Hackers and Romantics: Are They Anti-System?

What could German Romanticism have in common with computer hacking?
At first sight, the answer seems obvious: rebellion. Both Romantics and hackers seem, in some sense, anti-system. But does challenging a system necessarily mean opposing it? Or can criticism contribute to its improvement? This distinction matters particularly for technology: attempts to expose a system’s limitations or make it behave in unintended ways need not be destructive. They can also contribute to its improvement. I want to suggest that neither Romantics nor hackers simply reject systems. Both challenge the idea that a system’s present form determines the limits of what is possible. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) never saw a computer. The hackers at MIT were unlikely to have Schlegel pinned above their terminals. There is no genealogy connecting them.

Yet put their attitudes toward systems side by side, and something curious happens.

Romantics and the Problem of Systems

In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel, one of the central figures of early German Romanticism, wrote in Athenaeum Fragment 53: “It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.” Schlegel was clearly not simply rejecting systems. Having no system, he tells us, is just as problematic as having one.

One way of understanding this paradox is through a form characteristic of early Romanticism: the fragment. A philosophical fragment is incomplete, but this does not necessarily mean that something is missing. It can be connected to other fragments, contradicted, reconsidered or continued. It presents a thought without requiring us to regard that thought as having reached its final form. In his notebooks, Schlegel extends this idea to systems themselves: “Even the largest system is only a fragment.” The Romantic problem is therefore not simply the existence of systems, but their closure. A system is necessary to organise thought. The danger comes when its present organisation is taken to the point of exhaustion.

More than 150 years later, a similar attitude appeared in a very different kind of system.

From Romantic Fragments to Computer Hacks

In Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), Steven Levy reconstructed the culture that emerged around some of the first computer hackers at MIT. He called their collection of values the “Hacker Ethic”.

Today, hacker often evokes someone breaking into a computer system. That was not the meaning Levy was trying to capture. For the hackers he described, hacking involved curiosity, ingenuity and a desire to understand what computers could be made to do. The first principle of Levy’s Hacker Ethic is the “Hands-On Imperative”. Hackers wanted access to computers because systems could be understood by taking them apart, seeing how they worked and using that knowledge to make new things. Richard Stallman, who joined the MIT hacker community in the 1970s, later gave hacking an especially revealing definition: “exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness.”

The hacker encounters a machine designed to do certain things in certain ways and asks a simple question:  What else can it do? Here, the resemblance to Schlegel becomes clearer.

For the Romantic, the present organisation of a system of thought does not exhaust what thought can become. For the hacker, the intended functions of a technical system do not exhaust what can be done with it. Both resist identifying what a system presently is with the limits of what is possible through it.

This is why describing either as anti-system is both tempting and misleading. Hackers are fascinated by systems. Challenging a computer requires understanding its rules and constraints. Schlegel likewise does not propose disorder as an alternative to systematic thought: having no system, he says, is also “fatal.”

The more interesting opposition may therefore be not between system and anti-system, but between closure and possibility.

Can a Technical System Benefit from Being Challenged?

The comparison becomes more interesting for technology ethics when we consider a particular descendant of hacker culture: the “ethical hacker”. An ethical hacker may deliberately circumvent protections, expose vulnerabilities or make a computer system behave in ways its designers did not anticipate. Considered in isolation, such actions can look hostile to the system. Yet their purpose can be precisely the opposite. Discovering and responsibly reporting a vulnerability can allow those responsible for a system to repair a weakness they had not recognised. Some organisations even offer bug bounties, paying hackers who discover and report such vulnerabilities. Challenging the system can therefore be not only tolerated but deliberately encouraged as a way of making it more robust.

There is an intriguing Romantic parallel.

For Schlegel, criticism was not simply a matter of standing outside a work and judging it. Romantic criticism could disclose possibilities within a work and contribute to its further development. Walter Benjamin later made this idea central to his interpretation of Romantic criticism. Criticism, he argued, was not merely the judgment of a work but a means of its completion: it could go beyond the work by developing possibilities already present within it. An artwork, of course, does not have a security vulnerability. A Romantic critic is not performing a penetration test on a poem. The analogy has limits.

But the structural resemblance is revealing.

The ethical hacker challenges a technical system and can thereby contribute to its improvement. The Romantic critic challenges the apparent completeness of a work and can thereby contribute to its development.

Criticism need not be the opposite of construction. It can be one of its forms.

This brings us back to the question in the title. Are hackers and Romantics anti-system?
Not if this means that they simply want to destroy systems or replace organisation with disorder. What they share is a refusal to let the present form of a system determine, once and for all, the limits of its possibilities.

For technology, the ethical hacker makes the consequence particularly concrete. A good technical system may not be one protected from every challenge. It may be one capable of benefiting from being challenged.

Perhaps Schlegel and the hackers, therefore, leave us with a surprisingly contemporary question:

What kind of technical system should welcome its own critics? Sometimes, challenging a system is a way of caring for it.

References

• Benjamin, W. (1919/2002). The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. In M. Bullock & M. W. Jennings (Eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926. Harvard University Press.
• Levy, S. (1984/2010). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. O’Reilly
• Schlegel, F. (1798). Athenaeum Fragment 53. In Philosophical fragments translated by Peter Firchow : foreword by Rodolphe Gasché, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London 1991 p. 24Schlegel, F. Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur. In E. Behler (Ed.), Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol. 16, p. 163, no. 930. Ferdinand Schöningh.
• Stallman, R. (2002). “On Hacking.”  https://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

Author Bio

Alexandru (Sacha) Mateescu is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He has an interdisciplinary background with degrees in Computer Engineering, Contemporary Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. His doctoral research focuses on recommendation algorithms considered as persuasive technologies, studied at the intersection of classical and modern rhetoric and their nature as adaptive systems.