Virtual Nudism is practiced by many long time hackers.
Hackers often choose to live their lives in an open, friendly, and honest manner. They are trying to go through the day without telling 200 white lies.
Here's how the net helps them do this:
- They can practice exposing their inner thoughts, plans, and reflections through a publically viewable file. (see .plan, public web journal entries)
- The Internet thrives because of Free Software* and cooperatively reviewed open networking standards (see RFC, IETF, W3C).
*Free Software and Open Source software often endeavor to provide a reference "implementation" of Internet standards. They give you a usable glimpse of what vendors of commercial software will then copy as faithfully as possible (to achieve maximum interoperability) and offer.
All netizens and netizen programmers have access to the formulas with which companies and the customers they serve, organizations, and individuals cooperatively use (see Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, TCPIP, Perl) to build the Internet.
Hackers thrives in this said universe where they one can take off the clothing (see GUI or web forms or HCI or ease of use) of their software tools. The clothing makes it easy to utilize a tool. But with it comes false pretense to what it really is.
- It maybe more complex than what meets the eyes.
- It maybe more elegant than what meets the eyes.
- There maybe nothing to be ashamed to show.
- The clothing makes us take blind shots of assumptions that aren't always true.
- Revealing what's hidden may empower you. Thus opportunities to furthur human values increases.
- The clothing hides in good ways and unfortunately, bad ways.
Hackers perceives many inner beauties with the help of such helpful and affordable resources. When they see the inners of one operating system, they learn they can approach another operating system with a critical x-ray like eyes. Bypassing shallow and perhaps wrong marketing assumptions. Seeing new elegant solutions to difficult problems. They say things like, "You're full of bullshit." And they would be right.