to meet the other human being.”

Prologue by Linus Torvalds
Epilogue by Manuel Castells
Publisher Secker & Warburg, 2001
ISBN 0436205505, 9780436205507
232 pages

Wikipedia

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (English, 2001, no OCR, updated 2016-1-16)
Die Hacker Ethik und der Geist des Informations-Zeitalters (German, trans. Heike Schlatterer, 2001, updated 2016-1-16)