“Hacking, across its various manifestations, can be seen as a site where craft and craftiness converge.”
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| Editing by Rajesh Sunuwar |
The following is a draft of an essay, eventually for publication as part of the Digital Keywords project (Ben Peters, ed). This and other drafts will be circulated on Culture Digitally, and we invite anyone to provide comment, criticism, or suggestion in the comment space below. We ask that you please do honor that it is being offered in draft form — both in your comments, which we hope will be constructive in tone, and in any use of the document: you may share the link to this essay as widely as you like, but please do not quote from this draft without the author’s permission. (TLG)
Hackers — Gabriella Coleman, McGill University
The Culture vs. the Cultures of Hacking
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Since this coinage sixty years ago, the range of activity wedded to the term “hacking” has expanded exponentially. Bloggers share tips about “life hacks” (tricks for managing time or overcoming the challenges of everyday life); corporations, governments, and NGOs host “hackathon” coding sprints[2]; and the “hacktivist”, once a marginal political actor, now lies at the center of geopolitical life.[3] Since the early 1980s, the hacker archetype has also become a staple of our mass media diet. Rarely does a day pass without an article detailing a massive security breach at the hands of shadowy hackers, who have ransacked corporate servers to pilfer personal and lucrative data. Alongside these newspaper headlines, hackers often feature prominently in popular film, magazines, literature, and TV.[4]
Despite this pervasiveness, academic books on the subject of hacking are scant. To date the most substantive historical accounts have been penned by journalists, while academics have written a handful of sociological, anthropological and philosophical books -typically with a media studies orientation.[5] Surveying the popular, journalistic, and academic material on hackers, it is clear that few words in the English language evoke such a bundle of simultaneously negative and positive-even sexy-connotations: mysterious, criminal, impulsive, brilliant, chauvinistic, white knight, digital robin hood, young, white, male, politically naïve, libertarian, wizardly, entitled, brilliant, skilled, mystical, monastic, creepy, creative, obsessive, methodological, quirky, a-social, pathological.
What is the source of this association, and why has it proved so tenacious? The reasons are complex, but we can identify at least two clear contributing factors. First, many hackers, especially in the west, do demonstrate an enthusiastic commitment to anti-authoritarianism and a variety of civil liberties. Most notably, hackers advocate privacy and free speech rights-a propensity erroneously (if perhaps understandably) flattened into a perception of libertarianism. While these sensibilities are wholly compatible and hold affinities with a libertarian agenda, the two are by no means co-constitutive, nor does one necessarily follow from the other.[8]
The second source propping up the myth of the libertarian hacker concerns the framing and uptake of published accounts. Certain, depictions of particular aspects of hacking or specific geographic regions wherein libertarianism does, indeed, dominate are routinely represented as and subsequently taken up as indicative of the entire hacker culture.[9] This is only magnified by the fact that Silicon Valley technologists, many who promulgate what Richard Barbrook has named the “Californian ideology”-“a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture,” are so well resourced that their activities and values, however specific, circulate in the public more pervasively than those at work in other domains of hacker practice.[10] There is no question the California ideology remains salient[11] – but it by no means qualifies as a singular hacker worldview homogeneous across regions, generations, projects, and styles of hacking.
This disproportionately-fortified stereotype of the libertarian hacker, along with the paucity of historical studies and contemporary research regarding other values at work in hacking, forms the terrain from which scholars of hackers currently work and write. But this seems, slowly, to be changing. Increasingly, scholars are tracing the genealogies of hacking practices, ethics, and values to heterodox, multiplicitous origins.[12] For instance, the inception of the “hacker underground”-an archipelago of tightknit crews who embrace transgression, enact secrecy, and excel in the art of computer intrusion-can be traced to the phone phreaks: proto-hackers who, operating both independently and collectively, made it their mission to covertly explore phone systems for a variety of reasons which rarely involved capital gain.[13] Conversely, “free software” hackers are far more transparent in their constitution and activities as they utilize legal mechanisms which aim to guarantee perpetual access to their creations. Meanwhile, “open source” hackers, close cousins to their equivalents in the free software movement, downplay the language of rights emphasizing methodological benefits and freedom of choice in how to use software over the perpetual freedom of the software itself; as a result, open source ideology maintains an affinity with neoliberal logics, while free software runs directly against this current.[14] Another engagem
Not all hackers are seeking, however, to promote social transformation. But we can nevertheless consider how many of their legal and technical artifacts catalyze enduring and pervasive political changes regardless of intent. Craft autonomy figures heavily in this unexpected dynamic, one which can be observed, perhaps most clearly, in the production of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS). Productive autonomy and access to the underlying structures of code are enshrined values in this community, and politics seems to be a natural outcome of such commitments. Irrespective of personal motivation or a project’s stated political position, F/OSS has functioned as a sort of icon, a living example from which other actors in fields like law, journalism and education have made cases for open access. To give but one example, Free Software licensing directly inspired the chartering of the Creative Commons non-profit, which has developed a suite of open access licenses for modes of cultural production which extend far beyond the purview of hacking.[38] Additionally, F/OSS practices have enabled radical thinkers and activists to showcase and advocate the vitality, persistence and possibility of non-alienated labor.[39]
Like F/OSS hackers, those in the underground also strive for and enact craft autonomy with interesting political effects-but here autonomy is understood and enacted differently. Often referred to as blackhats, these hackers pursue forbidden knowledge. While often lured by the thrills offered by subversion and transgression alone, their acts also serve pedagogical purposes, and many have emerged from these illegal, underground into the realm of respected security research. Their hands-on experiences locating vulnerabilities and sleuthing systems are easily transferrable into efforts to fortify-rather than penetrate-technical systems. Predictably, the establishment of a profitable security industry is seen by some underground hackers as a threat to their autonomy: Some critics deride their fellow hackers for selling out to the man.[40] A much larger number don’t have a problem with the aim of securitization per se, but nevertheless chastise those attracted to the field by lucrative salaries rather than a passionate allegiance to quality. In one piece declaring the death of the hacker underground, a hacker bemoans: “unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are willing, or indeed capable of following this path, of pursuing that ever-unattainable goal of technical perfection. Instead, the current trend is to pursue the lowest common denominator, to do the least amount of work to gain the most fame, respect or money.”[41]
A major, and perhaps unsurprising motivator of hacker politicization comes in the wake of state intervention. The most potent periods of hacker politicization (at least in the American context) are undoubtedly those following arrests of underground hackers like Craig Neidorf[42] or Kevin Mitnick.[43] The criminalization of software can also do the trick; hacker-cryptopapher Phil Zimmerman broke numerous munitions and intellectual property laws when he released PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption to the world-a fact governments did not fail to notice or act upon.[44] But this act of civil disobedience helped engender the now firmly-established hacker notion that software deserves free speech protections.[45]
In many such instances, the pushback against criminalization spills beyond hacker concerns, engaging questions of civil liberties more generally. Activists outside the hacker discipline are inevitably drawn in, and the political language deployed by them results in a sort of positive feedback loop for the hackers initially activated. We saw this precise pattern with the release and attempted suppression of DeCSS, a short program which could be used to circumvent copy and regional access controls on DVDs. In the United States, hackers who shared or published this code were sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and its author was subsequently arrested in Norway. State criminalization led to a surge of protest activity among hackers across Europe and North America as they insisted upon free speech rights to write and release code undisputality cementing the association between free speech and code. As alliances were forged with civil liberties groups, lawyers, and librarians, what is now popularly known as the “digital rights movement” was more fully constituted.[46]
ENDNOTES
1. Levy, Steven Hackers. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010, p. 10
2. DiSalvo, Carl and Melissa Gregg. “The Trouble With White Hats.” The New Inquiry, November 21, 2013.
3. Beyer, Jessica L. Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization. Oxford_; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014; Jordan, Tim, and Paul Taylor. Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause?. Routledge, 2004; Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London_; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2014; Sauter, Molly. The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
4. Alper, Meryl. “‘Can Our Kids Hack It With Computers?’ Constructing Youth Hackers in Family Computing Magazines.” International Journal of Communication. N, no. 8 (2014): 673-98.
5. For a history of phone phreaking see Lapsley, Phil. Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell, 2013; for a history of the first coordinate state crackdowns against the American black hats see Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. The history of the intersection between hacking and cryptography has been written by Greenberg, Andy. This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information. New York: Dutton Adult, 2012.Finally the classic account on the birth of university based hacking and early hardware hacking, see Steven Levy, ibid. For academic accounts also see: Jordan, Tim, and Paul Taylor. Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause?. Routledge, 2004; Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002; Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; and Coleman, Gabriella. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
6. Coleman, Gabriella. “The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld.” Anthropological Quarterly 83, no. 1 (2010): 47-72.
7. Borsook, Paulina. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech. PublicAffairs, 2000.
8. This is one but many examples where civil liberties is equated with libertarians but I feel like a jerk calling people out: Schulte, Stephanie, and Bret Schulte. “Muckraking in the Digital Age: Hacker Journalism and Cyber Activism in Legacy Media.” NMEDIAC, The Journal Of New Media And Culture 9, no. 1 (February 25, 2014).
9. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
10. Barbrook, R, and A Cameron. “The California Ideology.” Science as Culture, no. 26 (1996): 44-72.
11. Marwick, Alice E. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press, 2013 and Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs, 2013.
12. Jordan, Tim. Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008; Coleman, Gabriella, and Alex Golub. “Hacker Practice.” Anthropological Theory 8, no. 3 (2008): 255-77.
13. Lapsley, Ibid.
14. Berry, David. Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source. London: Pluto Press, 2008.
15. Greenberg, ibid.
16. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
17. Hannemyr, Gisle. “Technology and Pleasure: Considering Hacking Constructive.” First Monday 4, no. 2 (February 1, 1999).
18. For an in-depth account of how these spaces function pedagogically, Schrock, Andrew Richard. “‘Education in Disguise’: Culture of a Hacker and Maker Space.” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 10, no. 1 (January 1, 2014).
19. O’Neil, Mathieu. Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes. London; New York: New York: Pluto Press, 2009; Coleman, Gabriella. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
20. Montfort, Nick. “Obfuscated Code.” In Software Studies a Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.
21. See “Codes of Value” section in Coleman, ibid; and also Goriunova, Olga, ed. Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
22. Orr, Julian E. Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, N.Y: ILR Press, 1996.
23. See, for example, Takhteyev, Yuri. Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012; and Chan, Anita Say. Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2014.
24. Sewell Jr., William H. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005.
25. Wark, ibid.
26. Delfanti, Alessandro and Johan Soderberg. “Hacking Hacked! The Life Cycles of Digital Innovation.” Science, Technology and Human Values, Forthcoming.
27. Tate, Ryan. “Google Couldn’t Kill 20 Percent Time Even If It Wanted To.” Wired, August 21, 2013.
28. Lindtner, Silvia, Li, David. “Created in China.” Interactions Interactions 19, no. 6 (2012): 18.
29. [LEFT BLANK] ****
30. Kelty, ibid.
31. Wark, ibid.
32. Polletta, F. “‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action.” Theory and Society 28, no. 1 (1999): 1-38.
33. Bazzichelli, Tatiana. Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking. Aarhus N, Denmark: Aarhus Universitet Multimedieuddannelsen, 2013.
34. Maxigas. “Hacklabs and Hackerspaces – Tracing Two Genealogies.” Journal of Peer Production, no. 2. Accessed October 2, 2014.
35. Kubitschko, Sebastian. “Hacking Authority.” edited by Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett. New York: NYU Press, Forthcoming.
36. Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2014.
37. Burkart, Patrick. Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests. The MIT Press, 2014.
38. Coleman, Gabriella, and Mako Hill. “How Free Became Open and Everything Else Under the Sun.” MC Journal 7, no. 3 (July 2004).
39. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
40. Anonymous. “Lines in the Sand: Which Side Are You On in the Hacker Class War.” Phrack Inc. 0x0e, no. 0x44 (April 2012).
41. Anonymous. “The Underground Myth.” Phrack Inc. 0x0c, no. 0x41 (November 2008).
42. Sterling, Ibid.
43. Thomas, Ibid.
44. Levy, Steven. Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. 1st edition. London: Penguin Books, 2001.
45. Coleman, Gabriella. “Code Is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers.” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3 (November 2, 2012): 420-54.
“Hacking, across its various manifestations, can be seen as a site where craft and craftiness converge.”
The following is a draft of an essay, eventually for publication as part of the Digital Keywords project (Ben Peters, ed). This and other drafts will be circulated on Culture Digitally, and we invite anyone to provide comment, criticism, or suggestion in the comment space below. We ask that you please do honor that it is being offered in draft form — both in your comments, which we hope will be constructive in tone, and in any use of the document: you may share the link to this essay as widely as you like, but please do not quote from this draft without the author’s permission. (TLG)
Hackers — Gabriella Coleman, McGill University
The Culture vs. the Cultures of Hacking
In the 1950s a small group of MIT-based computer enthusiasts, many of them model train builders/tinkerers, adopted the term “hacker” to differentiate their freewheeling attitude from those of their peers. While most MIT engineers relied on convention to deliver proven results, hackers courted contingency, disregarding norms or rules they thought likely to stifle creative invention. These hackers, like the engineers they distinguished themselves from, were primarily students, but a handful of outsiders, some of them pre-teens, were also deemed to possess the desire and intellectual chops required to hack and adopted into the informal club; In the eyes of this group, hackers re-purposed tools in the service of beauty and utility while those students “who insisted on studying for courses”[1] were considered “tools” themselves.
Since this coinage sixty years ago, the range of activity wedded to the term “hacking” has expanded exponentially. Bloggers share tips about “life hacks” (tricks for managing time or overcoming the challenges of everyday life); corporations, governments, and NGOs host “hackathon” coding sprints[2]; and the “hacktivist”, once a marginal political actor, now lies at the center of geopolitical life.[3] Since the early 1980s, the hacker archetype has also become a staple of our mass media diet. Rarely does a day pass without an article detailing a massive security breach at the hands of shadowy hackers, who have ransacked corporate servers to pilfer personal and lucrative data. Alongside these newspaper headlines, hackers often feature prominently in popular film, magazines, literature, and TV.[4]
Despite this pervasiveness, academic books on the subject of hacking are scant. To date the most substantive historical accounts have been penned by journalists, while academics have written a handful of sociological, anthropological and philosophical books -typically with a media studies orientation.[5] Surveying the popular, journalistic, and academic material on hackers, it is clear that few words in the English language evoke such a bundle of simultaneously negative and positive-even sexy-connotations: mysterious, criminal, impulsive, brilliant, chauvinistic, white knight, digital robin hood, young, white, male, politically naïve, libertarian, wizardly, entitled, brilliant, skilled, mystical, monastic, creepy, creative, obsessive, methodological, quirky, a-social, pathological.
Some of these associations carry with them a kernel of truth, especially in North America and Europe: conferences are populated by seas of mostly white men; their professionalizable skills, which encompass the distinct technical arts of programming, security research, hardware building, and system/network administration, land them mostly in a middle class or higher tax bracket (they are among the few professionals who can scramble up corporate ladders without a college degree); and their much vaunted libertarianism does, indeed, thrive in particular regions like Silicon Valley, the global start-up capital of the world, and select projects like the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Yet many other popular and entrenched ideas about hacking are more fable than reality. Maxigas. “Hacklabs and Hackerspaces – Tracing Two Genealogies.” Journal of Peer Production, no. 2. Accessed October 2, 2014.
Montfort, Nick. “Obfuscated Code.” In Software Studies a Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.
Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs, 2013.
O’Neil, Mathieu. Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes. London_; New York_: New York: Pluto Press, 2009.
Orr, Julian E. Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, N.Y: ILR Press, 1996.
Polletta, F. “‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action.” Theory and Society 28, no. 1 (1999): 1-38.
Postigo, Hector. The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012.
Sauter, Molly. The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Schrock, Andrew Richard. “‘Education in Disguise’: Culture of a Hacker and Maker Space.” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 10, no. 1 (January 1, 2014). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0js1n1qg.
Schulte, Stephanie, and Bret Schulte. “Muckraking in the Digital Age: Hacker Journalism and Cyber Activism in Legacy Media.” NMEDIAC, The Journal Of New Media And Culture 9, no. 1 (February 25, 2014).
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Sewell Jr., William H. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005.
Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.
Takhteyev, Yuri. Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012.
Tate, Ryan. “Google Couldn’t Kill 20 Percent Time Even If It Wanted To.” Wired, August 21, 2013.
Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
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