Pekka Himanen

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Pekka Himanen (born October 19, 1973) is a Finnish philosopher.

He studied philosophy (and computer science as a minor) at the University of Helsinki and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the same university in 1994 for a thesis on philosophy of religion on The challenge of Bertrand Russell as the youngest Ph.D. in Finland.

He has done research work in Finland (University of Helsinki), the United Kingdom, and the United States (Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley) and has done field work in India, China and Japan. In UC Berkeley, Manuel Castells and Himanen founded a research centre of information technology and information society.

Himanen has also been a counselor to the president of Finland, Finnish government (including the Ministry of Education) and Finnish parliament in the field of information society, keeping a sustained dialogue on human-oriented information society with the leading IT companies of the world.

Currently, Himanen works as a Principal Scientist at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, where he leads a research project on global network society. He is also a Professor of Creative Economy at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and a Visiting Professor at Oxford University.

In his book HimEros written as a dialogue, Socrates’ wife Xanthippe relates to the Helsinkian what happened to Socrates in Hades, how Socrates decided to escape from Hades and go to study philosophy at the University of Helsinki, and how he was arrested, sentenced to death and executed as a result of a three-day conversation with the philosophers of the University. Xanthippe also transmits Socrates’ dialogue with the university teachers of philosophy Cyborg (Stephen Hawking), Pope (John Paul II), Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) and Madonna (Madonna Ciccone).

In Hacker Ethic, Himanen is trying to understand the core of informationalism, the post-industrialist paradigm, extending the ideas of Manuel Castells' Information Age. As an alternative to the industrial-capitalist protestant work ethic he proposes a hacker ethic as something like a cyber communitarianism. This is a new system on the capitalism, that as if abandons capitalism. The structure of the information society is a web, which in contemporary business world manifests itself, for instance, in dynamic outsourcing and even cooperation with one's competitors. The "knots" of such a web get activated according to the needs and opportunities.

According to Himanen, the three main features of hacker ethic are:

  • enthusiastic, passionate attitude to the work that is enjoyed
  • creativity, wish to realize oneself and one's ability, often in teams that are formed spontaneously (project orientation)
  • wish to share one's skills with a community having common goals, along with the need to acquire recognition from one's "tribe"; one is motivated by inner zeal rather than external awards: the fruits of one's work are donated to everybody for their advances and further developments

Manuel Castells thinks that the innovations produced by hackers are the foundations of the development of the whole culture. According to Himanen, the social hackerism begins from such things as vegetarianism, whereas the opposite of it is represented by Microsoft and the licensing of computer programs. Himanen thinks that in the information society we need a radical lack of prejudice, such as he has met in philosophy lessons to children. A critical challenge of the Internet era is the ability to meet the other human being.

[edit] Books

[edit] Awards

  • 1994 Finnish State Award for Popular Science (for the talk series Joulukalenteri (Christmas Calendar))
  • 1998 European multimedia award Europrix for the CD Sokrates (Socrates)

[edit] External links

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