Summary: Explains the definition, style, and tone of hacking world sustainability.
The term, hacking, needs some explanation and maybe redemption from ignominy. The term carries some baggage: We can identify political hacks who would not comprehend sustainability. Someone driving a taxi was once dubbed a hack. A clumsy woodcutter might be caught hacking. I obviously have something else in mind.
The contemporary use of the term refers to improvising computer applications to get a different result than that originally intended. A hacker is a person who creates and performs spontaneously from what is available. A hacker adjusts as appropriate and moves inventively toward the goal, the hack. Inventing hacks for world sustainability must be totally legal, of course, and there is plenty of free space within which to maneuver. These definitions of hacking and a hacker, respectively, from The Urban Dictionary captures my intended meaning:
"to program a computer in a clever, virtuosic, and wizardly manner. Ordinary computer jockeys merely write programs; hacking is the domain of digital poets. Hacking is a subtle and arguably mystical art, equal parts wit and technical ability, that is rarely appreciated by non-hackers."
"An individual capable of solving complex non-intuitive problems in a seemingly intuitive manner. The processes and techniques used are not necessarily methodical to the observer, but yet achieve results significantly and consistently faster than known experience would predict. A hacker is not defined in terms of intention or purpose, but rather by the talented single-mindedness of method. A hacker is not a hack. "
Hackers are recognized as hard-working, imaginative, inventive, passionate, and highly independent (Himanen). A fascinating depiction of hackers at work/play, The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick, tells the story of the founding of Facebook and its inventor, Mark Zuckerberg. Like Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, hackers are typically driven by the vision of networking. The outcomes of hacking includes social networking and potential for collective intelligence that can be directed toward building a sustainable society. Collective intelligence has been defined in this way:
"Collective intelligence is the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as variation-feedback-selection, differentiation-integration-transformation, and competition-cooperation-coopetition" (Blog of Collective Intelligence, viewed 9/26/2010)
The generation of collective intelligence has the potential of forming the Noosphere, as we explain later in the project. Examples of collective intelligence include Wikipedia, Google, and even futures markets (Segaran, 2-4 ). Social learning has been deemed essential as an antidote to the Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome.
As I collected notes for this page, a perplexing news item arrived about business and sustainability. The giant and notorious oil field services company Halliburton is named by the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes as both a North American and a world leader in sustainability business practices. The company previously run by Dick Cheney, Vice-President under George W. Bush, seemed out of place as a champion of sustainability. Yet, there it was.
The site that provided this new feed, Triple Pundit: People, Profit, Planet, builds its reporting around the concept of the Triple Bottom Line, essential to the notion of sustainability used in this project, particularly to define the economics of sustainability. The founder and publisher of Triple Pundit, Nick Aster, has worked for Nike, SAB, Cit-Bank, and Tree-Hugger.com. He appears to me to be a fine example of a person who is actively hacking world sustainability. I would not quibble about issues such as whether a sustainer can work for Citi-Bank, but rather appreciate the contribution that Nick Aster is making to the cause of hacking world sustainability.