Nicola Ken says that we, hackers, are in fact addicts living in a tribe.

He's right. Addiction comes because you're working (can we still call this "work" ?) with people that "share some neurons" with you, as Steven likes to say, on stuff that you have chosen to work on, that you like, and that allows you to learn and learn and learn again, both from code and from people.

And you often feel you're intellectually more familiar with the "tribe", composed of people that you never or rarely meet for real, than with the colleagues that are just near you.

All this makes you consider the computer screen as a window that is wide open on the outside world, while people around you consider it more as something you're chained up to.

Fortunately, my wife and children force me to go back to the "real" world ;-)

Another evidence of this addiction is Torsten complaining about how he misses his daily dose of Java and Cocoon.