Hermann Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game”

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ is probably his greatest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit. It combines a theory of history and education with lessons in Zen, meditations on the enduring power of institutions, friendship, duty and excellence, forays into the psychology of genius, a description of life at a hacker paradise like the 1960s MIT, and an intriguing vision of a fictional game that seems like a cross between a unified field theory, a lisp s-expression tree, predicate calculus and generative art, all in one: a unified, grand Lego of the mind, the ultimate programming language of the universe.

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ is probably his greatest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit. 

He published the book in 1943. Bombs were falling all over Europe, Hitler’s armies had been defeated in Stalingrad, the first digital computers were just being put together from hundreds of mechanical relays and miles of cable, taking up whole rooms (Zuse’s Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid at the end of that year). Universities all over Germany had been turned into places of racial hate and indoctrination, opponents of the Third Reich were being deported to concentration camps, politics was being made with tanks, fighters and U-boots. The paradise islands of the Pacific were in flames, Hiroshima would soon disappear in a mushroom cloud of death and the North-African desert was littered with burning tanks and crashed airplanes. As the war was nearing its crazy paroxysm of death, a lonely man with short-cropped hair and round spectacles, looking more like an oriental monk than a Swiss intellectual, was hiding out in his villa above the placid lake Lugano, creating a vision of a new, a better, an unheard-of world. A world as it should be, or should have been, or perhaps would sometimes be, if things for once went right.

Utopia and the hacker mind

Hesse’s vision belongs among the great utopias of any age. It sits right up there with Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, and Huxley’s Island. I don’t know if the US hacker culture ever directly took notice of the book, but it certainly belongs also among the great visions of hackerdom, of how a world of hackers could work: half a century before Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman and Douglas Hofstadter, Hermann Hesse was driven by a dream that was very close to theirs, and based on very similar principles: freedom of research, freedom of information, …

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