2020
Joseph Reagle <j.reagle@northeastern.edu>
Communication Studies, College of Art, Media, and Design
Northeastern University
Status: Draft, feedback welcome!
Abstract: Life hacking is self-help for the digital age. Its gurus recommend that life—including yourself and others—be treated as a system of rules to be optimized or subverted. Self-help authors Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) and James Altucher (Choose Yourself) advise that the rules of social life be hacked so to “make the impossible possible” and “get everything you want.” I analyze their advice relative to the interplay of abiding versus subverting the spirit or letter of a rule yields. This yields four different types of advice: that rules be bent, broken, stretched, and exploited. I consider each relative to the critiques of life hacking and Kant’s categorical imperative: “can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?” This effort yields a new avenue for engaging with popular culture, and these distinctions can help those who wish to hack (life) ethically and challenge those who do not.
Keywords: self-help, life hacking, ethics, hacking.
Life hacking, a self-help for the twenty-first century, recommends that life—including yourself and others—be treated as a system of rules to be optimized or subverted. And self-help is one of the most lucrative, consequential, and popular genres of popular culture. Yet, as Steven Starker writes in his history of the genre, “It is terribly easy to accord self-help books the usual pop-culture treatment: the shake of the head, momentary sneer, superior smile, and benign neglect.” To engage with it seriously “may even entail some degree of academic risk” (Starker, 2002, p. 2). Even so, critically engaging with self-help, especially that which recommends life’s systemization, deserves effort rather than neglect.
Occasionally, experts do challenge harmful self-help advice, journalists report on the scandals of gurus, and scholars critique the underlying ideologies of the genre. When a book, like John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus dominated popular attention, a few scholars of popular culture critiqued the ideology of his recommendations and explained how his success was related to his media environment (Cowlishaw, 2001; Buzzard, 2002). Similarly, there are critiques of contemporary life hacking advice; for example, Costas and Grey (2012) speak to the exploitation inherit in the life hacking tactic of personal outsourcing (e.g., paying someone in India to find and schedule dates for you). None of this critique, however, is placed within an ethical frame. Costas and Gray, for example, apply the notion of “organizational ambidexterity” within “new capitalism” to argue personal out-sourcing is an act of “re-differentiation” whereby attempts at escaping corporate life reaffirm its ideology. True enough, but what of the ethics of advising this course of action? When, how, and why is such advice wrong?
Traditional self-help is often presented as set of rules, such as The Rules for romance (Fein and Schneider, 1996) and the 12 Rules for Life (Peterson, 2018). This is even more so for life hacking. Beyond “unethical” and “evil” hacks (Unethical Hacks, 2014; Evil week category, 2016), suspect advice includes outsourcing chores to the less fortunate, being pushy or cutting in line, manipulating “beautiful women in[to] bed,” and “boosting” your body and brain to have an “unfair advantage”—the actual name of an energy supplement.
The ethical vacuum around such advice is startling for a few reasons. First, systematizing others and violating rules merits thought of possible harm. Aside from shallow invocations of “do no harm” and brief rationalizations, this consideration is lacking among its practitioners. Second, the notion of a “hacker ethic” is an important part of computer culture, which inspired life hacking. Yet, life hackers do not speak of such an ethic. Finally, life hackers often speak of rules (and algorithms and routines) and there is a branch of normative ethics, deontology, similarly dedicated to rules (of conduct and duty). There should be a natural affinity between the two, but they are not mentioned together.
On the other hand, this moral vacancy is not wholly surprising. Life hacking is a type of self-help, which tends to be individualistic—self-interested and egoistic even. And though the larger genre includes tens of thousands of titles, is consequential to millions of readers, and is worth billions across all media (Vanderkam, 2012), it is, as noted, overlooked. It’s seen as benign advice or dubious pap (Starker, 2002, p. 2). And critical interventions tend to focus on egregious specifics and ideological abstractions, missing the middle ground of practical ethical reasoning.
I address this middle ground, but first introduce life hacking’s origins, the “hacker ethic,” and life hacking’s major critiques. I then consider how gurus, those who sell lifestyle advice and their role as its vendor, talk about the ethics of subverting rules, even if cursorily.
This analysis is based on an in-depth engagement with life hacking from 2014-2020, wherein I captured over one-thousand sources including books, blog posts, comments, podcasts, interviews, and popular and scholarly critiques dating back to 2004. I begin with famous entrepreneur and ex-Googler Paul Buchheit’s theory of hacking and focus on the advice of Tim Ferriss and James Altucher, whose book and podcast audiences number in the millions. The interplay of abiding or subverting the spirit or letter of a rule yields four different types of advice—that rules be bent, broken, stretched, and exploited. I consider each suggestion relative to the critiques of life hacking and Kant’s (1998, v. 4:404) categorical imperative: “can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?” That is, would you wish everyone do the same?
The notion of life hacking emerged in February 2004 when Danny O’Brien proposed a “life hacking” session at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego, California. O’Brien (2004), a writer and digital activist, noted that “alpha geeks” are extraordinarily productive, and he wanted to speak “to the most prolific technologists about the secrets of their desktops, their inboxes, and their schedules.” Within a year 43Folders.com, named for a way of organizing tasks via folders, and Lifehacker.com, a site that remains popular today, emerged as sources for such secrets. Tim Ferriss (2007b) took the practice mainstream, though he rarely uses the term, with his 2007 best-seller The 4-Hour Workweek. One technique he made (in)famous was “extreme personal outsourcing,” which he wrote about in a blog post entitled “Mail Your Child to Sri Lanka or Hire Indian Pimps” (Ferriss, 2007a).
O’Brien’s usage of hack has its origins among model railroad enthusiasts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Over sixty years ago, they used the term to describe a quick fix to “The System,” the web of wires and relays under the train platform (Samson, 1959; Steele et al., 1983; Levy, 2010, p. 8). In subsequent years, hacking became associated with an identity and culture of clever system builders and manipulators. As Thomas (2015; 2015, p. 44) wrote in his Critical History of Life Hacking, the “broadening of the term to encompass all of life’s activities suggests the degree to which people are increasingly thinking about everything in computational terms.”
While computing is linked to life hacking’s origins, the hacker perspective can more accurately, and broadly, be described as systems thinking (Reagle, 2019, p. 20). This is exemplified by entrepreneur Paul Buchheit, an early Google employee who developed Gmail and the prototype of AdSense. He believes that hacking is an “applied philosophy” of life. Buchheit writes that “wherever there are systems, there is the potential for hacking, and there are systems everywhere. Our entire reality is systems of systems, all the way down.” His examples include Tim Ferriss exploiting the rules of disqualification to become a National Chinese Kickboxing champion and the pickup artists (PUAs) in Neil Strauss’s The Game, a “very amusing story of people hacking human attraction” (Buchheit, 2009; for PUAs as hackers, also see Thomas, 2015, ch. 4; Reagle, 2019, ch. 7).
In the hacker’s view, everything is a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with rules that can be understood, optimized, or subverted. Life hacking, then, is an application of this mindset as self-help.
I understand ethics to be “systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior” (Fieser, 2020). In moral philosophy, this is often accomplished by a normative focus on virtues of character (virtue ethics), consequences of action (consequentialism), or rules of conduct (deontology) (Manjikian, 2017, ch. 2, 3). Given that hacking extends to every aspect of life, do the ethics of computer hacking lend themselves to addressing the moral quandaries of life hacking? Only somewhat, especially because the term “ethic” is used in unexpected ways. The hacker ethic is mostly spoken of as (1) a commitment to a set of social values and (2) as an ethos, “the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community” (Oxford, 2016).
The germinal source for ethics as social values is journalist Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy (2010, pp. 28–31) famously associated six values with what he called the “hacker ethic”: a commitment to sharing, openness, decentralization, meritocracy, creativity, and improvement. Not only did this shape the development of subsequent hacker culture (Mizrach, 1997), but it has also been a focus of scholarly work (Denning, 1990; Himanen, 2001; Coleman and Golub, 2008, p. 258) and at least one reference work’s article on hacking and ethics (Tavani, 2015, pp. 160–161). Although hacking often has a negative (criminal) connotation, in this sense, it is a principled and pro-social activity.
Another influential source is a dictionary that emerged from the MIT’s model railroad club. What was first known as the club’s dictionary continued to be developed as the “Jargon File” among MIT hackers and beyond (Samson, 1959); it was eventually published in print as the Hacker’s Dictionary (Steele et al., 1983) and the New Hacker’s Dictionary (Raymond, 1991b). This work received its greatest popular attention under the editorship of Eric Raymond, who is well-known for contributions to and documentation of hacker and open source culture—which is sometimes overshadowed by his idiosyncratic beliefs. In the 1993 version of the “Jargon File,” Raymond added an entry for “Hacker Ethic” with two senses: again, that information sharing is a positive value, and that “system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality” (Raymond, 1993). This latter sense does touch on the deontological frame (from Greek δέον, deon, duty), yet Raymond’s definition reinforces the importance of ethics as social values, as is seen in its use in another reference work article on “Hacker Ethics” (Johnson, 2005).
Alongside ethic as social values, the other dominant frame is ethic as ethos. This ethos was conveyed by Levy’s early portrayal of computer hackers—and overlaps with discussions of hacker aesthetics (Harvey, 1985; Stallman, 2002; Coleman, 2013). Also, in a version of the “Jargon File,” Raymond (1991a) added an appendix: “A Portrait of J. Random Hacker.” His detailed caricature of hackers—including specific tastes in food and clothing—reified elements of the hacker ethos. This level of specificity is also seen in his “How to Become a Hacker” (Raymond, 2001), which enumerates the necessary attitude (e.g., “boredom and drudgery are evil”), skills (e.g., program on Unix computers), and means of gaining status (e.g., “publish useful information.”) Ethic as ethos also prominently appears in scholarly work (Suiter, 2013), including book-length works (Thomas, 2002).
Finally, what of normative deontology, of a moral code that, for example, prohibits theft or vandalism? At MIT, the hackers who enjoyed exploring campus and pulling pranks, including mounting a police car atop the Great Dome, had such a code. One MIT alumni recalled: “When I was hacking at MIT, we carried orange laminated cards with ‘Hacker Ethics’ printed on them. These served two purposes: first, they were useful for carding doors (and we used them routinely to break into places). Second, they served as a constant reminder of how to hack safely and ethically” (Davidoff, 2019). These rules included leave things as you found them or better, if you see something broken call maintenance, and never hack intoxicated or alone (Nightwork: Hackito ergo sum, 1996).
In the computer security profession, hackers are sometimes discussed using a trope from old Western movies: white hat hackers test and fortify system weaknesses and black hats maliciously exploit them (Manjikian, 2017, pp. 99–120; Christen et al., 2020, ch. 9). There have been minor efforts toward a code of conduct for white hats. Recently, a more concerted effort is the branding and certification of “ethical hackers,” with a nineteen item code of conduct in 2016 (Code of ethics, 2016). However, only three out of the 125 questions on the certification exam focus on appropriate behaviors expected of an ethical hacker (Domain 7, 2020).
To speak of a computer hacker ethic, then, is to speak of an ethos that privileges hacker values over traditional ones. For example, teaching a newbie how to pick a lock to access an MIT rooftop can reflect the values of openness, sharing, merit, and creativity. Because this is also traditionally understood as trespass, these values are buttressed by a code of conduct—“leave things as you found them (or better)”—that yields neutral or improved consequences. Outside this example, though, deontological ethics from which life hackers could borrow are rare among computer hackers.
Though there are few discussions of self-help ethics, that is not to say that self-help, and life hacking specifically, is without criticism.
An obvious concern with life hacking is that it equates humans with exploitable machines, such that “we must all master ourselves using technology, make do with less, ignore structural conditions, forget about the past, and work, work, work to make ourselves more productive like good little robots in a never-ending quest for improvement” (Thomas, 2015, p. 210).
Thinking of ourselves and others as machines is complemented by the immoderate individualism inherent in American self-help (Starker, 2002, p. 170). Critics note that this liberal/Enlightenment value mythologizes the seemingly autonomous individual who is, often, dependent on the “unacknowledged labor and servitude” of others. Benjamin Franklin, for example, is known for scheduling every hour of a twenty-hour day—“time is money,” after all—but little thought is given to how his wife and servants made it possible for him to live such productive life (McGee, 2005, pp. 6–7). This individualism is manifest in the motifs of self-help culture up until today: “entrepreneurship, pragmatism, fierce self-reliance, [and] gauzy spirituality … have been embedded in the national DNA since Poor Richard’s Almanack” (Kachka, 2013).
These motifs are even more pronounced in the life hacking sub-genre, where labor is recognized, but only as an opportunity for transactional delegation. Ferris’s call to “Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join The New Rich” is said to be about “individualistic responses to corporate overwork.” Life hackers like Ferriss advise readers to “outsource all the work of exploitation, leaving themselves free to enjoy the creativity and fun of exploration” (Costas and Grey, 2012, p. 223). And critics worry this is done without cognizance of the privilege inherent in such a “California tech bro approach to self-help” (Barekat, 2019; Day, 2011). Reagle (2019; 2019, pp. 38–43, p. 153) discussed this at length, including one guru who hired an overseas man to regularly call and remind him to floss his teeth. Thomas (2015; 2015, p. 65) did as well, concluding: “Ferris’s empire, such as it is, is built on the semi-slave labor of brown people from around the world, who are, thanks to technology, out of sight and out of mind.”
A popular workflow among life hackers, David Allen’s (2001) Getting Things Done, has similarly been criticized for “espous[ing] asociality as superiority.” “Entitled delegation,” one of the most lauded techniques, means “liberation from a raft of unrewarding labor that others must still perform.” This technique requires of its practitioners an “investment in a default assholery” (Gregg, 2018, p. 5; 2015, p. 187). To be called an asshole, here, is not simply an insult, but references Assholes: A Theory, wherein James (2012, 2012, ch. 1) provides a typology of assholes, all of whom believe they are entitled to “special advantages in interpersonal relations.”
These critiques, adeptly point out the failings of neoliberal ideology and the shortcomings of entitled assholery, but they offer little by way of practical ethical reasoning. How might we distinguish between good, tolerable, and harmful practices? These questions ought to be asked of the advice given in popular culture, especially the subgenre that recommends that rules be subverted.
Recall that Paul Buchheit (2009), inventor of Gmail, believes that “our entire reality is systems of systems, all the way down.” “This includes human relations,” and he identified Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists as “a very amusing story of people hacking human attraction.” Both Thomas (2015, 2015, ch. 4) and Reagle (2019, 2019, ch. 7) critiqued those who machinate sex with their “targets”—and rate them on a ten-point “Hot Babe” scale. Strauss himself recognized the danger of this at the end of his book; with their group of friends in dissolution and their ringleader in a psychiatric hospital, Strauss confessed that “in the process of dehumanizing the opposite sex, I had also been dehumanizing myself” (Strauss, 2005, pp. 227, 412). Even more mainstream use of relationship apps raises concerns about the gamification and mistrust inherent in their neoliberal logic (Danaher et al., 2018).
Beyond the objectification that can follow from systematization, what of hackers’ attitude towards rules themselves? For Buchheit, the power of hacking is that every system is governed by two sets of rules: the perceived rules of how things are thought to work and the actual rules of reality. He wrote that “in most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.” There is power in this: “Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform ‘miracles’—things which violate the perceived rules.” So, for example, a computer hacker can exploit the gap between how a program is supposed to behave and the reality of a buffer overrun. Of course, “hacking isn’t limited to computers” (Buchheit, 2009)
Buchheit is not the first to speak of two realities. Philosophers have long distinguished between phenomena (as they appear) and noumena (as they are). An early legal scholar drew “distinctions between law in the books and law in action, between the rules that purport to govern the relations of man and man and those that in fact govern them” (Pound, 1910). More recent theorists speak of a gap between rules-in-form and actual rules-in-use, with the latter including informal norms (Ostrom, 2007). But it is hackers who have made this gap, and breaking of rules, central to their work. As high-tech entrepreneur, capitalist, and “hacker philosopher” Paul Graham (2010; 2010, p. 50) wrote, “Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules.”
Not all of life hacking is about rules, but it is an important motif, especially among the most hawkish of gurus. I engage with this discourse relative to a simple ethic and the preceding critiques of individualism, privilege, exploitation, and assholery. [Coincidentally, or not, many of those who advise violating specific norms have been publicly called out as assholes. I’ve put aside personal criticisms and (even more egregious) posts that gurus have since deleted to focus on the ethical reasoning of espoused advice.]
Elsewhere, Reagle (2019; 2019, p. 8) suggested Kant’s categorical imperative (i.e., do only that which you would want everyone to do) be used to assess life hacking advice. Kant’s ethic is a simple and rules-based ethic—having been formalized as a “procedure” (Rawls, 1993, pp. 295–296) and even debated as an “algorithm” (Millgram, 2003, p. 553fn3). [Only the Golden Rule is better known, and it too could be applied to the advice given, though it has significant weaknesses (Bennett, 1998).] I take up this suggestion and apply Kant’s universalism in my question of if bending, breaking, stretching, and exploiting rules are: (a) beneficial or harmful, (b) to one’s self and/or others, and (c) exceptional or universal? That is, who is a hack/advice beneficial and harmful to, and does it depend on others not acting similarly? Advice to be friendly to those with whom you are waiting in line, for example, is beneficial to one’s self and others and can be practiced by everyone. I take this to be virtuous advice. Encouragement to cut in line benefits the self at the expense of others, and it’d be a worse world if everyone did so. I take this to be harmful advice.
Life hackers’ first tactic of subversion is to find loopholes in the perceived rules relative to the actual rules and “perform miracles.” That is, to bend a rule is to adhere to its letter and subvert its spirit by violating its associated norms. This is commonly known as “gaming the system” and is associated with the critiques of entitled asshole behavior.
In the intro to his TV show, Tim Ferriss, for example, promised to “make the impossible possible by bending the rules” (Ferriss, 2017, min. 00:30). A famous of example of this, mentioned by Buchheit, is Ferriss’s kickboxing championship. In The 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss wrote that he won the 1999 USA Chinese championship by losing and then gaining twenty-eight pounds in water so he could compete in a lighter weight class. He also exploited a technicality: a contestant who steps off the platform three times is disqualified—likely intended to prevent undue delays. After re-hydrating, he used his weight to push the “poor little guys” off the platform and win technical-knockouts: “I won by reading the rules and looking for loopholes” (Ferriss, 2009, pp. 28–29). At the start of his book he wrote, “the commonsense rules of the ‘real world’ are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions. This book will teach you how to see and seize the options others do not” (Ferriss, 2009, p. 9).
Was Ferriss’s bending of rules beneficial to others, and could he wish everyone do the same? No. He gained some status and a clever story at others’ expense by adhering to the letter rather than the spirit of the rules: “this did not make the judges the happiest Chinese I’ve ever seen” (Ferriss, 2009, p. 29). Though he advises rule bending to his readers, the tactic is dependent on exceptionalism: the majority of people need to continue to uphold and rely on the norm of competing on merit for it to be subverted. If too many people followed Ferriss’s advice, the spirit of the game would be damaged or the rules would need to be amended.
Though the consequences of Ferriss’s rule bending could be deleterious to kickboxing if it became commonplace, bending the rules can be virtuous. White hat computer hackers identify technical loopholes to improve a system. Such hackers might benefit and receive a “bug bounty,” but they don’t use the loophole itself for their gain and at the expense of others. Finding and reporting bugs is also universal in Kant’s sense, if everyone did it, our digital infrastructure would be more secure. Similarly, violating unjust rules—as civil rights protesters did when sitting at lunch counters—can be virtuous if it exposes injustice and leads to reform. This is true of formal rules and informal norms and the gap between.
Ferriss’s kickboxing victory, however, was not virtuous in these ways. He violated a norm that bridged the gap between the spirit of the perceived rules and real written rules: win on merit, not technicalities. (What counts as “real” here is what gets enforced.) This was frustrating to the other competitors and judges, and if it prompted an amendment to the rules, this itself can be deleterious. Most every social system is a hybrid of formal rules and informal norms. This has an advantage over exhaustive formal rules because it is parsimonious and permits the exercise of good judgment. An overly specified system is unwieldy; additionally, every attempt to close a loophole can introduce another. (Much as a software developer patching an unwieldy mess of “spaghetti code” can introduce a new regression.)
In the 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss wrote: “Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical” (Ferriss, 2007b, p. 10). This is true, his advice about simplifying one’s life, for example, doesn’t require one to be unethical. But it doesn’t preclude it either, and he says little about how his reader should discern the ethical from unethical. And in the kickboxing case, only an asshole would do what Ferriss did. Recall, for James (2012, 2012, ch. 1), the asshole “systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement.” More than a jerk, who also takes advantage of others, an asshole “acts out of a firm sense that he is special, that the normal rules [including norms] of conduct do not apply to him.” We will see evidence of this among those who break rules as well.
The second means of subversion is to break a rule, ignoring its letter and spirit, and is also associated with critiques of entitled behavior.
Maneesh Sethi, for example, was a Ferriss disciple before inventing Pavlok, a wrist band that delivers “tiny jolts” of “Pavlovian conditioning” so as to break its users of bad habits. While he was still blogging at Hack the System, Sethi (2012) wrote a guest post elsewhere entitled “The Sex Scandal Technique: How to Achieve Any Goal, Instantly (and Party with Tim Ferriss)” wherein he advised: “the shortest path to a goal is not by doing what everyone else is doing. It’s often by doing the EXACT opposite.”
An exemplar of this philosophy is James Altucher, tech entrepreneur, self-help author, blogger, podcaster, and the person behind many of the scammy online crypto-currency ads. In a 2011 blog post entitled, “Nine Ways to Break All the Rules,” Altucher (2011) wrote of his truancy as a 12-year old, of his self-dealing as a professional, and of non-compliance during an arrest. These were all things he did when told “you can’t do that,” placing him among other rule breakers including Google, The Beatles, Warhol, Einstein, and Jesus. He exhorted his readers to disobedience by way of nine tactics including: do the opposite, surprise, and steal (and improve upon). Honesty, too, is disobedient, and most people are afraid to be honest because they would be rejected or ostracized. Despite concluding, with a parenthetical, one should follow the rule of “do no harm,” he doesn’t mention that radical honesty might also harm others’ feelings.
Similarly, in a 2013 blog post entitled “How To Break All The Rules And Get Everything You Want,” Altucher (2013) wrote of getting his daughter a front-row seat at a teen fashion show despite not appearing on the guest list. He made a minor nuisance of himself in line to get admitted, tried (and failed) to bamboozle an organizer for a good seat, and ultimately succeeded when his daughter was given an empty seat near the front by a friendly usher. He wrote that “we broke all the rules and had a fun time. The key is that we were simply nice to everyone and didn’t argue and were very thankful at everything we got to do.” He concluded, “Don’t break the laws. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal. But most other rules can be bent.”
Like the Ferriss case, Altucher subverted rules to serve his own interests—even if acting on his daughter’s behalf. [Research suggests that white men have an advantage in that their rule breaking, such as skipping school and gambling, does not impair their future as it does others. Additionally, they are more likely to have the financial, social, and cultural resources to launch entrepreneurial ventures and recover from them when they fail (Levine and Rubinstein, 2013, p. 20; Black et al., 2015).] Whereas Ferriss’s bending of rules requires others to abide by a technicality, Altucher violated the letter and spirit of the rules (i.e., don’t deceive others and all those without tickets ought to be treated fairly). Though he gestured toward doing no harm, following two of the Ten Commandments, and abiding by laws, these are more of a sop than a meaningful distinction.
Just as bending a rule can be virtuous, so can breaking it. Both laws and norms can be unjust; civil disobedience conscientiously breaks them to serve the interests of justice. But this is not what Altucher was advising, and it would be a worse world if everyone acted as he advised.
The third method of subversion is to stretch a rule, violating the letter but abiding—or at least not violating—the spirit.
An example of rule stretching can also be found in Altucher’s (2013) evening with his daughter. After the fashion show, they went to play ping pong, but the venue had been rented out for a corporate event. Nonetheless, they saw an empty table with paddles and a ball and played for an hour. When a staff member finally noticed, they were asked to leave. Altucher offered to pay for the time, but that wasn’t necessary. And he had, again, gotten what he wanted.
This case might be an instance of justified exceptionalism, whereby an exemption to a rule is defensible or even merited. Altucher’s behavior was self-interested, granted, and he broke the letter of the rule that “these tables are off-limits” but he (hopefully) did not violate the spirit of the rule by depriving the parlor of revenue or a legitimate player of the ability to play. This is similar to the case of the MIT hackers with their laminated “hacker ethics” cards. The cards could be used to violate the proffered “no trespassing” rule by shimming a door lock, but the card also reminded hackers to do no harm. More than that, if the trespassers saw something broken, they ought to call maintenance: “Hackers often go places that Institute workers do not frequent regularly and may see problems before anyone else” (Nightwork: Hackito ergo sum, 1996).
Stretching the rules is still an entitled attitude: the hacker is exceptional and need not abide by the rules that everyone else must follow. The desire to stretch a rule is also understandable, as the letter of a rule can be out of step with its spirit or overly blunt. The MIT hackers understood the spirit of the locked door as “do not harm yourself or the facilities.” By shimming the door, they declare themselves responsible for what happens on the roof. They also risk MIT claiming the spirit and letter of the rule are the same, no trespassing, and of MIT responding with penalties. Given that MIT, however, celebrates the many hacks that have occurred on its rooftops, this suggests a more liberal spirit. And by abiding by an ethic of do no harm, to be helpful even, and not be a fool (i.e., hacking soberly and with others) the hacker might survive Kant’s scrutiny. Kant (1998, v. 4:404) asked: “can you also will that your maxim become a universal law?” The hacker can answer “yes, everyone sufficiently skilled (to shim or pick a lock), not foolish (hacking soberly and with more experience hackers), and doing no harm and being helpful can trespass.”
Of course, not all justifications are equal. A rich and powerful person might say, “Yes, anyone rich and powerful like me can cut in line,” but this is sophistry; they would object if some other rich and powerful person cut in front of them. The justification needs to be universalizable such that it is impartial to personal position and interest. Rawls (1999; 1999, pp. 118, 118fn11) described this as reasoning from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” and implicit in Kant: we must be ignorant to our place within the imagined society for which our maxim is to be universal. For example, we might stretch a rule about cutting in line to permit someone with a demonstrable emergency to do so. This latter claim speaks to the spirit of fairness and the spirit of exigency; it can also be universalized. We can easily agree on the rule: wait your turn, but accommodate rare emergencies. Though we are typically the person waiting in line, one day we might have an emergency.
In any case, Altucher might not have violated the spirit of the rule by playing ping pong, but doing so was still self-interested rule stretching. There are other instances of rule stretching that are altruistic and uphold a rule’s spirit or that of a higher rule. Planting a guerrilla garden on a neglected corner violates the letter of some city ordinance, no doubt, but it beautifies the neighborhood. It is an urban hack that stretches the rule (“this is not your property”) to uphold its spirit (“this is community property that benefits from beautification.”)
The final subversion is that of exploitation and relates to critiques of the life hacker’s privilege. Sometimes the meaning of a rule, in letter or in spirit, varies according to one’s socio-economic status. To exploit a rule is to take advantage of this without acknowledgment.
One of the quandaries of rules is that they are often enforced by way of fines. However, given sufficient wealth, a prohibition with a fine easily becomes a service with a price (Gneezy and Rustichini, 2000). In some locales, for instance, the owner of an expensive car can exempt themselves from the perceived rule against speeding and exploit the real rule of doing so for a price. To counter this in egalitarian Finland, speeding fines are a percentage of personal income rather than a fixed amount (Pinsker, 2015).
Personal outsourcing also exemplifies transactional relationships across socio-economic differences. Traditionally, the off-shoring of labor has brought cost savings to industry, such as manufacturing and tech support, and jobs to those overseas. It has also decimated local jobs and led to labor and environmental abuses abroad. Some gurus advocate that their readers realize similar efficiencies.
Ferriss is one of the most prominent proponents of outsourcing one’s chores overseas. He seized upon the idea from writer A. J. (2005), who did so as a satirical take on the spread of commercial outsourcing. Whereas Jacobs attempted to cast a (humorous) light on outsourcing’s expansion across industries, Ferriss took the premise as core tenant of his advice—providing Jacobs’s essay on his website and including it verbatim in the 4-Hour Workweek. For example, Jacobs tried to delegate his therapy sessions to a remote assistant, whom he provided with a list of neuroses, but his therapist refused because of “ethics, or something.” He shed light on a commercial practice by parodying it in his personal life. Ferriss (2007a) used competing teams of overseas assistants, whom he provided with a spec sheet of his desires, to find and organize dates with women. He concluded “it worked extremely well,” surpassing his hit rate in bars and parties and only cost $350, including the $150 bonus for the best team.
Such advice naturally attracted attention and critique. Rebecca Mead (2011), reporting on an interview for the New Yorker, wrote that “Ferriss professes to be untroubled that his own freedom to live ‘outside of the inbox’ is bought by transferring drudgery to the inboxes of less fortunate individuals in the developing world.” Ferris responded, “there are people I have outsourced to in India who now outsource portions of their work to the Philippines. It’s the efficient use of capital, and if you want the rewards of a free market, if you want to enjoy the rewards of the capitalist system, these are the rules by which you play.”
This is an example of exploiting a rule because Ferriss abides by both its letter and spirit. There are good arguments for and against corporate outsourcing, as there are for personal outsourcing. Yet in this case, Ferriss advocates for adhering to the rules of a system without much consideration of his privileged position. He has adopted the practices of global industry, which has both merits and demerits, into the personal realm. But he gives little thought to the assumptions and implications of the rules and the system they exist within.
Besides Gmail and AdSense, Buchheit’s greatest claim to fame is Google’s early motto “don’t be evil,” which has had an interesting life. Buchheit (2007) credits Amit Patel, the seventh Googler, with coining the phrase, which Buchheit then suggested during an early meeting about articulating Google’s values. Though the meeting facilitator tried to squelch the idea, Buchheit and Patel persisted and once “don’t be evil” made the initial list, “it took on a life of its own.” When Eric Schmidt was hired at Google in 2001 to play the part of the responsible executive, he though the slogan was stupid. In 2013, however, Schmidt conceded that the motto had substance: its invocation by an engineer could pause the conversation and stop a project (Kaiser, 2013).
“Evil” is an important trope for hacker types. Though it connotes morality, it is more so an expression of ethos and aesthetics—much like the term “ethic.” For example, in Raymond’s (2001) “How to be a Hacker” he wrote “boredom and drudgery are evil”; that is, a personal distaste is so strong it takes on a universal moral character. Similarly, Wikipedians sometimes say “voting is evil” because its counter to their consensus culture (Wikipedia, 2007). “Don’t be evil” has joined the “[something] considered harmful” trope (Considered harmful, 2020) as a way for techies to express aversion. These maxims aren’t wholly divorced from moral reasoning. “Don’t be evil” expresses an (ambiguous) value and it is a (simplistic) rule. The argument that “[something] is considered harmful” can be made on ethical grounds. However, though their invocations signify an urgent, and perhaps moral, concern, they provide little guidance on how to practically reason about that concern.
In the life hacking realm, this laxness is even more pronounced among practitioners. Discussions about subverting rules are perfunctorily complemented by the proscription “do no harm.” Little attention is given to the circumstances and constitution of harm, who is harmed, and how to balance any benefits. Understanding what it means for rules to be bent (adhering to letter, subverting spirit), break (subverting both), stretch (subverting letter, adhering to spirit), and exploit (harming others by adhering to both) can help those who wish to hack ethically and critique those who do not.
Similarly, scholars of popular culture, including those focused on self-help, though adapt at ideological critique, shy away from the analysis and deployment of the ethical reasoning that can further illuminate cultural phenomena and have practical, popular applications. In the two decades since Starker’s cultural history of self-help, the field of popular culture has gained in stature, especially as computer and comic culture have become sources of mainstream influence and profit—a moment located by Jenkins’ (2006) Convergence Culture, when “old and new media collide[d].” Self-help, though, still tends to suffer from “neglect,” even as it, too, has grown in power and proliferated amidst new media. Starker’s (2002, p. 2) concern, then, remains true: “It is my thesis, nevertheless, that the self-help book is a firm part of the fabric of American culture, too pervasive and influential to be ignored or lightly dismissed, and certainly worthy of investigation. Self-help and life hacking merit historical, ideological, and ethical investigations.