Hacking

"No section on reality hacking would be complete without a screed about computer programming, the original form of hacking. This essay is by Rudy Rucker, a contributor to the Great Work of the third millennium: building machines that are alive." —editors

Bold introduction, but he's an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. And he founded an ISP for punks and small businesses in San Francisco in 1998! (And his web portal is somewhat stuck in that era, referencing a  He's lauded by fellow cyberpunk founder William Gibson (who might have broader name recognition). Let's say it's a fitting preamble and leave it at that.

"A computer program is a virtual machine that you build by hand. Hacking is like building a car by building all of the parts in the car individually. The good thing is that you have full control, the bad thing is that the process can take so much longer than you expect it to. Are you sure you feel like stamping out a triple-0 z-ring gasket? And compositing the plastic from which to make the gasket? The hacker says, 'Yaar! Sounds like fun!' "

But in 2012, Rudy was looking decades back, before the age of computers with a certain fondness: "When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to that garden of Eden."

I realize that hacking or programming is not the same thing as living in the modern computer age, where there are endless feeds of information to the point of complete distraction. And I can recall people, even young adults, griping about the speed of communication and the implied obligation of instant replies, in the mid 1990s.

So let's instead focus on how far we've come in world of programming from 1995, when the way to start was take a course on C or buy a C compiler and start working through examples. Now, it's much easier to start coding, with online teaching platforms like Code Academy, and there's a broad push to get kids interested and involved in computer science at a young age, with online resources like Code.org.

"Hacking teaches that the secret of the universe need not be so very complex, provided that the secret is set down in a big enough space of computation equipped with feedback and parallelism." Programming can still open up windows to other worlds, once you understand the languages.