Hacker Perspective: Mitch Altman

by Mitch Altman

I don't know how to define a hacker, but I guess I am one.  And whatever hacking is, I derive great pleasure from it, and, more recently, community as well.

I grew up in my own little world as a kid.  What choice did I have?  Being tormented daily and beaten up frequently by other kids for being geeky, I quickly found that hanging out by myself was way better than being subjected to the cruelty of the other kids while the gym teacher (it's always the gym teacher, isn't it?) watched the scene with his arms folded, encouraging their daily tortures.

Not having other kids to learn from about social norms, I looked at things and thought about things in my own way.  This was painful as a kid, but it turned out to be a great asset later in life.  Starting from a depressed blob of a kid, I somehow learned to love life, and hacking is a big part of how I did that.  So is TV.  I see life as a hack.  We keep hacking away at it, making it as good as we can, and sharing it as we go along.

How can anyone can be bored?  Maybe boredom has to do with feeling confined, like in a hospital.  Or a jail cell.  Maybe it really comes down to depression.  While depressed how can you be motivated to do anything?  Except maybe watch TV.  That's what I did, as a kid, as much as i could: after another day of anguish at the hands of my peers, I'd come home and retreat into TV.

But I just kept watching.  Time went away.  Hours each day that I wasn't doing something enjoyable, that I wasn't learning how to interact with other kids, that I wasn't being active or doing something healthy.  And all the junk food I ate in front of the thing made me even fatter.  And all the people on TV were beautiful, happy, and any problems they had were solved by the end of the half-hour show.

They had friends, they had warm, loving parents.  It was all so depressing!  And the next day, back at school, I was even more of a target: I'd get beaten and tormented all the more.  So, I'd come home and retreat into TV.  The cycle of depression continued.

But one day, I made a choice for myself, not for someone else or what I thought others wanted of me.  I chose to stop watching TV.  And it sucked!  I was bored.  What to do?

I did some of the things that I had been doing all along, but had neglected: taking apart electronics, putting them back together, ham radio, messing with phones, programming the mainframe computer late at night at the factory that let some of us Cub Scouts in during the wee hours when they didn't need the computer power to make chemically processed, frozen desserts for America.  Though I was still depressed, I saw that there were some things I actually liked doing.

The first big system I tried to hack was me.

Like many of my first hacks, it wasn't successful.  I made a big mess of things.  I tried to hack myself into a wonderful person for others and failed.  Later I would figure out that for some systems, such as myself, it's way better to make use of strengths, as well as find good uses for what I thought were weaknesses.

But back then there were some successes on other fronts.  I managed to convince my parents to add a second phone line to their house.  I set to hacking a switch that would connect the two phone lines together after I'd call two pizza places, or two bullies from school who didn't like each other.

I soon learned that I had to unscrew the phone's microphone so that no one could hear me laugh.  Wiring the basement for sound with the homemade stereos I built was important for listening to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon really loud, way high on pot (from the homemade electronic bong that I made), meditating on fixing myself so that other people might actually want me around.

That brings me to what really saved my life.  Pot.  I know it's not fashionable in our Homeland Security-era to say that you did drugs.

But it was the 1970s then and everyone was smoking it, even the jocks.  And after somehow getting through junior high school alive (if not emotionally scarred for life), I found another system to hack: the school district.  I worked it so that I had a choice of which of two high schools to go to and, naturally, chose the one all the bullies did not go to.  And this high school had an electronics class!

Our class was full of future radio repairmen of America.  And total pot-heads.  At this very large suburban high school, all you had to do was say, "I'm cool" and that instantly let you into a circle of people smoking pot, usually in the woods behind the school.  This was way better than recess with gym teachers.  Who knew?

Maybe I'd have figured out how to be with people some other way, but I found out how to be silly and laugh with people in this way.  And, of course, I wanted more.  Which meant that I abused the hell out of pot.  And then other drugs.

I learned a lot from each one.  But the drugs took their toll, which is why I don't do anything stronger than sugar and chocolate anymore.  Yet, somehow back then I was a great student through it all, 'cause I liked learning.  About everything.

How does it all work?  And why?  Why, why, why, and why again, brings you down to the smallest levels of obscure inexplicable quantum mechanics.  Quantum is so bizarre that it makes little sense to anyone, including the people who created the field (just like life).  That means that any meaning we find is our own business.  What could be cooler than that?

By this time I was in university learning assembly on a CDC Cyber computer (with 60-bit words!).  I instinctively gravitated to the one lab that didn't accept any military funding, run by Ricardo, one of the greatest professors ever.  Ricardo was about to be fired (yet again) for not getting enough military funding.

But Intel, a small semiconductor company, donated about one million dollars' worth of single-chip microcontrollers to our lab.  Here was a community of misfit introverted geeks doing the coolest projects.  While the other labs were working on boring missile guidance systems, people in our lab were working on robots, neural-networked microcontrollers, music synthesizers, and designing better microcode.

Ricardo would get all us geeks together over pizza to talk about responsibility for what we put into the world, communication (is it really possible, or is it just passing information back and forth?), consciousness (would it be theoretically possible for a machine to have it, whatever it is?), and what it means to be human.

It was during these get-togethers that I got hooked on community: a whole bunch of people hacking their own society, mutually supporting each other into growing as much as possible, individually and collectively, becoming more of who we are all the time.

Starting off innocently enough with group houses, leading to food coops, community radio, community centers for music and performance, fun civil disobedience events...  One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was starting a commune in very rural Tennessee.

This is way too long a story for this column, but suffice it to say that hacking societies in a commune will be explored in the future by others besides myself.  I found other means.  Fleeing the commune, I moved back to San Francisco and started a RAID controller company with a friend - and 3ware was born.

3ware was more community than the commune ever was.  At least at first.  But like all startups, the bozo-explosion took place when the investors started hiring middle-management, and then it was time to go back to consulting.

Why don't more of us consult?  It's the coolest way to hack your economy.  Life in the economy is a tradeoff between time and money.  For me, time is way more valuable than making money.  So, throughout my adult life, I've worked a few weeks consulting, making enough money to live the rest of the year.  That gives enough time to travel, hang out with friends, volunteer, and work on my own projects at home.

I discovered the world of consulting while traveling down the West Coast after driving to Alaska.  This is where I first learned to be happy - working in a fish cannery of all places.  It finally clicked while I was chopping the heads off of fish.  I am free if I choose to be.  I have no control over the world, but I have a lot of control over what I choose to do with my time.  Why not choose more of what I truly enjoy?  So, I chose to quit my job chopping the heads off of fish and headed back south.

Interesting things happen when you let them.  People who don't know me often pick me out of a crowd and tell me stuff: their problems, their opinions, or even their life story.

In San Francisco this guy at an obscure electronic music show randomly decided to complain to me that he couldn't find anyone to work with a 6502 microcontroller.  Wouldn't you know that I had taught assembly language programming for a few years in university, using 6502s?  He hired me as a consultant on the spot.  Together with these folks we created the first virtual reality machines (VPL Research) though, at the time, we thought we were working on a visually-oriented programming language and some input devices for it.

After 3ware bozo-ed out, I made a conscious choice to make time to explore what I really love to do.  By now I'd learned that I didn't need to fix myself, that I could accept myself for even the parts that i don't like.

But I didn't really know what I loved to do.  So, after consulting enough to make a year's worth of money again, I made time to explore what I could do with my talent in computers and electronics that I truly loved.  My hope was that I would somehow be able to make enough money from whatever I found to keep doing it (whatever it was).

I didn't know if it would work or not.  I just knew that I didn't want to make yet another gizmo.  I wanted to work on something meaningful to me.

I started doing lots of volunteer work.  And I also started working on a microcontroller project that I'd been thinking of for about ten years but hadn't had the energy to work on.  This project was conceptually so easy: push a button and the micro would pulse an infrared emitter (like the ones used in TV remote controls) with all of the power codes for just about every TV.

Had I known that it was going to take a year and a half to make, or that it would take over my life, I may not have done it.  But I did.

My original hope was that I'd sell a few here and there, maybe breaking even on it.  Instead it became an overnight sensation and I had to start a business to keep up with demand.  As you can imagine, there are aspects to running any business that suck but, overall, I love TV-B-Gone.

I use the media attention as a fun way to encourage people to think about TV and its effects, encouraging everyone to take any opportunity they can to make their own choices to better their lives in their own ways.  And TV-B-Gone makes me and some friends enough money to live off of.  We're making a living doing what we love.  How cool is that?

But the coolest thing is that TV-B-Gone has connected me to a world of way wonderful people.  If you watch TV you'd think that the world is full of idiots.  And it is.  Why else would all those gawd-awful shows be so popular, and why else would all those outrageously manipulative commercials be so effective?

But the world is also full of incredible people doing so many amazing things.  It's just that we don't all know about each other.  But the means are at our disposal.  This magazine has existed for over 20 years, giving a forum for geeks all over the world.  MAKE Magazine and their Maker Faire are bringing hackers and makers of all sorts together.  Off The Hook has been an independent outlet for information since 1988.

Community radio stations all around the U.S. are also beacons of independent voice.  The Internet (with all its faults) provides a means for anyone to know that they are not alone and to share what we know and believe.

HOPE conferences have been providing fantastic experiences of information and real live community.  And there are other hacker conferences, such as CCC and DEFCON.  The ability for us to get together in community has never been greater.  Geeks of the world unite!

At least for long enough to know that we are not alone so we can go back into our geeky little worlds and create more cool technology that make the world better for all of us.  There is no guarantee that what you do will succeed, but what is guaranteed is that if you don't make time to explore what you love, you will not be doing what you love.

I can't prove it, but I believe that if more of us do what we love, the world becomes a better place for everyone.  Please choose well what you do with the time of your life.

Mitch Altman is best known for inventing TV-B-Gone, the popular keychain that can turn off just about any TV in public places.  But he feels that his main accomplishment has been, against all odds, learning to enjoy life.  Next time you see him, go up to him and tell him your life's story.