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The Etonomlst Technology Quarterly September 3rt! 2011

What 'would Jesus hacl<?

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 lads some competition, according to Antonio Spadaro, an ItalianJesuit priest. In an article published earlier this year in La Civilta 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 tradition al, 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 hack ers 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, competi tion 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 Eleutheros to encourage the church to endorse such software. Its manifesto refers to "strong ideal affinities between Christianity, the philosophy of free soft ware, and the adoption of open formats and protocols". Marco Fioretti, co-founder of the group, says open-source software , teaches the "practical dimension of com munity and service to others that is al ready in the church message". There are also legal motivations. Commercial soft ware 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 encour age 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 evenjoined Twitter. But praise has always been tem pered by warnings. As early as 2002, for instance, the Vatican's "Church and In ternet" document cautioned that "there are no sacraments on the internet" and worried about the solipsistic appeal of technology. Moreover, hackers in partic ular 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 Catho lic 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 Ray mond 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 authoritar ianism 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 to wards creativity and sharing. Don Parris, a North Carolina pastor, wrote an article in Lil1uxJournalin 2004 in which he argued that "proprietary software limits my abili ty to help my neighbour, one of the cor nerstones of the Christian faith." Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, an open-source programming language, said in an in terview a decade ago that God expects humans to create-and to help others do so. Mr Wall said he saw his popular lan guage asjust such a prod to creation, say ing, "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 think ing a bout this issue." From the outside, hacking computer code has largely been viewed as a tech nical 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. _