I mean, the guy was obviously amazingly talented and everything. And this is a really cool tidbit of information that lets me look back on his career as a performer in a new light.
But really, folks, is it a good idea to claim Jacko as an ideal to which people in this community might aspire?
I don't want to speak ill of the dead here. The guy lived a hard life, and had been an object of scorn and derision for a long time. I hope he had found some kind of peace of mind before he died.
But I gotta ask -- don't hackers already get enough grief for being thin, pale, eccentric, socially awkward, obsessed with artificiality, and bizarre in how they relate to women?
But really, folks, is it a good idea to claim Jacko as an ideal to which people in this community might aspire?
The man took something that was considered to be geeky and odd - dancing - practiced it feverishly and from a young age, and almost singlehandedly made his own brand of dance mainstream, sexy, and cool. To the end he worked hard at trying to keep himself at the peak of his abilities.
If he's a hacker, he was the ultimate hacker - despite being a bizarro geek in nearly every way up to and including the gradual draining of his skin pigmentation, he did what he loved, became famous for it, was the best at his line of work, and was a sex icon for two decades. If that's not hacking I don't know what is.
You have to admit that Michael Jackson was just plain weird. But then many of the greatest innovators were also considered weird in their time.
I don't think that anyone would want to emulate every aspect of his strange lifestyle, but he definitely came up with a few ideas that were worthy of a hacker. He found new ways to entertain people, and whatever strange personal identity crises he may have had he still hacked together an identity that most people are at least slightly familiar with.
To my way of thinking, that is relatively successful, even if he did end up dying young.
I think if there is anything worth emulating it would be persistence.
You have to admit that Michael Jackson was just plain weird. But then many of the greatest innovators were also considered weird in their time.
I think that in particular is what I'd want to emulate: He was weird because he did a lot of stuff that he liked that nobody else really understood. I don't know if it was courage on his part or if he just didn't care, but I hope that I'm one day able to do the same.
But was he really doing what he loved, or was he partially an automaton doing what his parents engineered him to do, eventually becoming the only things he knew how to do? It seems like he almost had no choice in the matter, and all his eccentricities were his way of coping with destiny.
I don't know enough about Michael Jackson to be able to respond well to this, but he made his career out of it, invented his own moved, and genuinely seemed to love what he did. That's not enough to say it was of his own accord, but I'd like to think it was.
But if Michael Jackson was a hacker, he was a nearly ideal one. He was recognized as a musical prodigy when he was 5. After that, because of his domineering, exploitative, and probably abusive father, music was basically all he thought about [1]. These are the same childhood circumstances that produced Mozart and Beethoven.
The experts all seem to agree that he was an absolute master musician and dancer. At the very least, he made some of the most popular albums of all time. It's hard to imagine anyone achieving that kind of success without a lifetime of dedicated practice. I can definitely see the shoe thing as the product of someone who spent a lot of mental energy thinking about new ways to push the envelope in a song-and-dance act.
So, to sum up, if Michael Jackson was a hacker, he was a great one. And the trouble is, if Michael Jackson was a Great Hacker [3], he's the only one I know [4]. I happen to agree with Paul Graham's take on Greatness:
So if you ask a great hacker how good he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know. He's not just being modest. He really doesn't know.
And none of us know, except about people we've actually worked with. Which puts us in a weird situation: WE DON'T KNOW WHO OUR HEROES SHOULD BE. (emphasis is mine)
I'm really not comfortable with this conclusion, because I'd like to be a Great Hacker myself someday, and it's pretty obvious that Michael Jackson's troubles were partly caused by his success.
Of course, I'd love to find a way to escape this line of reasoning...
[1] Obviously, this isn't something anyone would want to live through, but it did have the effect of making Jackson focus on music the way a great hacker would. If music was the only way for him to earn his father's love when he was five years old, then he definitely would have wound up loving music [2].
[2] Yes, this is pretty twisted. Hard to believe. Most of the reporting I've read about the Jacksons says something to similar effect, though. I'm inclined to believe it's true just because it would be such obvious libel otherwise.
I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you're saying. Are you asking how one can become a great hacker without having troubles similar to Michael Jackson's? It's obvious you've put a lot of thought into this post, so I'm just trying to understand...
But the irony here is that you're whining about how "hackers get grief" for being totally dense socially but your comments seems to be totally socially dense. It's really interesting to see how someone can be ironic about being ironic.
You're right. There's a good chance I'm totally socially inept, especially in this medium with no vocal cues or facial expressions to carry the emotional shading that I'd like to attach to what I write.
But is it really so surprising that my thoughts are internally inconsistent? So long as we're playing self-reference games, is it socially savvy to expect an absence of hypocrisy?
I mean, the guy was obviously amazingly talented and everything. And this is a really cool tidbit of information that lets me look back on his career as a performer in a new light.
But really, folks, is it a good idea to claim Jacko as an ideal to which people in this community might aspire?
I don't want to speak ill of the dead here. The guy lived a hard life, and had been an object of scorn and derision for a long time. I hope he had found some kind of peace of mind before he died.
But I gotta ask -- don't hackers already get enough grief for being thin, pale, eccentric, socially awkward, obsessed with artificiality, and bizarre in how they relate to women?
Let the downmodding begin.