Hackers

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"In one of several meanings of the word in computing, a hacker is a member of the programmer subculture originated in the 1960s in the United States academia, in particular around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Nowadays, this subculture is mainly associated with the free software movement.

Hackers follow a spirit of creative playfulness and anti-authoritarianism, and sometimes use this term to refer to people applying the same attitude to other fields." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(free_and_open_source_software)

History

Jarkko Moilanen:

"Hackers form a global community, which consists of multiple micro-communities (Barber, 2001, 14). Those autonomous micro-communities are constanly on the move; evolving, hibernating and dying. Hacker micro-communities have been the first to form virtual communities. Among hackers, the most common communication network and base for community is Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Hackers lurk on the channels often all the time, night and day following the text stream. Intense interactions and strong emotional ties are not uncommon among these virtual communities, the members share activities and resources with each other and interaction is supportive rather than comparative. (Whittaker et al., 1997) Rheingold has labelled those channels as “the corner pub, the caf‚, the common room–the “great good place” of the Net.” (Rheingold, 1993, 155) The participants of channels become familiar with each other without meeting in real life. The above virtual communities have been the ruling form of hacker networks for decades.

Over the past years hackers around the world, mostly in Europe and Northern America, have begun to move hacker networks and communities out of the virtuality to the real world. They have begun to form hackerspaces, hacker communities which have both virtual and real world bodies. This article attempts to define Hackerspace generation as the latest form of hacker community. In this article hacker generations are divided into two classes: introvert and extrovert generations. The description of hackerspace generation is build on comparing hackerspaces to hacktivism. The comparison is a valid tool since the two generations have shared history. Therefore both forms of extrovert generations, hacktivism and hackerspaces, are discussed in great length.

Introvert hacker generations

This article adopts Taylor’s view of hacker generations. Although Taylor’s view of hacker generations seems quite valid, it is out of date and needs to be updated to include hackerspaces as the latest generation. The updated generation model can be seen in the figure below.

Graph at http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/files/2010/11/hacker-generations-divided.png

The generations are divided to two classes, extrovert and introvert generations. Characteristics of introvert generations can be identified to include at least the following. They have been satisfied to stay in somewhat closed circles. They have little or no connections at all to surrounding community and prefer to stay hidden from the public. They have formed independent small communities with little cooperation with other similar groups or communities. The extrovert generations, hacktivists and hackerspaces, in turn wish to be seen, be written and discussed about. In other words, they use the publicity to gain attention of the public. Furthermore, extrovert generations do not want to be separated from the surrounding community, instead they wish to be part of it and influence directly to it. Before discussing the extrovert generations in more details, the previous generations need to be addressed briefly.

The amount of generations varies, but most scholars agree that the first hacker generation was born in MIT during the late 1950s. These early pioneers of computing were labelled as the ‘true hackers’ or ‘original hackers’(Levy, 1984, 15-129) Phone-phreakers are often labelled as the second generation of hackers. (Gollin, 2010; Taylor, 2005; Rosenbaum, 1971; Sterling, 2002) In the 1970’s new generation of hackers emerged. Hackers like Lee Felsenstein, Efrem Lipkin, Bob Albrecht, Ed Roberts did not have access to mainframes. They had to build their own computers, which started the arise of personal computers. Games began to arise as a new form of computer applications in the 1980’s. Before this computers were mostly used merely in industry and science. (Flowers, 2008) Games and hackers have always had deep interwiened relationship. The relationship grew into new dimensions when commercial game developers enabled community based game modification or better known as modding. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and douglas Coupland’s Microserfs(Coupland, 1996) are used as the main examples of fictional portrayals of hacking. Coupland’s book is a vivid fictional (or factional) description of commercially opted hackers, microserfs, working for Microsoft. The life of a microserf is dedicated to their projects and the company. The microserf plods on at a low-level computer job and low salaries without the prospects of long-term financial success with relatively little autonomy.

The next generation, open source, is almost the opposite to ‘microserfs’. Many authors have written about the significance of hackers concerning the Open Source development, which is becoming more and more permanent part of societies as more and more official parts of societies in all levels of different institutions such as schools and administration. (Torvalds ja diamond, 2002; Lakhani ja Wolf, 2005; Lin, 2007; Lakhani ja Von Hippel, 2003; Sauer, 2007; Raymond, 2001) Hackers and open source movement have a close relationship with each other as the founder of the Open Source Initiative describes “[o]ne of the reasons that I support hackers is that they have been telling us for over 10 years that the emperor is naked.”(PBS, 2001) According to Lakhani and Wolf(2005, 6) the term hacker is a badge of honor within the F/OSS community, as opposed to its derisive use in popular media. Open source licences like GPL and it’s derivates are real world applications of abstract hacker ethic where “free exchange of information allows for greater overall creativity.”(Levy, 1984, 27)

Open source hackers began the transition from introvert to extrovert hacker communities. Their efforts gained a lot of attention and economical signifigance. Yet their intention was not to turn activities complitely ‘extrovert’. Most of the development is still more or less hidden and in the hands of hardcore hackers. Furthermore, the activities of open source hackers are not political and are concentrated in the virtual space. In the same time the transition towards more socio-politically oriented and extrovert hacker generation known as hacktivism was forming.

Politically active hackers

The term hacktivism was coined by Omega, member of Cult of The dead Cow (cDc) in 1996 (Ruffin, 2004). Ruffin was one of the main architects concerning the content or what the term hacktivism includes and resembles. What seems to be agreed in some level is that hacktivism transfers the tactics of previous activism in the real world to the realm of cyberspace. Hacktivism was borne out of a specific goal of resisting, “the commodification of the internet at the hands of corporate profiteers and violations of human rights at the hands of oppressive governments” (Manion ja Goodrum, 2000, p. 14). Such ideals are evident in the manifestos and group ideologies of hacktivist groups such as the Cult of the Dead Cow (cdc), the Electronic disturbance Theater (EDT) and the Electro-Hippie Collective. Hacktivists want to protest and disrupt; they do not want to kill or terrify.

According to one of the most public figures of hacktivism Oxblood Ruffin the first generation of the kids that “spent their time hacking soda machines” (Ruffin in McKay, 1998) in the 1980’s became middle-aged, age when people live the most active phase of their political lives (Smith ja H., 2009). The above kids were the first ones who grew up in the world which became more and more computer reliant. Furthermore, generation shares experiences of some great changes which causes sometimes fundamental changes in societies such as wars for example (Purhonen, 2007, 16). In this case the great change took place in the middle of the 1990’s. The growing importance of the Internet as a means of communication and the rise of graphical browsers can be seen as another plausible factor that fostered the formation of hacktivist generation.

Hacktivism is not a single-issue political activity. To be more precise, hacktivism is “[...] a policy of hacking, phreaking or creating technology to achieve a political or social goal”.(Fleming, 1998; TheHacktivist, 2003) It includes variety of political focuses and should not be treated as a simple entity.

In the above figure hacktivism is located in the end of the 1990’s. This might be somewhat misleading, since the creation of PeaceNet, a text-based newsgroup service, in 1986 allowed “political activists to communicate with one another across international borders with relative ease and speed.” (Wray, 1998). PeaceNet was the tool before the rise of world wide web, also known as www. To pinpoint the first incidents that could be labelled as hacktivism varies. If viruses and worms are excluded, then MilW0rms (hacker moniker) attacks against Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in 1998 can be identified as one of the first incidents. The above attack was a classical example of computer intrusion and defacement. During the same year hackers with monikers Bronc Buster and Zyklon, members of hacker group called Legion of the Underground (LoU), disabled firewalls of Chinese goverment to enable chinese people’s free access to web. Probably one of most the well-known hacktivist operation has been X-Ploit’s attack (1998) against Mexican officials, the government of President Ernesto Zedillo, with intention to support Zapatistas. In the attack X-Ploit defaced some of Mexico’s Finance Ministry and Health Ministry websites. Another group called Kaotik Team defaced 45 Indonesian websites to include message that called for independence of East-Timor. Based on these examples, year 1998 could be labelled as the birth year of hacktivism.

Graph at http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/files/2010/11/hacktivist-organisations-simple.png

Some hacktivist organizations are still alive and some have ceased to exist. Two groups, cDc and CCC (see figure 2), were the initial forces to engage political hackerdom. The latter was established as early as September 12, 1981 in Berlin by Wau Holland and Andy Müller-Maguhn. Soon after that, cdc was founded in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas by three hackers. During the 1980’s CCC protested against French nuclear tests and some of the members of CCC were involved with the German Green Party. Today CCC is known for public demonstrations of security flaws of different systems. One of the latest demonstrations 2008 dismissed the security of biometric identification which can be used for example in passports. The group acquired and published the fingerprints of German Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (Relph-Knight, 2008). The fingerprints could then be copied and used by anyone to fool fingerprint readers. CCC is the main organizer of the biggest annually held European hacker conference SIGINT. CCC also holds annual four-day conference Chaos Communication Congress. Besides the large conferences, the activities of CCC include a great variety of smaller scale conferences, own radio broadcasts and a magazine. In others words, CCC appears to have a significant role in hacking community. As it has been discussed before, hacker generations and organizations intertwine, about which the network of CCC is a great example. CCC is a large nation wide organization and it has established several hackerspaces around Germany (CCC, 2010). In brief, hacktivists have concentrated in the combination of hacking and socio-political issues both locally and internationally, yet at the same time their activities have had a significant role (see figure 3) in building the latest hacker generation which can be labelled as hackerspace generation.

Arising Public Form of Hacker Community

While the above described hacker generations are acknowledged by some scholars (see for example Sterling, 2002; Taylor, 2005) it might be missing the latest development if hackerspaces as one form of the new ‘do-it-yourself’ movement would not be added to it. Hackers are forming new kind of communities, which are quite different compared to earlier hacker communities. Hackerspaces are communities which have a physical space as a centre of the community. Since the hackerspaces as a movement is still new, a simple and compact definition is missing even among the persons who are involved in hackerspaces. Different hackerspaces use different names for their community: hacklab, non-profit workshop, Art Collective, makerspace, tech shop, fab lab and so on. The variety of names for the new ‘do-it-yourself’ communities expresses the variety and diversity of the movement, which might be best desbribed as “digital revolution in fabrication [... which] will allow perfect macroscopic objects to be made out of imperfect microscopic components”. (Gershenfeld 2007, 10)

Scientific attempts to clarify the differences of various ‘do-it-yourself’ hacking communities are rare. Even a shared understanding how to name the movement is still missing.

Troxler has adapted Gershenfeld’s (2007, 3-17) term ‘fabbing’, which is “commons-based peer-production of physical goods”. Troxler (2010, 2) Troxler uses the term as an umbrella for all forms of hacking described below. The term ‘fabbing’ might be somewhat misleading since the word is derived from fab labs (short for fabrication laboratory or fabulous laboratory), which are mostly NSF funded do-it-yourself communities. According to Troxler hackespaces are one form of ‘fabbing’. Other forms of fabbing are: fablabs, techshops, 100k garages, sharing platforms, and open source hardware. Troxler’s view of ‘fabbing’ or ‘do-it-yourself’ culture is more or less focused on the physical production of goods, which neglects the community aspects. Hackerspaces emphasize the role of community, the role of members and independence from outside influences such as funding. (Moilanen 2010) The situation is the opposite for example in fab labs, which are monitored by MIT. (Troxler, 2010, 3) The list of fab labs is maintained by MIT, which in turn is an example of control. A community can declare to be a hackerspace and list themselves to freely maintained wiki based list of hackerspaces. In other words, hackerspaces community itself regulates who can be labelled as hackerspace. Strong desire to be independent is shown in funding the space, which is often based on membership fees rather than external funding. Hackerspaces are hacker communities which apply hacker ethic and stress the value of community, while other forms of ‘fabbing’ seems to be sort of mini production networks or communities. The attitude towards business or business alike communities is what separates hackerspaces from techshops. Community which acts even slightly as a business can not be a hackerspace. dispite the limitations of Troxler’s model, it includes hackerspaces as one of the clearest form of ‘fabbing’ which has spread around the world. Furthermore hackerspaces ecosystem is the biggest form of ‘fabbing’, since the amount of hackerspaces is around 350, of which 250 active and 100 in building process. The amount of fab labs is around 100.(Troxler, 2010, 3)"

Graph at http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/files/2010/11/hackerspaces-organisations-ccc.png

(http://extreme.ajatukseni.net/2010/11/20/extrovert-hacker-generations-hacktivism-and-hackerspaces/)

Jarkko Moilanen continues this history with the recent emergence of Hacker Spaces.

Discussion

The Gentrification of Hacking

Brett Scott:

"Here is where the second form of corruption begins to emerge. The construct of the ‘good hacker’ has paid off in unexpected ways, because in our computerised world we have also seen the emergence of a huge, aggressively competitive technology industry with a serious innovation obsession. This is the realm of startups, venture capitalists, and shiny corporate research and development departments. And, it is here, in subcultures such as Silicon Valley, that we find a rebel spirit succumbing to perhaps the only force that could destroy it: gentrification.

Gentrification is the process by which nebulous threats are pacified and alchemised into money. A raw form – a rough neighbourhood, indigenous ritual or edgy behaviour such as parkour (or free running) – gets stripped of its otherness and repackaged to suit mainstream sensibilities. The process is repetitive. Desirable, unthreatening elements of the source culture are isolated, formalised and emphasised, while the unsettling elements are scrubbed away.

Key to any gentrification process are successive waves of pioneers who gradually reduce the perceived risk of the form in question. In property gentrification, this starts with the artists and disenchanted dropouts from mainstream society who are drawn to marginalised areas. Despite their countercultural impulses, they always carry with them traces of the dominant culture, whether it be their skin colour or their desire for good coffee. This, in turn, creates the seeds for certain markets to take root. A WiFi coffeeshop appears next to the Somalian community centre. And that, in turn, sends signals back into the mainstream that the area is slightly less alien than it used to be.

If you repeat this cycle enough times, the perceived dangers that keep the property developers and yuppies away gradually erode. Suddenly, the tipping point arrives. Through a myriad of individual actions under no one person’s control, the exotic other suddenly appears within a safe frame: interesting, exciting and cool, but not threatening. It becomes open to a carefree voyeurism, like a tiger being transformed into a zoo animal, and then a picture, and then a tiger-print dress to wear at cocktail parties. Something feels ‘gentrified’ when this shallow aesthetic of tiger takes over from the authentic lived experience of tiger.

This is not just about property. In cosmetics shops on Oxford Street in London you can find beauty products blazoned with pagan earth-mother imagery. Why are symbols of earth-worship found within the citadels of consumerism, printed on products designed to neutralise and control bodily processes? They’ve been gentrified. Pockets of actual paganism do still exist, but in the mainstream such imagery has been thoroughly cleansed of any subversive context.

At the frontiers of gentrification are entire ways of being – lifestyles, subcultures and outlooks that carry rebellious impulses. Rap culture is a case in point: from its ghetto roots, it has crossed over to become a safe ‘thing that white people like’. Gentrification is an enabler of doublethink, a means by which people in positions of relative power can, without contradiction, embrace practices that were formed in resistance to the very things they themselves represent.

We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones.

Silicon Valley has come to host, on the one hand, a large number of highly educated tech-savvy people who loosely perceive themselves as rebels set against existing modes of doing business. On the other hand, it contains a very large pool of venture capital. The former group jostle for the investor money by explicitly attempting to build network monopolies – such as those created by Facebook and Google – for the purpose of extracting windfall profit for the founders and for the investors that back them, and perhaps, for the large corporates who will buy them out.

The revised definition of the tech startup entrepreneur as a hacker forms part of an emergent system of Silicon Valley doublethink

In this economic context, curiosity, innovation and iterative experimentation are ultimate virtues, and this element of the hacker ethic has proved to be an appealing frame for people to portray their actions within. Traits such as the drive for individual empowerment and the appreciation of clever solutions already resemble the traits of the entrepreneur. In this setting, the hacker attitude of playful troublemaking can be cast in Schumpeterian terms: success-driven innovators seeking to ‘disrupt’ old incumbents within a market in an elite ‘rebellion’.

Thus the emergent tech industry’s definition of ‘hacking’ as quirky-but-edgy innovation by optimistic entrepreneurs with a love of getting things done. Nothing sinister about it: it’s just on-the-fly problem-solving for profit. This gentrified pitch is not just a cool personal narrative. It’s also a useful business construct, helping the tech industry to distinguish itself from the aggressive squares of Wall Street, competing for the same pool of new graduates.

Indeed, the revised definition of the tech startup entrepreneur as a hacker forms part of an emergent system of Silicon Valley doublethink: individual startups portray themselves as ‘underdogs’ while simultaneously being aware of the enormous power and wealth the tech industry they’re a part of wields at a collective level. And so we see a gradual stripping away of the critical connotations of hacking. Who said a hacker can’t be in a position of power? Google cloaks itself in a quirky ‘hacker’ identity, with grown adults playing ping pong on green AstroTurf in the cafeteria, presiding over the company’s overarching agenda of network control.

This doublethink bleeds through into mainstream corporate culture, with the growing institution of the corporate ‘hackathon’. We find financial giants such as Barclays hosting startup accelerators and financial technology hackathons at forums such as the FinTech Innovation Lab in Canary Wharf in London, ostensibly to discover the ‘future of finance’… or at least the future of payment apps that they can buy out. In this context, the hacker ethic is hollowed out and subsumed into the ideology of solutionism, to use a term coined by the Belarusian-born tech critic Evgeny Morozov. It describes the tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for (profitable) solutions.

This process of gentrification becomes a war over language. If enough newcomers with media clout use the hollowed-out version of the term, its edge grows dull. You end up with a mere affectation, failing to challenge otherwise conventional aspirations. And before you know it, an earnest Stanford grad is handing me a business card that says, without irony: ‘Founder. Investor. Hacker.’

Any gentrification process inevitably presents two options. Do you abandon the form, leave it to the yuppies and head to the next wild frontier? Or do you attempt to break the cycle, deface the estate-agent signs, and picket outside the wine bar with placards reading ‘Yuppies Go Home’?

The answer to this depends on how much you care. Immigrant neighbourhoods definitely care enough to mobilise real resistance movements to gentrification, but who wants to protect the hacker ethic? For some, the spirit of hacking is stupid and pointless anyway, an individualistic self-help impulse, not an authentic political movement. What does it matter if it gets gentrified?

We need to confront an irony here. Gentrification is a pacification process that takes the wild and puts it in frames. I believe that hacking is the reverse of that, taking the ordered rules of systems and making them fluid and wild again. Where gentrification tries to erect safe fences around things, hacker impulses try to break them down, or redefine them. These are two countervailing forces within human society. The gentrification of hacking is… well, perhaps a perfect hack.

Or maybe I’ve romanticised it. Maybe hacking has never existed in some raw form to be gentrified. Perhaps it’s always been part of the capitalist commodification processes. Stuff is pulled down and then reordered. Maybe the hackers – like the disenchanted artists and hipsters – are just the vanguard charged with identifying the next profitable investment. Perhaps hacking has always been a contradictory amalgam that combines desire for the unstable and queer with the control impulse of the stable and straight. Certainly in mainstream presentations of hacking – whether the criminal version or the Silicon Valley version – there is a control fetish: the elite coder or entrepreneur sitting at a dashboard manipulating the world, doing mysterious or ‘awesome’ things out of reach of the ordinary person.

I’m going to stake a claim on the word though, and state that the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets. The hacker impulse should not just be about redesigning products, or creating ‘solutions’. A hack stripped of anti-conventional intent is not a hack at all. It’s just a piece of business innovation.

The un-gentrified spirit of hacking should be a commons accessible to all. This spirit can be seen in the marginal cracks all around us. It’s in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of ‘open’ scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around 3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of manufacture. In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit." (http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos/)

More Information

1. PBS. (2001). fFrontline: hackers: interviews: Robert D. Steele. Retrieved Sept 22, 2010 from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/hackers/interviews/steele.html.
2. Course: Anthropology of Hackers. By Gabriella Coleman.

Bibliography:

Lakhani, K.R. and Wolf, R.G. (2005). Why hackers do what they do: Understanding Motivation Effort in Free. Open Source Software Projects.

Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. Anchor Press/Doubleday Garden City, NY.

Lin, Y.W. (2007). Hacker culture and the FLOSS innovation. Handbook of research on open source software: technological, economic, and social perspectives, page 34.

Sterling, B. (2002). The hacker crackdown. Retrieved 18 July 2010 from http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

Becha

Compiled by Becha [1]:

1. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman http://codingfreedom.com
2. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/everyday-hacking/
3. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/the-multifaceted-hacker/
4. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/productive-freedom-and-the-political-economy-of-hacking/
5. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/hacking-beyond-activism-and-crime/
6. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/hackers-freedom-fighters-or-danger-to-society/
7. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/productive-freedom-and-the-political-economy-of-hacking/
8. http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/which-hackers-are-we-talking-about/
9. http://www.puscii.nl/blog/content/limits-inclusion
10. http://lifesoperatingmanual.com by Tom Shadyac http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/138190455?
11. http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/26/the-war-on-hackers/
12. Which Side are you On -- http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=68&id=16&mode=txt
13. http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16274/1/read-a-five-point-guide-for-a-better-internet
14. Speech by Eleanor Saitta at "Observe Hack Make" https://noisysquare.com/ethics-and-power-in-the-long-war-eleanor-saitta-dymaxion/
15. "The hacker is someone one can imagine as still having some shred of a utopian practice." Interview with @McKenzieWark http://owl.li/rPYGN
16. "IG & hackers" Internet_Governance_and_hackers Civic hacking / Who are the hackers, Catherine BRacy http://www.ted.com/playlists/10/who_are_the_hackers *Why good hackers make good citizens*
17. Jaromil, on TEDx: Hackers Ethic "What hackers do", video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJNUUkx-_38
18. Weev and the definitions of hacking, Quinn Norton https://medium.com/quinn-norton/d3ed1ce63615
19. From Ken Thompson (August 1984) - about trust - and what "hacking" (breaking into computers" is (or is not) #http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
20. Five ways hackers can build better cities -- Detroit -- World Economic Forum Davos: http://forumblog.org/2014/07/five-ways-hackers-build-better-city/
21. End of the World Hack http://rewiredstate.org/event/end-of-the-world-hack.php // https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=6596
22. Wisdom hackers http://www.wisdomhackers.com