EOF - Hacking with Humor

Hacking is largely a practical matter—scratching itches and all that. But, some hackers work in service of irony, manipulating social as well as computer code—to effects that are equally interesting, useful and funny. At this line of work, nobody outdoes Tim Hwang (aka @TimHwang), who blogs as Broseph Stalin (after retiring as commissioner of the US Bureau of Fabulous Bitches) and whose CV also includes creating and organizing all of the following:

Tim Hwang

I met Tim when he was a researcher at the Berkman Center and got to know him better through ROFLCon and The Awesome Foundation (in which I now hold a chair in the original Boston chapter). It also seemed like I ran into Tim pretty much everywhere around the MIT-Harvard axis of Cambridge-based social and technical hackery.

I still don't know where Tim went to college, though I'm guessing it was one of the two likely suspects. (Berkman is at Harvard and ROFLCon happens at MIT.) I never asked. From a hacking perspective, where one went to school (or currently goes to school) is not a matter of great importance. This is one of the things that drew me to working with Linux Journal and hanging with hackers in the first place. The hacker ethos is a corollary to a line on a T-shirt I used to see a lot in Los Angeles. It read, “It isn't who you are but how you look. After all, who cares who you are?” Around hackerdom, it's like, “It isn't where you went but what you do. After all, who cares where you went?”

These days, Tim goes to UC-Berkeley, where he's a law student. What he's doing (and presumably will do when he gets out) is work with Robot Robot & Hwang. And, since hacking law is an activity on which at least one of my own open-source projects depends, I'm looking forward to Tim's progress on that front.

Meanwhile, my immediate interest is in SOCIALBOTS 2011, which will be over by the time you read this. The whole “social network” craze drives me up a wall. We've had “social networks” forever, both off-line and on. Bars, restaurants, churches, town squares, marketplaces, cafés, USENET, FidoNet, SMS, blogging—all those things are no less social than Twitter and Facebook, yet when somebody says “social network”, those two things are what they mean. Until I busted them for it, Wikipedia's entry for “social media” read:

But, while I mocked the pursuit of influence and rankings on Twitter as “high school with a business model”, Tim hacked up a way to prove it, with SOCIALBOTS 2011. The pitch:

I look at this as a way of debugging Twitter, plus every other “social network” (or wannabe) whose executives cringe at the results.

Here's betting that Tim's hack will do more good than a thousand complaints like mine.

Oh, and don't forget to check roflcon.org for details on ROFLCon 3.