Hacker Culture

Are Flagan writes with the review below of Hacker Culture. Flagan says this book "truly marks the entry of the 'hacker' into the realm of academia" -- a point which has both good and bad consequences. Read on to see if you might enjoy Hacker Culture as much as Flagan did. Hacker Culture author Douglas Thomas pages 266 publisher University of Minnesota Press rating 10(ish) reviewer Are Flagan ISBN 0816633452 summary A new critical history of hacker culture

Let me first recapitulate two brief preludes that figure prominently in Hacker Culture:

1. Around 1970 John Draper discovered that a freebie whistle included with Captain Crunch cereal sounded a tone that allowed him, as a literal whistle-blower, to take control of the phone line. Sounding the frequency of 2600 Hz, the high-pitched toy quickly sprouted a cottage industry of small electronic devices called "blue boxes" (first built by Draper) that emitted the commanding tune. Shortly thereafter, in 1971, Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak built hordes of the boxes and sold them to students in the Berkeley dorms. Jobs and Wozniak would go on to build and found Apple computers by employing the same principle: take existing knowledge and turn it to profit by, eventually, making appropriation proprietary. (Slashdot readers are no doubt familiar with the fact that Mac OS X is not much more than an "aqualicious" -- and expensive -- wrap of FreeBSD.)

2. The first personal computer was arguably the Altair. It came as a raw DIY kit that required soldering for assembly and programming to make it work. An early success in coding came in the form of Altair BASIC, a programming language adopted from mainframe systems by Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Unlike other hobbyists who shared their exploits freely, Allen and Gates decided to charge for their adaptation, but were quickly thwarted in their race to the goldmine by the sharing of software at computer clubs, an action that prompted Gates to call fellow developers thieves. For these hobbyists, the notion that programs could be secret and had to be purchased violated the tradition of programming as an ongoing collaboration. The births of our two major personal computing platforms, Mac and PC, consequently both stem from significant changes in the relations between openness and secrecy, sharing and ownership.

In Hacker Culture, Douglas Thomas provides a rewarding account of what preceded and followed these developments, charting the evolution of cracking and hacking from early yet seasoned programmers, generally found at Ivy League departments or under ARPA jurisdiction, to the demonized teenage villains of the 1990s. Although the term "hacking" has become somewhat of an umbrella misnomer to cover diverse behaviors bridging half a century, Thomas does it remarkable justice through, as he puts it, "an effort to understand hacking as an activity that is conditioned as much by its history as by the technology that it engages." To this end, he seeks to engage the role of hacking from an expansive and useful perspective, covering the hacker relationship to technology and society, representation of the hacker through both mainstream media and outlets such as TAP, Phrack and 2600, as well as the juridical construction of the criminalized hacker, which is basically a fancy term for Kafkaesque travesties of justice (the cases of Kevin Mitnick and Chris Lamprecht are analyzed in depth).

Hacker Culture is thankfully not a stylized look at subculture, as an embryonic cult aspiring to become marketable culture, but rather a much broader view of the increasingly computerized networks that comprise society. It is an intelligent exploration beyond the package-design boxes of software, covering our documents, and the product-design casings of computers, housing our institutions. Seen from, or via, an autonomous, skilled perspective on the command line, Hacker Culture provides an indispensable insight into a history of computing that it has become increasingly important to understand for computer users of all levels and abilities. As such, it is perhaps best suited, and intended, for those who do not frequent sites like this, but even pundits with Slashdot bookmarked since it was listed in the root will presumably enjoy the thoughtful analysis Thomas brings to the subject.

A lingering criticism, not exactly directed at the book, is that this publication truly marks the entry of the "hacker" into the realm of academia, where this figure will be dissected ad nauseam along with other minority reports concerned with the so-called radical fringes. Earlier blockbusters on the hacker topic, like Steven Levy's eponymous Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution from 1994, had a certain "sensationalist" appeal that, akin to William Gibson's Neuromancer, drew more of their leitmotifs from classic frontier westerns than cultural criticism. Instead of reading about jacking in and cracking from these primal sources, we got a ton of obligatory theory that read between the lines and reported on the findings at twice the length. Thomas, although he writes both eloquently and lucidly in an entertaining style, is fundamentally connecting the dots of theoretical writing as a second-generation commentator, frequently quoting Levy, for example, and at times the discussion embarks on rather redundant pontifications as a result. (Recall how you can guess the subject of most connect-the-dots outlines, while it usually takes a child careful tracing to number 147 or so before a shriek of joy recognizes the rabbit.) Such misgivings, which are essentially more inspired by the predictable rhetorical mode of academia than this book, are however relatively minor compared to the welcome prospects of actually having some core ideas about free information and open-source computing distributed to a wider audience.

A question remains about what will happen to the figure of the hacker now that we have had, and discussed, both Matthew Broderick, in Hollywood's War Games, and Kevin Mitnick, in jail. In Hacker Culture, both lay claim to capture and coach the collective imagination with regards to what informed autonomy means and the paybacks it receives. Perhaps the future, following Hacker Culture, will prepare a better balance between revered stardom, obscene bankrolls, criminal records and lone isolation cells?

Reviewer Are Flagan has trouble remembering his own passwords. You can purchase Hacker Culture from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Another source of hacker history

[Drunken Coward]

If anyone likes the idea of a hacker history and doesn't have the time to do the reading, I'd recommend Pirates of Silicon Valley. It aired a few months ago on TV and covers most of what the reviewer talks about.

Very cool to see the history of something that is still so alive today

Re:Another source of hacker history

[Paladin84]

The only people to call it Hackers 2 are the kids on Kazaa and gnutella "sharing" it. It's called Takedown, and is based on the Shimomura book with the same name. Depending on which side of the story you choose to believe, it's largely fictional. If you're looking for it, it was released on DVD in France as Cyber Traque. It can be found here.

Not light reading...

[mookie-blaylock]

I picked this book up over the summer on a whim. I expected a fairly interesting read that might tend to romanticize the image of hackers in some way.

Not so. The book is actually very dense, and looks at hackers/hacker culture in a more sociological/anthropological context, examining norms and values of the subculture versus traditional society and so forth.

It's interesting and I moved through it fairly quickly, but it's not really light reading. It basically reads like someone's thesis paper or something. And there are enough typos that it just might drive you nuts. But on a four hour flight, I would much rather read this than the thrilling American Airlines magazine.

Re:I am just tired

[xphase]

I enjoyed 'Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet' by Stephen Segaller.

But YMMV

--xPhase

Re:Takedown

[Your_Mom]

Another good book is "The Fugitive Game" by John Littman. Highly Recommend this book to anyone who has ever read Takedown, as it provides a more (IMHO) realistic, albeit shorter, view of the arrest of Kevin. The book overall follows Kevin during his time as a fugitive, in which he had telephone conversations with the author. Kevin even says the book is a very accurate portrayal of what really happened. Buy this book, now. :)

Man, I think I am going to have to pull that book off my shelf this weekend and start it again.

The Cuckoo's Egg

[fumanchu898]

If you want good books that show what hackers were doing to military installations and whatnot in the mid-80's, try reading 'The Cuckoo's Egg' or 'Masters of Deception'. These books will give you a good look at how Tymnet was more full of holes that Swiss cheese at that point is history. 'The Cuckoo's Egg' is better, but they are both enjoyable, from a hacker's perspective.

A book that covers the individual hacker

[dr_canak]

and their relationship to the hacker culture and mainstream culture is:

"Underground"

Which is available, in its entirety here:

http://www.underground-book.com/download.php3

What I really liked about this book was the indepth story telling about several hackers, their relationships with other hackers (globally I might add), their relationships with family and other "non-hackers," and their general makeup as people.

After reading this, I felt I had a much better appreciation of the importance that the hacker culture can have for some people. The hacker underground was clearly a place where these kids felt most comfortable, and in some cases provided an important level of social support that they didn't otherwise have access to.