Cybertheology, Jesus says

What would Jesus hack? Cybertheology: Just how much does Christian doctrine have in common with the open-source software movement? Sep 3rd 2011 | from the print edition the economist “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. from the print edition | Technology Quarterly