After a period of euphoria when hackers together with social activists thought they had found the place to realise utopia, the net community is now suffering from a revolutionary hangover.

The attempt to project the social structures and interactive qualities of every day life (like a city or a club) onto the net did not only fail but was probably the most fatal start for creating an alternative community. Why? Because such metaphorical structures as a city or a club are related to the free market economy. Subsequently, all attempts to create a many to many communication infrastructure, especially on the world wide web, were easily adopted by companies whose definition of 'interactive' is: 'I Sell You Buy'. Commercialism dominates the net. There is no place for process oriented projects. Everything has to be perfect. Free of errors.

A perfect program would allow a company to capture the customer in a close circuit. Metaphorically speaking, a perfect program can be seen like a perfect state - it would exclude alternatives. The battle between Microsoft and Netscape (browsers) or Microsoft and Macintosh (operating systems) goes much further than the battle for market segments. It is a race against time to create the first perfect system. For a non-hacker like me I put great hopes onto the Linux community, a group of independent programmers who create an operating system which is for free and can be modified by anybody at anytime. But unfortunately they will only produce an autonomous zone where hackers with an attitude find refuge. And what if the perfect system erases this refuge.

The perfect system is going to eliminate transparency. The worst thing about the perfect system is the fact that we will not even know that we are captured by it. Therefore the error becomes the only way out. Every new technology creates its own specific accident and it is this accident that shows the true face of this technology. The accident that accompanies the new media is called 'bug' or 'error'. The error reveals the true identity of a system or a program. The error displays the mind behind the superficial graphical interface. The only way to escape the perfect system is to feed it with bugs and errors because the error message is the only moment where the system discloses itself. Now for a hacker this means that in the future they will still have to find the bugs in a system but instead of debugging, they should cultivate them. The error has genuine revolutionary potential. Proclaim the search for the perfect error. Everybody should have the chance to look behind the system and if the error is the only way to get to see what is going on, I claim errors for all!

Bill Kurtz [asa@contrib.com]