I hack, you hack, he/she hacks, we hack, they hack – whether you’re tying something to your key-ring with string, or trying “Username=admin / Password=admin“, you’re officially a hacker. Furthermore, says well-known YCombinator startup guy Paul Graham, the word “hack”…
…can be either a compliment or an insult. It’s called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that’s also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.
Believe it or not, the two senses of “hack” are also connected. Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules. And there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking that’s merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).
An ugly-to-beautiful rule-breaking continuum, eh? Further on in the post, Graham muses about what was wrong with living in Florence…
But after I’d been there a few months I realized that what I’d been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I’d just left. The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. (So I went back to America.)
Put all these pieces together, and do you grasp what Graham is feeling his way towards? That the Renaissance started with wave after wave of Florentine hardware hackers (Brunelleschi et al) and software hackers (Alberti et al), using their restless ingenuity to bypass & sidestep the rigid rules and conventions holding wobbly medieval practices & thought in place. But, irritatingly, this was not done under an elegantly humanist banner: no, this was a grass-roots, geeky, reality-hacking startup crew (let’s call them ‘Generation R‘, for want of a better name), all vying for Series A-style funding from the Venture Capitalists of the day (Medici, Sforza, Rucellai, Malatesta, etc), where the ‘exit strategy’ on their proposals wasn’t an IPO, but something much greater: fama – eternal individual fame.
It’s true that it’s a looong time since Burckhardt’s progressivist ra-ra-Renaissance-in-Florence line has been the dominant historical narrative for the Quattrocento; and yes, the Middle Ages also saw plenty of invention (see Jean Gimpel’s “The Medieval Machine” if you don’t believe me); but all the same, I suspect there would be more than a Tower grain of truth in the idea that the history of hacking can indeed be traced back through time right to Generation R’s door. Even if you don’t buy in to the rest of the simile. 😉
Putting our cipher mystery hat back on, does this mean that our favourite early modern cipher object – the Voynich Manuscript, of course – might merely be the ultimate software hack of its era? If so, is it an ugly (yellow duckling) hack of temporary convenience and cunning, or a beautiful (black swan) hack born of unique happenstance and intellect? Or might it instead sit somewhere in the foggy continuum between these two poles? Something to bear in mind, anyway…