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245 Hacker E. Gabriella Coleman Hackers—they seem to be everywhere, landing headlines in the news, founding companies in Silicon Valley and hacker spaces around the world, and, at times, facing years in jail. Despite this presence, they are everywhere misunderstood. Generally , a hacker is a technologist with a penchant for computing, and a hack is a clever technical solution arrived at through nonobvious means (Levy 1984; Turkle 2005). It is telling that a hack, as defined by fi The Hacker Jargon File, can mean the complete opposite of an ingenious intervention: a clunky, ugly fix, which nevertheless completes the job at fi hand. Among hackers, the term is often worn as a badge of honor. In the popular press, however, the connotations of hacker are often negative, or at minimum refer to illegal r intrusion of computer systems. These differences point to the various meanings and ff ff multiple histories associated with the terms hacker and r hacking. Hackers, especially in the West, tend to uphold a cluster of values: freedom, privacy, and access. They adore computers and networks. They are trained in the specialized— and economically lucrative—technical arts of programming, system/network administration , and security research. Some gain unauthorized access to technologies (though much of hacking is legal). Foremost, hacking, in its distinct incarnations, embodies an aesthetic where craftsmanship and craftiness converge; hackers value playfulness, pranking , and cleverness and will frequently display their wit through source code, humor, or both. But once one confronts hacking historically and sociologically, this shared plane melts into a sea of differences that have, until recently, been overlooked (with a few ex- ff ff ceptions) in the literature on hacking (Coleman and Golub 2008; Jordan 2008). The term hacker was fi r rst used consistently in the 1960s among technologists at fi MIT whose lives maniacally revolved around making, using, and improving computer software—a preoccupation that Steven Levy dubbed “a daring symbiosis between man and machine” in his engaging and exhaustive account Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984, 39). Levy unbundled the groups’ unstated ethical codes from their passionate , everyday collective pursuits and conceptualized them as “the hacker ethic,” shorthand for a mix of aesthetic and pragmatic imperatives that included commitment to information freedom, mistrust of authority, heightened dedication to meritocracy, and the firm belief that computers can be the basis for beauty and a better world (1984, 39–46). fi Levy’s book not only represented what had been, at the time, an esoteric community but also inspired others to identify with the moniker “hacker” and its ethical principles. H 246 Hacker By the 1980s, many other technologists routinely deployed the term hacker, individur r als enthralled with tinkering and technical spelunking but whose history and politics were distinct from those chronicled by Levy. Sometimes referred to as the “hacker underground,” the story goes that they arose in the 1980s, sullying what had been a pristine and legal tradition. What is often overlooked is their history: their heirs are the phone phreaks who existed at the same time as the first crop of university hackers in the fi late 1950s and early 1960s. These phreaks, as they were eventually known, tapped into the phone system to make free phone calls, explored “The System,” and found each other on phone conferences, also known as party lines (Sterling 1992; Rosenbaum 1971; Thomas 2002; Lapsley 2013). The end of the analog phone network after the divestiture of “Ma Bell” heralded the end of the golden age of phreaking, which was largely replaced with the exploration of computer networks. The marriage between phreaking and computer hacking was represented in the popular e-zine Phrack, first published in 1985 on bulletin board systems, fi where hackers of all kinds congregated (Scott 2005; Sterling 1992; Thomas 2002). Hackers published prolifically in diverse genres, including manifestos (most famously “The fi Conscience of a Hacker”), textfiles (written in sparse ASCII text but often fi fi lled with fi ASCII art and audaciously worded content), and zines (such as Hack-Tic in the Netherc lands and 2600 in the United States). Although many of these underground hackers engaged in technical exploration, often scouting for security vulnerabilities, they also sought forbidden fruit, and their actions included mockery, spectacle, and transgression—a politics and ethics distinct from the university hackers of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford (although there was plenty of pranking and irreverence among these hackers as well, and some individuals participated in both domains). The canonical narrative identifying MIT as hacking’s first homeland—a place where fi the...

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