Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes ed. by Gerard Alberts, Ruth Oldenziel (review)

Hacking Europe is an edited collection focusing on the era of personal computing in the 1980s from several European perspectives. The topic is widely interesting to sociologists of technology, historians, and many others: how computers were first introduced to homes in various contexts. Diversity is the strength of this collection. In nine individual chapters, the authors focus on topics such as how personal computers were introduced by enthusiasts and their clubs in the Netherlands (Frank Veraart), how computers in Britain made their way to middle-class homes and schools alike (Thomas Lean), and how Greek users hacked the technology to fit their specific needs, such as the use of Greek characters, producing celebrated hackers (Theodoros Lekkas). While these careful studies reach the ordinary users’ as well as the states’ actions, the big picture on the European level with ordinary users, as opposed to “hackers,” is mostly left for the reader to summarize her- or himself.

Importantly, the volume extends from Western Europe to include what at the time of study in the 1980s was called socialist and Eastern Europe. Two significant chapters by Bruno Jakić and Patryk Wasiak detail the roles that personal computers played in Yugoslav computer culture and in Poland respectively. Users in these countries faced different challenges, such as early import problems, and met them with creative solutions. This inclusion brings together an unusually rich variety of information technology practices in one volume.

In the latter part of the volume, Kai Denker writes about a different case with a politically driven Chaos Computer Club from West Germany. The club was established in 1981 and Denker follows the members’ swift change from heroes to criminals after successful hacking of some official state services. Antti Silvast and Markku Reunanen focus on the participants in “demoscene” who programmed and shared computer demonstrations to test and display their technical and artistic skills. The authors discuss their topic as a transnational phenomenon based on the northern European community’s electronic magazines—circulated on diskettes by regular mail.

In the last two articles, the time frame is stretched to the 1990s and 2000s. Caroline Nevejan and Alexander Badenoch explore how the internet was reinvented in Amsterdam as a public space for local networking purposes before 1995. Last, Johan Söderberg offers an entertaining description and analysis of a user-controlled technology created by a Czech community of wireless network activists and tinkerers in the early 2000s.

More than most, Söderberg discusses the concept of user with his case of a community building hardware for transmissions of red light or infrared. Writers of other chapters use concepts such as cultural script and hacker culture and discuss the mediating processes shaping the technology of personal computing by its users and uses. Hacking is defined very broadly, in order to capture the various playful means by which Europeans appropriated computers. The title “Hacking Europe” remains unexplained, however, if it is not merely hacking in Europe. The editors perhaps wanted to assert that European users did a lot more than play games—an interest which indeed worried many across the continent.

The experienced editors, Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, frame the book as an alternative and a correction to a research theme so far dominated by American actors and interpretations. While this is a necessary extension, in the chapters the omnipresent “U.S. model” is often the older market leader IBM, and increasingly also new players such as Apple or Microsoft. On several occasions, these companies are black-boxed as America. If one digs deeper, as in the research program Inventing Europe, which included the editors but not most of the authors here, then the external nature of the “U.S. model” is more complicated: in the Netherlands, for instance, IBM has had a long-lived national subsidiary, which makes it also an insider.

A broader issue comes to mind here, intended for future discussion. On the one hand, these authors could make more...