I see little sense in the statement “Why don’t people like me? It must be because I’m better than them,” but Paul Graham insists that nerds should come to this conclusion. Graham presents a vision of hackers as people who are inclined, and almost required, to think this thought. Do hackers have to be outcasts? Is intellectualism always part blessing, part curse? If hackers are so different, does that mean not everybody can be a hacker?
In his first four essays of “Hackers and Painters,” Paul Graham depicts, in his own, abstract way, a vision Hackers as creators and critical thinkers, who have no fear of what others think and whose creations have a lasting impact in the world. Unfortunately, this view quickly devolves into that of an elitist artisan.
Graham opens with his essay “Why Nerds are Unpopular,” in which he asks readers to recall their teenage years in prison… I mean high school… same thing, whatever.
Secondary school children frequently divide between popular students, nerds, freaks, athletes, etc. This giant Breakfast Club waiting to happen turns students against each other in an essentially unsupervised competition for social status. Nerds seem to be the outcasts in this arrangement, and there is some speculation as to why. Nerds should be smart enough to play the popularity game, why does the stereotypical high school nerd never win it? Graham Argues that nerds could be popular, but either they threaten the rest of their peers with intellectual superiority, or they’re distracted by other, more academic pursuits.
Graham has created a very small box for this group he calls “nerds” and sets up a defeatist ideology trapped by the self-fulfilling prophecy that intellect and friends are mutually exclusive.
I’m not a big fan of labels in most cases, but what Graham does here goes too far. He’s created a group he calls nerds that conforms to all his stereotypes: intellectual, socially awkward, with less focus on socialising than the average teenager. These people don’t exist. At the very least, they’re not born, but made in rough approximation when an impressionable youth displays a handful of these traits, even one, and feels pressured to embody them all. If you’re doing a serious social analysis, or at least prescribing a response, then you don’t buy in to harmful labels. Graham is trying to observe the state of young computer scientists growing up, but he’s either misattributing the problem (overseeing the labeling that brings this about) or willfully buying in to the meme that people fit into these boxed stereotypes.
What’s worse is this warped understanding that “ in some cases the reason that nerds don’t fit in is that everyone else is crazy.” Graham has come to the unspoken conclusion that all people who don’t display the nerd gene are unfit for interaction with the nerds. Coupled with all the later benefits of intellectualism that Graham cites later (successful individuals claiming to have been nerds and such), nerds have become an exclusive club. Others are mad at this group because they don’t display their special traits (and it’s suggested they never can). “They hate us ‘cause they ain’t us.” nerds purport to say. This unbridgeable gap becomes increasingly problematic as Graham begins to conflate the terms “nerd” and “hacker” in his later essays.
In “Hackers and Painters” Graham starts assigning more labels. Makers build things that others can interact with or appreciate. Mathematicians produce abstractions, facts that can be built on but never seen, and are more isolated than others. Hackers are software makers, they produce code that has an inherent, observable “beauty” to it. I’m willing to believe that beautiful code exists. At the very least we’ve all seen code that we’d call “ugly.” But I also think we could all list some ways to avoid code that is ugly, does that mean anyone can write code that is beautiful?
While I don’t love the ambiguity surrounding the word beauty, I can accept how this statement touches on Levy’s Hacker Ethos. Hackers take a heightened pride in their work, seeking to produce something that doesn’t “just work.” While this analogs well to Levy’s “instruction bumming” culture at MIT, but not every one of Levy’s HAckers were obsessed with small, pretty code. Sometimes they swung axes, punch cards, and soldering irons at a machine until they got some new feature to emerge. And isn’t the running program the part that others can appreciate? Like any art, the nature of its creation is of interest, but the general public is much more attracted to the finished project, right?
I also don’t love Graham’s skepticism on research, either. He describes academia as a system that pressures participants into targeting simple changes that produce good-looking graphs. I’ll admit there exists research that does that (it’s how I survived in undergraduate research), but I feel like there are people who work towards an end with their research. Maybe research can happen industrially, but so does software development. If hackers developing software can rise from the industrial mire, then can’t people become hackers by doing beauty focused research in an original way? Graham will tell you: it’s because almost all true Hackers are working on startups.
Graham describes the race of startups with a simple give and take between companies of different sizes. Large monolithic corporations are familiar and entrenched in public minds, they have an easy time sticking around in established markets. However, (Graham thinks) product managers are stupid and make it harder and more time consuming to produce good software, so a small company with focus and less management overhead can beat large competitors to a new market like Davids landing a focused blow on Goliath. And thus the software company life cycle is complete, with large, stationary companies buying ideas being outpaced by startups on the fringes of the industry, the most successful of which become larger, slower companies, either buying faster companies to grow or being bought themselves.
Graham’s background makes this kind of obvious, but this essay affirms his belief that start-ups are the only source of new ideas.Everyone else is a sellout, a 9-5-er, a cog in a machine that’s way too big. If a hacker exists at one of these places, then it’s because they hack on their own time. If you don’t have the right job then you can’t do Graham’s “cool” labor and you’ll never be cool enough to be a Hacker.
It’s too bad, because I like Graham’s vision of a hacker as “someone who can make a computer do what he wants -whether the computer wants to or not.” I like the idea that hackers have taken computing from a droll occupation or an iterative science and made it into an art. A place for creatives to builds things that speak to non-experts. These tenants were the core of Levy’s philosophy that I found so attractive. How can Graham and I purport to love the same ideas in ways that make us so different?
Decryptic 