Week 12: hacking in the modern world

Pekka Himanen, a Finnish philosopher, has proposed seven different values that would shape the information age. In this week's blog, I'm going to go over these points one by one.

Passion - I think this aspect applies to pretty much every field, if you want to be good at something and be satisfied with yourself, you should do it with passion. And if possible you should always strive to make that passion and hobby into your career.

Freedom or playful cleverness - I agree with this aspect and I really think that freedom is essential as promotes innovative thinking and develops us further. And at least from my experience, rigid rules really hinder passion and creativity.

Hacker work ethic - this aspect states that rules should be born from debates rather than blindly following the given rules. The coin of "blindly not following rules" of course has two sides and a lot of people misinterpret it sadly.

Hacker money ethic - in a world where we are extremely materialistic, it's important to weigh out whether getting a small financial gain is worth all of the cons at the ned. I love the example with Linux, if Torvalds wouldn't have chosen a free license of Linux the entire field of hacking would have been different.

Hacker network ethic or nethic - hackers tend to resist censorship in all its forms and I am also a firm believer of it, if we leave out censorship of harmful content for children and minors.

Caring - I agree with this, having seen it myself, people sometimes tend to forget to look at the bigger picture. Reminding yourself of what really matters from time to time is important.

Creativity - I think this aspect is getting more and more important as the field is growing so fast so creativity and innovation is essential to stand out and be successful at what you are doing.

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