11 lines
2.3 KiB
Plaintext
11 lines
2.3 KiB
Plaintext
Namedropping “ESR”
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<p>For at least fifteen years my name and its tri-letterization has been something with which you could conjure up a lot of attention among hackers and other sorts of geek. This fact presented the more clueful of my personal friends with a delicate problem: under what circumstances would it be proper for them to invoke this instrument?</p>
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<p>I have actually been asked for guidance about this more than once. I developed some guidelines more than a decade ago. To the best my knowledge my friends have been pretty good about applying them. I present them here for your amusement.</p>
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<p><span id="more-5266"></span></p>
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<p>1. Please do not drop my name to score cheap social-status points. That’s crass and I don’t like it.</p>
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<p>2. Do drop my name if by doing so you can achieve some mission objective of which I would approve. Examples that have come up: encouraging people to design in accordance with the Unix philosophy, or settling a dispute about hacker slang, or explaining why it’s important for everyone’s freedom for the hacker community to hang together and not get bogged down in internal doctrinal disputes.</p>
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<p>3. Do drop my name if by doing it you can rock someone’s world in a positive way. A case of this that comes up fairly often is encouraging a young proto-hacker.</p>
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<p>4. Do drop my name if doing so would be <em>funny</em>. Funny is even an acceptable excuse for scoring social-status points with it – if you think I’ll laugh when I hear the story, go right ahead.</p>
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<p>And yes, I apply these rules (or obvious analogs thereof) to myself. I think it’s vulgar to wave my fame around in contexts where it’s irrelevant. It can be very amusing, if you’re clued in, to watch what happens when somebody in a group of programmers (or gamers or SF fans or any other population that oversamples programmers) that hasn’t met me before twigs to The Presence.</p>
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<p>If this attitude seems odd to you, understand that fame is exhausting and psychologically dangerous (I have a lot more sympathy for rock stars who fuck themselves up with drugs than before I felt the pressure myself). Ironic detachment from one’s own celebrity is, I have found, an effective coping strategy.</p>
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