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The hacker ethic 421Giddens, 1992). Most importantly, it has been pointed out that there is nonecessary historical relationship between the Protestant religion and moderncapitalism. The modern spirit of capitalism also emerged in non-Protestantenvironments like Venice. However, for the purposes of this chapter, the exacthistorical relationship between Weber’s two distinct concepts of the“Protestant ethic” and the “spirit of capitalism” is not central because Weberemphasized the above three elements in both. In fact, in the common use oflanguage, the “Protestant ethic” is used as a synonym for the “spirit of capitalism.”The expression “Protestant ethic” has become somewhat similar to theexpression “Platonic love”: when we say that people have a Platonic relationshipwe do not mean that they are Platonists (holding Plato’s views on metaphysics,epistemology, and so on) and even less that Platonism is the reasonfor their love! The same goes for the “Protestantism” in the Protestant ethic.In this chapter, the expression “Protestant ethic” will be used in a way thatdoes not include any historical claims about the relationship betweenProtestantism and capitalism. There are additional advantages in thisapproach. It makes sense also to talk about the “Protestant ethic” in the economyof non-Christian cultures. For example, the above three elements havebeen very strongly present in Japan’s rise as a powerful industrial economy. Inthis context, the expression “Protestant ethic” means the culture of industrialcapitalism, which had the three key elements listed above in otherwise differentcultural and political environments.In the same sense, this chapter intends to formulate the key characteristicsof the culture of the new informational economy. Again, the analysis willexpress elements that are shared in otherwise different cultural and politicalsettings wherever there is an informational economy. I called this culture the“hacker ethic” in my book The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the InformationAge (Himanen, 2001). The reasons for the choice of this expression arepresented below.To be sure, the current form of the informational economy is still capitalist.Manuel Castells has presented the theory of the informational economy in histrilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Castells,2000a,b, 2004). In this context, informational refers to a trend in which operationsbecome (1) based on the use of information technology, (2) organized(globally) like computer networks, and (3) focused on information (symbol)processing. The resultant informational capitalism is one in which the dominantoperations are – with the help of information technology – organized(globally) as networks and based on information (symbol) processing. (I usethese concepts here along the lines of Castells and Himanen, 2002.)It should not be necessary to add that this development is very differentfrom the hype of the “dot-com economy” or the “new economy.” But, as thereis so much hype surrounding it, it is useful to emphasize that the emergence of