Hacking Stuff
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Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 5: Hacking Stu Joseph Reagle Published on: Apr 03, 2019 Updated on: Apr 09, 2019 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 5: Hacking Stu Hackers seek shortcuts, sometimes toward unusual ends. Tynan, for example, has taken a different route than most: college dropout, professional gambler, pickup artist, software developer, author. He learned to type on the Dvorak keyboard and twice attempted polyphasic sleep. Despite living frugally, he throws away nickels and pennies. The few dollars he loses a year aren’t worth the hassle. Tynan also likes to travel, and for many years his home had wheels. Two of his books describe the philosophy and practice of his lifestyle, Life Nomadic and The Tiniest Mansion: How to Live in Luxury on the Side of the Road. In the first book, Tynan discusses the philosophy of living in a recreational vehicle: “Minimalism is essentially freedom from excess, and there are few lifestyles more minimalist than living in less than one hundred square feet of space in a vehicle. The mental clutter associated with rent payment, home maintenance, cleaning, vacuuming, and furnishing is gone.”1 In The Tiniest Mansion, Tynan addresses the practicalities of living in an RV, such as getting utilities and disposing of waste. And he’s frequently asked if this lifestyle interferes with dating: “My one suggestion is to tell a story early on that indicates that you aren’t forced to live in an RV as a last resort, but that you intentionally chose a freedom-laden minimalist lifestyle.”2 Telling others, and ourselves, a compelling story about our life gives it meaning. This is true for life hackers and their relationship to possessions. When David Allen spoke of getting a handle on “stuff ” in Getting Things Done, he was speaking of incomplete tasks that occupy the mind. Material stuff also occupies the mind. It takes work to get and keep possessions, no matter how productive or organized you are. Consequently, some life hackers embrace minimalism by limiting their possessions to the essential. And technology frees them to become digital nomads, taking their work, social networks, and entertainment with them wherever they go. When life hackers discuss their relationship to stuff, they tell two stories. They talk about the gear that is essential and how they discarded everything else. In these stories zen often makes an appearance. This invocation connotes simplicity and a clean aesthetic, made famous by Steve Jobs at Apple. As a young man, Jobs studied Buddhism intensively. Even though he was not known for his compassion and seemed far from ego-less, Zen suited his aesthetic. (There is a famous picture of young Jobs sitting, cross-legged, on the floor under a Tiffany lamp, the only piece of furniture worthy of his otherwise empty mansion.) Not surprisingly, most life hackers favor Apple’s aesthetic and products. The blogs 43 Folders, Zen Habits, and Minimal Mac have dozens of posts about Macs. Tynan is the notable exception to the fanboy rule—even so, his 2012 his laptop of choice was the Asus Zenbook Prime. Even if the references to Zen are shallow, they show that life hacking transcends simple tips and tricks. The hacker ethos informs how hackers understand and approach larger issues, like material contentment, and hackers are happy to share their recommendations and philosophy with others. We can learn much about contemporary life via their stories and the questions they prompt. For example, what does it mean to choose “a freedom-laden minimalist lifestyle” in a society of unequal wealth, in 2 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 5: Hacking Stu which others have few choices? To address this question, we need to first understand a bit of life hacking’s cultural history. Gear Lists and the Whole Earth Catalog One tenet of minimalism is that if you rely on a few things, they should be dependable. As Tynan writes in Life Nomadic, the “best way to enjoy what this amazing world has to offer is through limited but high-quality consumption.”3 A recurring story life hackers tell about their relationship to stuff is their search for good gear. Lifehacker, for example, showcases bags and workspaces filled with useful items. Individuals also post gear lists. Tynan has been doing so since 2008—frequently extolling the virtues of wool clothing. A good online gear list has a common structure. Each item is accompanied by an image and personal reflection. Some lists are capped by images of all the items arranged next to each other and another of everything packed away. Links to Amazon allow authors to make commissions on their recommendations. Tynan’s lists are excellent: “every product I recommend is the absolute best in its class; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using it.”4 Although gear lists have reached their apex online, there are historical antecedents. In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau listed the supplies and foodstuffs he used during his experiment of simple living —making him a favorite of life hackers.5 Among the items he purchased and scavenged, Thoreau paid $8.03 (and one-half cent) for the boards he used for his cabin, which were repurposed from the shanty of an itinerant railroad worker. Tynan makes no mention of Walden, but his account parallels that of Thoreau. Tynan spent around $20,000 for a 1995 Rialta RV, which he fitted with granite countertops cut from a single $200 slab. In their retrofits, neither Thoreau nor Tynan cared about luxury per se. They sought value, which was best had via used items and elbow grease. A more recent gear list precursor is the Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968. The Catalog recommended tools and books for those seeking self-sufficiency and a bigger picture. Its publisher, Stewart Brand, trained as a biologist at Stanford University and served in the US Army, but his most notable characteristic is his take on the world. In the few years preceding the catalog, Brand campaigned for NASA to release a photo of Earth from space, which would show humanity’s interdependence. When they did so, he used the image as the catalog’s cover art and talisman. Beyond perusing online copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, the best way to appreciate Brand’s interests is through Fred Turner’s history, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.6 Turner discusses the influences of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, Buckminster Fuller’s “comprehensive designer,” Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” the 3 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 5: Hacking Stu USCO art collective, and the road- and acid-tripping Merry Pranksters. Brand fashioned his eclectic interests into a syncretic vision for human improvement, and he created spaces in which his vision could become a reality. Despite being in the thick of the counterculture, Brand maintained a clean-cut look and deeply appreciated what he learned as an infantry officer. He had learned that with both soldiers and hippies, you have to make the best of what you have. His organizing abilities allowed him to play the part of countercultural entrepreneur by identifying nascent trends and giving them space and cohesion, as he did as a coorganizer of the 1966 Trips Festival in San Francisco. This three-day show was the first mass event of the hippie movement and featured the Grateful Dead, LSD-spiked punch, and a psychedelic light show. Thousands attended. The Whole Earth Catalog served as another space, in print, for those seeking an alternative way of living —long before anyone spoke of lifestyle design. The Catalog’s subtitle was Access to Tools, and its criteria were pragmatic. Items should be useful, further self-sufficiency, provide good value, and be little known but easily purchased by mail. Its stated purpose was grandiose: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” Power was shifting away from the formal institutions of schools, churches, corporations, and governments. The individual could now “conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”7 This individual sounds a lot like a life hacker. Despite its name, the Whole Earth Catalog was not just a listing of gear. More often than not, items in the Catalog were ideas, and the idea that Brand was most taken with fifty years ago was that of systems. Each issue of the Catalog, published regularly between 1968 and 1972, had a section dedicated to “understanding whole systems”—the same motive that drives hackers today. Other sections of the Catalog could serve as categories at Lifehacker: Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics, and Learning. Life hackers share Brand’s belief that ideas are powerful tools. This is best seen in Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World Class Performers. Ferriss writes that “world-class performers don’t have superpowers”; instead, “the rules they’ve crafted for themselves allow the bending of reality to such an extent that it may seem that way.” His self-help promise is that his Titans “learned how to do this, and so can you.”8 If Brand’s readers were gods, when given access to the right tools, Ferriss’s readers could appear like Titans, pre-Olympian deities, when given the same. Although both men love gadgets, their most powerful tools are ideas, especially those about systems and the rules for taking advantage of them. 4 Hacking Life • Hacking Life Chapter 5: Hacking Stu The “Californian Ideology” and Cool Tools Stewart Brand was quick to recognize that “computers and their programs are tools,” as he wrote in the first Whole Earth Software Catalog (1984).9 Most importantly, PCs could be networked, and in 1985 Brand cofounded The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), a San Francisco–area bulletin board system.