Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism articulated the animating spirit of the Industrial Age, known ever since as the Protestant work ethic. Now, Pekka Himanen articulates a new, opposing cultural logic, born of the Information Age and rapidly gaining force. The Internet, e-mail, the first personal computers — all were created by hackers. As more of our work becomes hacker work, hacker values — faith in the power of free and open information, rejection of rigid time divisions, and propagation of a new social model organized around the spirit of play and the economy of free exchange — bleed out into the world and change consciousness in radical ways, as this epochal book so brilliantly explains.