[P2P-F] Interesting article from the Economist

[Michel Bauwens]

mentions our good friend Marco Fioretti ...

for more, http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Spirituality#Christianity

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 11:34 PM, James Quilligan <jbquilligan at comcast.net>wrote:

> Monitor
> What would Jesus hack?
> Cybertheology: Just how much does Christian doctrine have in common with
> the open-source software movement?
>
> “THE kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” Jesus said of little
> children. But computer hackers might give the kids some competition,
> according to Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest. In an article
> published earlier this year in *La Civiltà Cattolica*, a fortnightly
> magazine backed by the Vatican, entitled “Hacker ethics and Christian
> vision”, he did not merely praise hackers, but held up their approach to
> life as in some ways divine. Mr Spadaro argued that hacking is a form of
> participation in God’s work of creation. (He uses the word hacking in its
> traditional, noble sense within computing circles, to refer to building or
> tinkering with code, rather than breaking into websites. Such nefarious
> activities are instead known as “malicious hacking” or “cracking”.)
>
> Mr Spadaro says he became interested in the subject when he noticed that
> hackers and students of hacker culture used “the language of theological
> value” when writing about creativity and coding, so he decided to examine
> the idea more deeply. The hacker ethic forged on America’s west coast in the
> 1970s and 1980s was playful, open to sharing, and ready to challenge models
> of proprietary control, competition and even private property. Hackers were
> the origin of the “open source” movement which creates and distributes
> software that is free in two senses: it costs nothing and its underlying
> code can be modified by anyone to fit their needs. “In a world devoted to
> the logic of profit,” wrote Mr Spadaro, hackers and Christians have “much to
> give each other” as they promote a more positive vision of work, sharing and
> creativity.
>
> He is not the only person to see an affinity between the open-source hacker
> ethos and Christianity. Catholic open-source advocates have founded a group
> called Elèutheros to encourage the church to endorse such software. Its
> manifesto refers to “strong ideal affinities between Christianity, the
> philosophy of free software, and the adoption of open formats and
> protocols”. Marco Fioretti, co-founder of the group, says open-source
> software teaches the “practical dimension of community and service to others
> that is already in the church message”. There are also legal motivations.
> Commercial software such as Microsoft Word is widely pirated in many parts
> of the world, by Catholics as well as others. Mr Fioretti advocates the use
> of open-source software instead, because he doesn’t want people “to violate
> a law without any real reason, just to open a church document”.
>
> Although the Vatican has yet to encourage the faithful to live like
> hackers, it has praised the internet as “truly blessed” for its ability to
> connect people and share information. The pope has even joined Twitter. But
> praise has always been tempered by warnings. As early as 2002, for instance,
> the Vatican’s “Church and Internet” document cautioned that “there are no
> sacraments on the internet” and worried about the solipsistic appeal of
> technology. Moreover, hackers in particular have problematic traits from the
> perspective of the Catholic church, such as a distrust of authorities and
> scepticism toward received wisdom. And the idea of tweaking source materials
> to fit one’s needs doesn’t mesh well with the Catholic emphasis on authority
> and tradition.
>
> *Cathedrals and bazaars*
>
> Mr Spadaro recognises these tensions but finds them manageable. Not
> everyone agrees. Eric Raymond, author of a classic essay on open-source
> software, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, finds it hard to believe that some
> Christians want to canonise the hacker mindset. After being quoted in Mr
> Spadaro’s paper, Mr Raymond took to his own website to note that he had
> deliberately equated cathedrals with proprietary, closed-source software
> directed from above, by contrast with the more chaotic bazaar of equals
> which produces open-source code. “Cathedrals—vertical, centralising
> religious edifices imbued with a tradition of authoritarianism and ‘revealed
> truth’—are the polar opposite of the healthy, sceptical, anti-authoritarian
> nous at the heart of the hacker culture,” Mr Raymond declared. As for Mr
> Spadaro’s ideas, they possessed a “special, almost unique looniness”.
>
> But Mr Spadaro is merely the latest to link coding with Christian attitudes
> towards creativity and sharing. Don Parris, a North Carolina pastor, wrote
> an article in *Linux Journal* in 2004 in which he argued that “proprietary
> software limits my ability to help my neighbour, one of the cornerstones of
> the Christian faith.” Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, an open-source
> programming language, said in an interview a decade ago that God expects
> humans to create—and to help others do so. Mr Wall said he saw his popular
> language as just such a prod to creation, saying, “In my little way, I’m
> sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God
> likes.”
>
> More recently Kevin Kelly, co-founder of *Wired *magazine and author of
> “What Technology Wants”, published last year, has argued that creation can
> go further in code. Whereas a novelist can craft a new world, coders can
> build worlds complete with artificial agents that exist and evolve outside
> the creator’s mind. Mr Kelly takes literally the words of his friend Stewart
> Brand, whose “Whole Earth Catalog” quipped, “We are as gods and might as
> well get good at it.” Mr Kelly, a Christian, says the ability to create
> artificial life will come with great parental responsibility and suggests
> that artificial worlds will need to be imbued with moral value. “This causes
> a kind of revival of religion,” he says, “because religion has been thinking
> about this issue.”
>
> From the outside, hacking computer code has largely been viewed as a
> technical discipline, not as a theologically rich vision of how to live. But
> some see a divine aspect to programming—at least when looking with the eye
> of faith.
>



-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20110907/76746958/attachment.htm