The Ubiquitous Computing and network society

Castells & Himanen: social hackerism (from the Finnish Model book)

Around 1995, a development programme called "Estonia 2010" was initiated in Estonia to predict and analyse future trends.

The four possible scenarios proposed were

• "Militaristic information oasis" - "little angry country" (like the one in Middle East) with good technological progress but little openness and overall freedom. "Military Estonia".
• "South Finland" - soft-spoken, well integrated into Europe (and decisively distanced from Russia), but with low innovation capacity. "Subcontractor Estonia" - perhaps the closest to current reality.
• "The Ferryman" - well-developed, but fully transit-based economy. Innovation and ICT are only to serve the main goal and thus of inferior importance. "Merchant Estonia", which is quite alike to the 'Singapore' scenario of Himanen seen in previous lecture.
• "Grand Slam" - the best realisation of both geographical location (transit) and innovative and educational potential. "Innovation/ICT Estonia".

While the last scenario, the Grand Slam was definitely seen as the most desirable, it did generally lack a central feature of Castell & Himanen's "hacker society", namely caring or social cohesiveness that characterises Himanen's Finnish ideal. Estonian Grand Slam was to be a society of brilliant and innovative businessmen rather than hackers.

Himanen (2004):

1. Caring
2. Confidence
3. Communality
4. Encouragement
5. Freedom
6. Creativity
7. Courage
8. Visionariness
9. Balance
10. Meaningfulness

References

• Himanen, P. Himanen, P. (2004) Challenges of the Global Information Society. report for the Committee for the Future in Parliament of Finland.
• Petri Martikainen and Martti Mäntylä (eds). Towards the Ubiquitous Network Society. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. September 15th, 2006
• http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2001/en/pdf/completenew.pdf