Hacking culture

Hacking culture is the culture of computer hacking which has been a controversial result of the abundance of new communication technologies. Many academics have outlined the vast and unrecognised impact of hacking, such as Levy, Castells and Thomas. Yet the community at large perceives Hackers to be trouble making "techno vigilantes" with their work regarded as insignificant and of no value for wider society.
Origins

1876 saw the birth of the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell through the rapid growth of his business consequently hired numerous employess to assist in the exponential growth of the market. The majority of the employees he hired were young boys, however these boys were not just happy with mundane jobs assigned to them by Bell and therefore they decided to tinker with Bell's invention by intercepting phone calls and experimenting with the new technology much to Bell's disgust. Consequently their employment was terminated in 1879, however their legacy will live on forever, being formally recognised as the first "hackers".

The Impact of Hacking

Stephen Levy’s “Hacker Ethic” states that hackers have been pivotal in developing the internet and other communication technologies, even stating "without hackers there would be no internet". Levy clearly highlights the importance of Hacking and it's impacts not only on computing but on democracy "hacking is the democratisation of computing" by getting your hands dirty you democratise the world. Hacking has been defined as an elegant solution to a technological problem.

Levy's Hacker Ethic

Levy outlined his "Hacker Ethic" in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984). Levy's account of the hacker ethic is in large part based on the values of the hackers at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The Precepts of Levy's "Hacker Ethic"
*Access to computers should be unlimited.
*All information should be free. As is affirmed by Stuart Brand when he famously stated “Information wants to be free" and also by John Perry Debarlo “Information is a life form”.
*Mistrust Authority – thus promoting decentralisation. Such a view is contrasted to hierarchical nature of traditional broadcasting. Langdon Winner has stated on may occasions that inventions should be seen as things that aid democracy.
*Hackers should be judged by their hacking.

Levy manisfesto is strongly grounded in the notion that computers can change life and society for the better. Levy also writes if everyone could interact with computers as hackers do, computers could change the world.

Dispelling Hacking Misconceptions

McKenzie Wark in her work “A Hacker Manifesto” aims to take back the word of "Hacker" from its current Hacker Ethic framing , she states “hackers aren’t computer freaks they are people who work with ideas, just like everyone, poets, authors, artists, geeks”.
It is clear from Wark's work that we can see Tim Berner Lee’s creation of the World Wide Web, Linux, Facebook and other ground breaking technologies as blatant evidence for the signiificance and impact of the "hacker ethic".
The wider social significance of the work of hackers is outlined by many academics through plainly signifying the internet as tool of social manipulation, such views are seen in the work of Clark in Gerard Goggin's Internet Anthology when he stated “the Internet can be seen as an infrastructure like plumbing that can be rebuilt” and also the internet is “The built environment of social life”, also Cafer stated “Architects is politics”.
However the most permient commentator on the topic is the famous academic Manuel Castells, who stated “the internet above all is a cultural creation”. Castells goes on to state that the internet's purpose is “to develop as a system that would reach out the world”. “Developed through and toward an architecture of openness”. Castells signifies in his work the importance of the internet outlining it's embedded politics and it's framework built on openness.
The work of these academics affirm the significance of the work that is done by Hackers by manipulating social structure through technology which has major effects on society.

The Hacker Crackdown

"Sundevil" the operation name, was the largest crackdown on Hacker's in world history. On May 7, 8, and 9, 1990, about forty- two computer systems were seized. Over 150 secret services agents were involved in the seizure of computers and other hacking implements including over 23,000 floppy disks.
Bruce Sterling in his work "The Hacker Crackdown"http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/crack3c.html states that the police were sending a message to the hacker's that was recited by Garry M. Jenkins, the Assistant Director of the US Secret Service, at the Sundevil press conference in Phoenix on May 9, 1990, immediately after the raids.

In brief, hackers were mistaken in their foolish belief that they could hide behind the "relative anonymity of their computer terminals." On the contrary, they should fully understand that state and federal cops were actively patrolling the beat in cyberspace -- that they were on the watch everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive dens of cybernetic vice, the underground boards. (Sterling)

Sterlling extensively accounts the significance of "The hacker crackdown" with many critics drawing conslusions from his work, such as Dr. Sherman Young from Macquarie University's Media Department concluding that these cases of hacker crackdown were primarily concerned with the control of language, attributing the moral panic surrounding hacking as an argument of inclusion v exclusion.

New School Hackers Vs. Old School Hackers

Douglas Thomas outlines the tension between "Old School Hackers" and "New School Hackers". Thomas states that "Old School Hackers" were heroes and were from the MIT generation such as Steve Wozniak,Bill Gates and now the world's most famous hacker Kevin Mitnick. Yet "New School Hackers" go to jail and are punished for their exploaration of the communication technologies, Thomas states the tension between the two is where the interest lies.

The Future of Hacking

Since the 1990's it has been plainly clear the effectr that hacker's can have on society as society becomes more dependant on technology it is a given that hackers will be there to tinker with the new technologies just as Bell's early "hacker" employees did. The one thing we can be certainly sure of according to Dr. Young from Macquarie University is moral panics will continue to significantly effect the hacker community with the question of, will hacker's ever be able included to be considered one of "us"?, rather than one of "them".

Resources

Castells, The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell (1997) (second edition, 2004)
Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier Sterling
Himanen, Pekka. 2001. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Random House. ISBN 0-375-50566-0
Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0-385-19195-2)
Wark, The Hacker Manifesto (1989)

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