Hacker Culture (review)

The concept and practice of hacking—and perhaps the issue is the distinction between concept and practice—has become one of those ubiquitous components of cyberculture. Hacking has surfaced not just as a way to use code, but as a cultural force as well. Hacking has become more a style, or a lifestyle, or at least an attitude. You can hack your wetware, hack a social scene, hack a city and so on. At some point, the term will become so all-encompassing that, in the network society, it will become metaphysical, a synonym for "doing" rather than "being."

It is this gap between the practice of hacking and the concept of hacking that Douglas Thomas's book, Hacker Culture, addresses. Between the gory details of computer code and the abstract, cultural attitude of hacking, we find government legislation, the economic interests of the software industry and the development of new technologies. It is particularly this last phenomenon that is the focus of Thomas's book, though his concentration on the socially shaping force of infotech certainly implies the interests of government and industry.

Thomas's book is divided roughly into three parts. The first part provides an excellent overview of Thomas's theoretical orientation and the culture of hacking. It not only mentions key moments in the timeline of hacking, but also spends some time meditating on the philosophy of hacking. The second part undertakes some more detailed analyses of hacking culture, from hardcore phreaking to the mainstreaming of hacking in science fiction films. Finally, the third part considers the relationships between hacking, the computer industry and law, taking a kind of Foucauldian approach to the construction of the criminal-hacker figure. The strongest argument in Thomas's book is to show how an ambiguous politics engages with emerging technologies to produce a set of social practices. Thomas shows how hackers are often positioned between being antipathetic to the corporatism of the software industry and being security experts and systems administrators for those same companies. The suggestion put forth is that hackers are defined by this tension—at once against the privatization of information and yet a product of the very thing they oppose.

The one thing I missed from Thomas's otherwise sophisticated handling of the subject was an analysis of the concept and the practice of hacking. I am not a programmer but I would still like to know exactly what different computer hacking practices involve. It seems that, if there is what Thomas calls a "performance of technology" in hacking, it would be at this level, in terms of run-time, time-to-live or compiling. After all, gaining access into a secure database is a different practice than port-scanning, and there are probably hackers who do not consider either to be "true" hacking. I would like to see Thomas carry his analysis of hacker culture to the material level of code, run-time and protocols. There is, arguably, a lot to be gained by refusing this gap between concept and practice, and an analysis of hacking techniques or code from a cultural standpoint is worth considering.

The advantage of such an analysis would be to further illustrate something that is arguably at the root of all hacking approaches: that the system only fails when it works. Internet viruses are an example (and I am borrowing here from Alex Galloway's work on Internet protocols). A virus or worm can only be successful if the Internet is functioning optimally. Otherwise, the virus cannot disseminate itself and will ostensibly be cut off from being able to function as a virus. As Thomas points out, the main insight of hacking—as both a practice and a concept—is that any system, when working "properly," has by definition a series of flaws, fissures and loopholes. Hackers are a paradoxical kind of developer, since they work almost exclusively at this level, at the points at which the system shows forth its glitches, idiosyncrasies and aberrations.

I would recommend this book alongside one of...