Hacking the field. An ethnographic and historical study of the Dutch hacker field.

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Hacking the field An ethnographic and historical study of the Dutch hacker field.

Sociology Master’s Thesis Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2011 Elgin Blankwater 1st tutor: Albert Benschop 2nd tutor: Bart van Heerikhuizen

Hacking the field. An ethnographic and historical study of the Dutch hacker field. by Elgin Blankwater is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Acknowledgements This thesis would not have existed without the help and guidance of a number of people. Before expressing my appreciation to these people, I want to deeply thank all the hackers of Randomdata, Revspace, Pumping Station:One, and Slug who have been so kind to grant me a look into their world, being open, and sharing their thoughts with me. Given that hackers have to cope with a general negative image, I really appreciate that I was permitted to do this research, despite being an outsider.

Great thanks goes to my first advisor Albert Benschop and second advisor Bart van Heerikhuizen who both stimulated me in my writings, but also criticized and guided me where needed. Another important person was my girlfriend Katie Stephenson, who I want to thank for being very patient with me the past year and helping me with my English.

Furthermore, I like to thank Bicyclemark for introducing me to the world of hackers, Gabriella Coleman for pointing me to some important authors, Jarkko Moilanen for granting me access to his survey data, and my parents and their partners for supporting me. My last thanks goes to my sociology friends Ellen, Heleen, Jantien, Lisa and Mireille with whom I shared nice and stimulating thesis dinners.

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Contents 1. Hackers?

2. A relational approach A break with prevalent sociological research Gaining entrance and exploiting the field 3. Liberal traditions 4. The excitement of a world in progress: a short history of hacking 4.1 Birth of the modern computer (1943-1958) 4.2 The Golden Age of hacking (1958- 1968) The first computers at MIT Levy’s hacker ethic The Right Thing The hackers’ social world Struggles 4.3 The spread of the hacker ethic and the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley (1968-1982) Techno hippies: the fusion of two fields with similar ideals The first personal computers BASIC and copyright controversies Apple: from garage to billion dollar company 4.4 Third generation hackers (1982-1991) Commercialization WarGames, cracking, and repression Richard Stallman and the F/OSS movement Hackers in Europe 4.5 Hacking today (1991-2010) The impact of global networks A plurality of hacking practices Celebration of hacker culture at cons and camps Hackerspaces 4.6 Conclusion 5. Becoming a hacker. A participant observation.

5.1 Gaining entrance and exploring the hacker field

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6 10 10 16 20 25 26 27 27 31 35 37 40 42 42 45 47 49 51 52 53 59 62 64 64 67 69 71 74 76 77

First contact 77 Getting into place: Hack in the Box 85 Acquiring a feeling of the game at eth0 88 5.2 Hacker lifestyles, manifestations of the habitus 96 Particularities of hacker lifestyles 96 A hacker work ethic, sharing and rewards 105 Play and boundaries 109 5.3 Dynamics of hackerspaces 112 Settings that facilitate meeting, making and sharing 112 Organizational structures and group acceptance in hackerspaces

116 5.4 Hacker’s struggles of freedom and attempts to gain autonomy 120 Control and autonomy in technology 121 Freedom of communication, a battle for privacy 124 Open and transparent governing: mistrust of authority and the struggle of Wikileaks and Anonymous 128 6. General conclusions and reflections 137 7. Bibliography 143 Appendix 1. An Open Letter to Hobbyists 152 Appendix 2. The Hacker’s Manifesto 154

Figure 1. The highlight of my ethnographical experience: spending four days and three nights non-stop with hackers at eth0, a hacker camp

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1. Hackers?

They have been called geeks, nerds, wizards but also thieves, criminals and terrorists. Today, a common view on a hacker is a whiz kid performing illicit actions from his computer, somewhere hidden behind networks living in the virtual world. Whereas these hackers (or rather, crackers or criminals) certainly exist and form a realistic threat, this negative view reduces the plurality of hacker cultures and practices that exist today. In a ten months participant observation (or observant participation) in the Dutch hacker scene I found a diverse group of people that have important views on the world. Besides being computer and network security experts, most hackers I met have a strong opinion on privacy matters, on freedom of information, and they generally mistrust authority. In this thesis I will trace the historical foundations of the Dutch hacker field, give an account of Dutch hacker culture and show how this culture and hacker practices both challenge and reiterate greater socio-political debates.

In some literature hackers are categorized into a dichotomy with the good hacker on the one side and the malicious hacker on the other.

In my research I have found that these normative distinctions are not as clearly demarcated. Definitions on hacking are as multifaceted as the diversity of hacker groups and even within hacker communities there is no consensus on what qualifies as hacking. For some it means making existing technology perform things manufacturers did not intend, or improving its functioning. For others hacking strictly means breaking into computers and networks, where motivations and intentions for this practice can differ. Some hackers will break in solely to make people and institutions aware of their network’s security weaknesses and others will steal information for personal benefit. Moreover, individual hackers can both act within the boundaries of laws at one time, and act illegally at another.

In contrast to the stereotype that hackers are solely active on digital networks, many hackers today meet each other locally at so called hackerspaces. During the past three years hackerspaces opened up all over the world. In the United States alone two hundred were founded

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and in the Netherlands at least three spaces opened and three more are in the making at the time of writing. A hackerspace is a physical location that provides facilities most hackers appreciate: tools, networks, hardware, games and a gathering space where people can socialize. Hackers make things, tear things apart, share knowledge, learn, collaborate on projects and play at hackerspaces. More importantly, in the spaces communities have developed that have a particular hacker culture and lifestyle that is being reiterated, reshaped, and diffused to others. These conditions gave me a resourceful insight into the dynamics of the hacker communities while visiting hackerspaces in Den Haag (The Hague) and Utrecht (both in the Netherlands) and one in Chicago (United States).

I did not begin this thesis project with a specific research question in mind that I wanted to answer or with a hypothesis that I needed to prove.

Instead, one of my objectives was to provide readers an understanding of a particular culture with its specific lifestyle and beliefs. A second objective was to analyze some of the complex historical roots of this culture. The first two objectives are connected to a third objective: challenge rational approaches of sociology by providing an alternative with a relational approach. By meeting these objectives I hope to deconstruct the dualistic understanding of hackers, contribute to an absence of ethnographic research on hacker culture, and create a better understanding of hacker’s activism.

I went into the field with a heightened sense of awareness for specific aspects of (hacker) culture based on an ethnographic approach offered

by Pierre Bourdieu. This approach allowed me to describe the internal dynamics of the field, how it is rooted in international hacker history, and how it was shaped in relation to numerous other fields. A field, for Pierre Bourdieu, is a formation of power positions structured around a specific body of rules, beliefs, values, and investment by its actors (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:16). Fields are rooted in history through the various habitus of its actors. For now habitus can be described as an internal steering mechanism that we acquire throughout our lives. These

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concepts are part of a relational approach to sociology.

The relational approach places a strong emphasis on historical foundations of present-day configurations. In order to understand the Dutch hacker field as it exists today I constructed an account on its possible roots. Steven Levy’s widely-cited and accredited book Hackers (1984) is my guide through the first forty years of hacker history of this account. It sets off with a somewhat homogenous group of young techno-enthusiasts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1950s, and ends with a diversified, international culture at the first decade of this century. Levy is famous for deducting a hacker ethic based on hundreds of interviews he conducted with hackers active in the 1950s to the 1980s. This ethic acknowledges the hackers’ general love for technology, but it also contains a belief that computers can better the world, that information should be free and it expresses a preference for meritocracy (Levy, 2001: 39-46).

Within the ethic a strong and specific expression of freedom is embedded. Perceptions of freedom structured the hacker field throughout its history. It did so from the start when students wanted to have the freedom to work on MIT’s computers, it did in the 1970s when hacker culture mixed with left wing activism, and it does today in open source movements, hacktivist groups, organizations like Wikileaks, and hackers that oppose copyright laws. The ingrained ideas on freedom in the hacker field fuel hacker practices and debates with a political layer, whether done conscious or not. Inspired by Gabriella Coleman, an academic writer on hacker culture, I will relate Levy’s ethic and its future variants to some core concepts of liberalism in the following chapters. The core concepts entail freedom, equality and ideas on what an individual is. Hackers reiterate, reformulate and contest liberal ideas.

The thesis starts with a chapter on the body of theoretical concepts and methodological tools surrounding the work of primarily Bourdieu, Norbert Elias and Erving Goffman. In the next chapter I provide a short exploration of some core liberal concepts in order to get a better understanding of the hacker field’s most immanent believes. In the

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subsequent chapter I provide a historical account on hacking and hackers that places hacker manifestations in a broader sociopolitical, technological and economical context. In the succeeding chapter I connect the historical roots with the present-day Dutch hacker field, based on experiences and observations of my participant observation. What rests is a conclusion and reflection on my research, found in the last chapter.

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2. A relational approach In this thesis I will apply a relational approach for analyzing a part of the social world. That is, I explain social action and historical change as dynamic and enduring processes rooted in history, rather than being isolated substances or static ‘things’, as so often observed in present day sociology.

The relational approach leads me to the work by Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc Wacquant, Norbert Elias and Mustapha Emirbayer. I begin this chapter by giving an account of this method of sociological inquiry in which I show its premises and way of perceiving the social world. I then discuss what it means practically to use it in my thesis and what limitations and issues this methodology comes with.

A break with prevalent sociological research The objectives of a majority of present-day sociological research are to produce knowledge with a predictable value that is not bound to contexts and makes clarifications. Bent Flyvbjerg (2001) argues that these objectives are the result of the desire to apply a rational-science model to social science. (Flyvbjerg, 2001: 25-6). It seems desirable to apply a model that has pushed science and human technological progress over the past centuries, to social research. But by doing so, a couple of presumptions are being made about the social world and its inhabitants that are less desirable. Social phenomena are reduced to static objects and actors in this model are calculable and ‘rational’ with a fixed number of interests and strategies and they make their choices independently of others (Emirbayer, 1997:84). This view, deeply rooted in philosophies of the enlightenment and liberal political theories, is known in sociology as methodological individualism and forms the basis for the popular rational choice and rational actor theories (Emirbayer, 1997:84).

A relational approach advances some radical differences with rational choice theory. Instead of taking individual human action as the driving force of social phenomena, it focuses on dynamic and continuous processes. The rational, calculating notion of the agent is quite different from the relational perspective. Following Loïc Wacquant, human beings

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are first and foremost suffering beings, in the sense that we experience the world through our bodies (Wacquant, 2002:3). Perceiving knowledge as not merely something mental, but rather something we embody, leads to a whole different model of social inquiry. Norbert Elias shows, for instance in his most prominent work The Civilizing Process (1939), that people, groups and social phenomena are interdependent of each other. By applying a relational model I hope to prevent making false dichotomies such as subject and object, rational and the body, individual society that are prominent in the rational approaches.

Bowen Paulle, Bart van Heerikhuizen and Mustafa Emirbayer (forthcoming) note that Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias have a common way of perceiving social worlds and they used similar conceptual tools for analyzing them. Elias and Bourdieu combined ideas by anti-Cartesian thinkers Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and classic sociologists like Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Although they used slightly different terms for it, they both ended up using a triad of three interconnected conceptual tools: field, habitus and power. These tools allowed them to research social phenomena beneath the direct observable level and grasp the “taken-forgranted ways of perceiving, thinking and acting” (Paulle, Heerikhuizen and Emirbayer, forthcoming: 4).

A field for Bourdieu is a “structured space of positions […] whose properties depend on their position within these spaces and which can be analyzed independently of the characteristics of their occupants (which are partly predetermined by them)” (Bourdieu, 1993:72). What this means is that a field should be conceptualized as a configuration of relationships between different positions found within it. These positions and the forces binding them together form a structure, or rather a temporary state of power relations characterized by a constant struggle for domination (Emirbayer, 2008:6). Fields are always situated in larger fields, for instance the field that the University of Amsterdam creates, is situated the greater Dutch or international universities field. This greater field will predetermine some structures and rules, but it can be considered semi-autonomous as creates its own sphere, with its own logic and culture (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:109-10). Every field possesses specific stakes and interests that are

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irreducible to those from other fields. For instance, within the hacker field a thorough knowledge of Linux1 is a desirable stake, while this is not the case in the literary field. An essential aspect for a field to function is the presence of people willing to ‘play the game’.

In my analysis of the Dutch hacker scene I highlight the dynamics of the field first by revealing some of the historical roots of the field, and under which specific socio-political circumstances the field developed.

We can only understand the immediate, lived experiences today if understand what structures it, or as Bourdieu and Wacquant put it: “[…] epistemological priority is granted to objectivist rupture over subjectivist understanding” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992:11). Acknowledging history as a collective history of agents who incorporate and also tend to reproduce structures of preference, is another critique on rational models of social inquiry, because it surpasses the idea of a ‘rational’ actors that make independent decisions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992:123).2 Therefore, I will give an interpretation of how different actors in the hacker field negotiate and reiterate these embodied structures, followed by an analysis of how the structure became apparent in the field.

Bourdieu often compares the dynamics in a field with a game, although a field is not the product of a deliberate act of creation and its fundamental principles and rules (or rather regularities) are often implicit, what Bourdieu calls nomos. In every field there are stakes, interests that are valuable to the players, which are the product of competition between players. The players invest in the game (the illusio) only insofar as they believe in the game (doxa) and its stakes. The reward of the game lies in certain recognition, expressed in power, or field specific capital

1 Linux refers to a family of UNIX-based open-source operating systems for computer hardware.

2 The importance of an historical awareness is advocated by several social theorists who all utilize their own methods and concepts, like Norbert Elias (sociogenesis), Michel Foucault (genealogy) and Fernand Braudel (longue durée). Also, like Bourdieu and Wacquant state: “[…] the separation of sociology and history is a disastrous division […], all sociology should be historical and all history sociological” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992: 90).

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(economical, cultural, social or symbolical). The recognition is part of a hierarchy of different species of capital that determine power and status in a specific field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:98).

In order to play the game, an actor in a specific field has to be endowed with a habitus that fits with the field, so that one has a feeling for the game. This means that people have to recognize (consciously or unconsciously) the immanent rules of the field, the stakes and its rewards.

According to Bourdieu, we internalize long-lasting exposure to particular social conditions (or structures in fields) into unconscious schemata. This is what he calls habitus, a “[…] system of durable and transposable dispositions through which we perceive, judge, and act in the world” (Wacquant, 2006:276). Elias used the concept long before Bourdieu used it, but applied several names to it, like ‘internal steering mechanism’ or ‘second nature’ (Paulle, Heerikhuizen and Emirbayer, forthcoming: 5).

People’s perceptions, practices, reasoning, even emotions and feelings are guided by schemata that make up the habitus, and because they are so close to us, we often perceive it as something natural. Guiding people’s practices in the social world makes habitus also a structuring mechanism and therefore inseparable from the field concept. Thus structures do not exist somewhere ‘out there’, but, to paraphrase Maurice MerleauPonty: “the body is in the world but the world is in the body” (quoted in Wacquant, 2002:3). It is through the habitus embedded in bodies that culture gets passed on and integrated in the present (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:18). As a habitus finds itself in a constant dynamic process of structuring and being structured, it is sometimes seen as a bridge between dichotomies like constructivism and subjectivism and structure and agency. It obliterates the positivistic treatment of society and actors as autonomous entities.

A key aspect to field dynamics is power. Bourdieu deployed a multi-faceted view on view on power, expressed in four types of capital which are either materialized or embodied. The easiest type of capital to understand is what Bourdieu calls economical capital. This is any materialized and transferable good, expressed in accumulated labor, like money or a house (Bourdieu, 1997:46). The other types of capital are

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mostly bound to specific fields and therefore difficult to transfer to other fields. The most profound form is cultural capital in its embodied form.

This can be, for example, thorough knowledge of classic philosophy, which could give someone high credit in an academic field, but would be fairly useless for becoming an accredited tennis player. Cultural capital in an embodied form is mostly hard to obtain and transfer. It can manifest itself in subtle, sometimes unnoticeable ways, like hair styles, dresscodes, but also field-specific gestures, body poses, language, et cetera.

Social capital refers to available connections actors hold with other people, that they can use as resources (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:119). To give an example, when you need advice on legal matters, it might help you to have a lawyer in your social network. This approach to power emphasizes the transactional character it, rather than regarding it as a substance. Elias’ theoretical framework is also built on this principle: “the concept of power [is] transformed from a concept of substance to a concept of relationship. At the core of changing figurations – indeed, the very hub of the figuration process – is a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving to and fro . . . This kind of fluctuating balance of power is a structural characteristic of the flow of every figuration” (Elias, quoted in Emirbayer, 1997:292).

A final and somewhat more abstract version of capital is symbolical capital. Capital, in any of the forms described above, has a certain symbolical value attached to it. Hierarchies are embedded in it, and they can be used for what Bourdieu called symbolic violence. A beautiful, however fictional example is found in Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan (1979), when Isaac (Woody Allen) is asked by Mary (Diane Keaton) to give an opinion on a photography exhibition:3 Isaac: Incredible, absolutely incredible. Did you?

Mary: No, I felt it was very derivative. To me it was straight out of Diane Arbus, but it had none of the whit.

Isaac: Really, oh you know, we didn’t like it as much as the Plexiglas sculpture, that I would admit.

Mary: Really, you liked the Plexiglas huh?

Isaac: You didn’t like the Plexiglas either?

Mary: Ha, that’s interesting… [mumbles, makes disapproving sound]

3 The best way is to see it yourself: tinyurl.com/scriptie-allen

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Isaac: It was a hell of a lot better than that steel cube. Did you see the steel cube? Haha [laughing].

Mary: Now that was brilliant to me, absolutely brilliant.

Isaac: The steel cube was brilliant?

Mary: Yes, to me it was very textural, you know what I mean? It was perfectly integrated and it had a marvelous kind of negative capability.

The rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit.

What this scene exemplifies that Mary is able to determine what the legitimate art is, based on her cultural capital in the form of a qualification scheme that is highly symbolically charged. She speaks the ‘right’ language, the collectively acknowledged terminology that is valid in the art field. Isaac clearly does not possess this capital and has to acknowledge her ‘superiority’. It is an example of a mild form of symbolic violence, because the social order that is created is completely arbitrary, but yet it is presented as justified. It gives a short introduction of the dynamics of taste, the distaste of others, of distinction and status, struggle in a field, competition and position takings. Another, more thorough, examination of dynamics in a field can be found in my analysis of the hacker field.

Bourdieu’s theoretical and methodological framework has been subject of criticism by several other sociologists. One of the main points of critique is the lack of conceptual clarity, especially when it comes to sources of power (Sullivan, 2002:146; Jenkins, 2002:123; BeasleyMurray, 2000:101-2). Albert Benschop justifiably argues that Bourdieu’s differentiation into three types of capital is quite a reduction of different power sources that could play a role in power structures (Benschop, 2011). Bader and Benschop propose to use a wider differentiation of direct and indirect sources instead of using an all-encompassing concept like capital that could prevent making critical analyses. They further specify direct sources into material resources (such as natural resources, but also means of production), individual capacities (acquired qualifications and competences) and forms of cooperation (Bader&Benschop, 1988:132-6).

To prevent falling into a reductionist pitfall, I will specify different power sources when I address types of capital throughout this thesis.

As should become clear by now, using a relational perspective for social

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research has some serious epistemological and ontological implications when compared to a rational perspective. Consequently, it also has some consequences for the way empirical inquiry is done. I see ethnography as an embedded and embodied social enquiry and therefore I agree with Wacquant when he argues that a physical co-presence is needed to understand a field (Wacquant, 2002:2). What is the actual value of conversation analysis, interviews or surveys if you are unable to really understand the context in which things are said and done, how power is distributed and how people are interdependent of each other? Erving Goffman also acknowledged the need to study the relations between people: “[…] the proper study of face-to-face interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another” (Goffman, in Emirbayer, 1997:295). He placed even more emphasis on settings, rather than agency by stating: “Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men” (Goffman, in Emirbayer, 1997:296).

Gaining entrance and exploiting the field After investigating some of the historical roots of the field, I participated in the Dutch hacker field for about ten months. Despite becoming fairly accepted in the field, the limited time available for writing this thesis and the lack of deep technological knowledge did not permit me to actually become a hacker (although some hackers did not agree on this statement) and fully acquire a ‘hacker habitus’. In that sense this is a limited embodied ethnographical study and certainly not endowed with the level of enquiry like Wacquant gained when he spent three years boxing in Chicago South Side (Wacquant, 2003). However, I think I acquired a feeling for the game with my semi-technical background and at least some level of embeddedness in the field. Therefore, I hope my analysis on the nomos and the field specific capital will be accurate and that I will make some structures visible that are obvious to most actors in the hacker field.

During the initial months of entering the field I kept some practical notes by Goffman in my mind. Although I do not agree with parts of Goffman’s theory or methodology, I admire him for his sharp eye for

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details and his ability to grasp the dynamics of what is going on in a certain situation. Yet, he never wrote down the details of how he was able to get into the field, and he only passed this knowledge on to his students in class. Luckily one of these students captured a meeting on tape and Lyn Lofland later transcribed and published it, seven years after Goffman passed away (Goffman, 1989:123-4). In this transcription it becomes clear what Goffman meant when he was speaking of participant observation: “[…] getting data […] by subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation […].

I feel that the way this is done […] is not just to listen to what they talk about, but to pick up on their minor grunts and groans as they respond to the situation” (Goffman, 1989:125).”

Goffman argues that in order to gain this level of inquiry, you are required to subject yourself to the circumstances of the lives of your subjects, which can mean that you will have to accept the desirable things, but also the undesirable ones (Goffman, 1989:125). He further explains how one gains access to a place and how one should be able to grasp the relevant, unspoken details of the group. First, to get into a place, you have to “open yourself up in ways you’re not in ordinary life” (Goffman, 1989:128), which can also mean that you have to accept situations and practices you would normally contest. You have to be, as Goffman stated, “willing to be a horse’s ass”, by which he means that you probably enter a field with an outsider status and you will have to earn your respect without too much protest (Goffman, 1989:128). Second, he proposes a strategy that respects the general costume in the field, while not completely mimicking it. Third, Goffman notes that you should not discuss your findings with possible friends you make (Goffman, 1989:129).

When you feel like you could “settle down” and “forget about being a sociologist,” when you are able to “engage in the same body rhythms, rate of movement, tapping of the feet, that sort of thing, as the people around you,” should be an indication of being ready to really penetrate the field you are in (Goffman, 1989:129).

The next phase is to really exploit the field, in the sense that you

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use your position to give a complete and thorough account, with multiple viewpoints. This requires getting really close to a set of individuals.

Goffman argues that you should start as low on the hierarchical ladder as possible. Once you move up yourself, it is more difficult understand the position of this group, because they might be suspicious (Goffman, 1989:129-30). The first day is very important for taking notes, because, according to Goffman, you will notice things that will not be as apparent later. Goffman also gives some tips on note taking, for instance that you should not write notes while you are in a situation, but to do it later (Goffman, 1989:130). He also warns for making too many notes, as they it will become too much to sort out. Write as lushly as you can, do not be defensive. Furthermore, “Do not just write about yourself, but put yourself into the situation that you write about” (Goffman, 1989:131).

The method of empirical enquiry derived from Goffman’s teaching mostly focuses on a local level (despite having meso or macro connections), and some readers may have doubt about this, because hackers tend to spend much time online. Many scholars focusing on the ‘digital age’ or ‘network society’ have made broad claims on the significance of the internet. They emphasize the global impact, the political significance or changing lifestyle patterns. Despite the wide use of networked technologies by hackers I will, however, not make any claims on global scale. Because, as Coleman argues: “To provincialize digital media is not to deny their scale and global reach […] rather, it allows us to consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience” (Coleman, 2010b:489).

In chapter five I show that it is above all the local and physical location of hackerspaces and hacker camps where hackers give meaning to their culture and lifestyle, and that this is certainly not confined to a digital experience.

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3. Liberal traditions Throughout this thesis I will explore how hacker’s moral expressions and hacker practices are connected with principles found in liberal traditions.

Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub (2008) describe three different, though overlapping, hacker cultures and how their moral genres are embedded in several liberal traditions. They argue that hackers constantly renegotiate and reformulate aspects of these traditions and certainly do not use it as a coherent body of concepts. To show how liberal concepts are embedded into hacker ethics and practices I will use an account on liberalism by Stuart Hall (1986). He traces liberalism in England back to the Enlightenment, when some prevalent views on core concepts used in liberalism (the individual, freedom and equality) were developed. He shows how socio-political circumstances have influenced perceptions and discourses surrounding these core concepts, and how it still structures our perceptions on the social world today.

Hall makes clear that there is a difference between liberalism and the term ‘liberal’. Liberal refers to a state of mind and existed long before the political creed of liberalism emerged. Liberals are supposed to be “open-minded, tolerant, rational, freedom-loving people, skeptical of the claims of tradition and established authority, but strongly committed to the values of liberty, competition and individual freedom” (Hall, 1986: 34). These characteristics have been adopted in several political ideologies throughout the past three centuries. Hall also argues that these ideologies and their embedded ideas have become part of everyday life ‘common sense’ reasoning, while it “does not appear to be an ideology at all” (Hall, 1986: 35).

This claim stays close to Bourdieu’s nomos concept: ideas and concepts in a field that seem so obvious to most actors that they almost feel ‘natural’. These ideas and concepts structure our world, for example, how we perceive individuals and society, what private property is and it predetermines how we experience space. By tracing the history of these ideas and concepts and analyzing it in current ideologies, and how its modes of thought are embedded in a field like that of hackers, we get

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a better understanding of how it is constructed. Like every ideology, liberal ideologies are diverse, internally inconsistent and subject to constant struggle, debate and adaptations (Hall, 1986:36). Hall argues, however, that these discussions have always evolved around a ‘matrix of core concepts’ (Hall, 1986:38). The concept of the matrix signifies that the concepts are interdependent of one another they should be studied in relation to each other.

Liberalism is often associated with the breakdown of traditional social hierarchies and associated with the birth and development of the modern capitalist world (Hall, 1986; 38-9). Its logic opposed the arbitrary social hierarchies of the feudal system in Europe and instead favored an ‘open’ meritocratic society (Hall, 1986:39). Hall argues that during the seventeenth century, a new way of conceptualizing the individual changed the way the social world was perceived (Hall, 1986:39). This leads me to note the first core concept of liberty: the individual. In classical liberalism, the individual was the secular version of the individual constructed during the Reformation, one that was abstract, sovereign, “stripped of status, position, relationship or place” (Hall, 1986:39). The idea of self became one that was separate, isolable and self-sufficient (Hall, 1986:41). It created a strict ‘logical’ separation between the individual and society, and produced an externalist model of the individual where an individual’s interests prevail over that of society. Seventeenth century liberalists, like John Locke, claimed that every individual has certain characteristics given from birth that drive it to “search for security, power and self-interest” (Hall, 1986: 39-40).

Freedom is a second core concept of liberalism. To prevent people from going into individual pursuits that harms other individuals’ freedom, classical liberalists acknowledged that some form of authority was necessary. Since this would imply restrictions on the freedom of the individual, this authority had to be justified, with consent of the governed (Gaus & Cortland, 2010). To bridge this, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (independently) developed the idea of social contract, which is an agreement with the state in which individuals trade some of their freedom in exchange for protection from a governing power.

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The role of a state, in this view, is to create the circumstances in which individuals can pursue their private interests and provide the individual as much freedom as possible and interfere only where absolutely necessary (Hall, 1986:40). To certify that authority was justified, libertarians placed an emphasis on law, as it offered formal and systematic criteria to ensure liberty and equality. Liberalism replaced the arbitrary power structures of feudalism, and was supposed to maintain fairness between competitors in the market: “The law protected the individual’s rights, liberties and property” (Hall, 1986:42). Liberty in this sense means “freedom of the individual from constraint” (Hall, 1986:41), in which an individual can pursue its ‘natural’ drives and instincts, without coercion of others. This view is what Isaiah Berlin refers to as negative freedom.

A third core concept of liberalism I want to discuss is equality.

Equality in classical liberalism means that “all individuals are equal because they are born with same rights” (Hall, 1986:41), echoed for instance in the United States Declaration of Independence. It means that people should be treated on equal conditions before law. Yet, the social conditions under which people are born, or power formations that structure laws are not taken into consideration. This is evident in for instance in the racial and sexual inequalities that were still apparent in laws of many western countries until far in the 20th century. Hall also observes that “Liberty and equality are always articulated together in liberal discourse but in ways which systematically privilege liberty over equality” (Hall. 1986:41, his emphasize). Redistribution of resources is therefore rejected and a free market is desired (Gosepath, 2009).

Central to the framework of ideas that liberalism presents is the approach to property. In classical liberalism an individual had the right to: “[….] own and dispose of his property, to buy and sell, to hire labour and make profit” (Hall, 1986:43). This is a materialist and utilitarian notion of property, stripped of moral grounds and ‘rationalized’, “grounded in the calculus of pursued self-interest” (Hall, 1986:43). An economic system that is based on private property is consistent with individual liberty, and it is at times even argued that they are actually the same thing (Gaus & Courtland, 2010). Fueled by technological advances and division of

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labor in the seventeenth century, liberalism was articulated on the idea of an infinitely expanding, developing economy, propelled by productive labor, individual risk-taking and rewards (Hall, 1986:43). The idea of free market was a perfect instrument of such a system, where each individual can be ‘set free’, as long as individuals were willing to make the choice to work for it. “A market order based on private property is thus seen as an embodiment of freedom” (Gaus & Courtland, 2010). In this model, which could be described as economic individualism, the liberal man was a rational, calculating, accumulating man (Hall, 1986:53). Adam Smith later made the liberal economic ideology into ‘scientific politics’ in his famous book The Wealth of Nations (1776), which justified the new structure of power and interests (idem). It even legitimized private vice as it would benefit the public.

Liberalism goes hand-in-hand with rational, modernist modes of thought, and it is no coincidence that it emerged when the modern Western world was coming into existence. The emergence of science, ideas on modernization and progress, and ‘mastering of nature’ coincides with an ideology based on property rights, equality and individuality (Hall, 1986:45). Dichotomies like mind and body, individual and society, reason and emotion, and subject and object become strongly present in academic work since that time (Paulle, Heerikhuizen & Emirbayer, forthcoming; Hall, 1986:45). “Nature was no longer an order for men and women to contemplate but an external reality with which they must experiment, investigate, use the tools of science to explain, labour to transform and above all master […]” (Hall, 1986:46). This new way of looking at the world changed interpretations on society, how a state should operate, what an individual is and what the role of the religion should be in society. It also forms the basis for a tradition in social sciences that claims to be rational, scientific, objective and calculable. It is exactly this tradition that I will try to contend by using the relational model described above.

During the 19th century, partly due to the work of John Stuart Mill, liberalism -as a political creed- became less uniform and some of its ideas found their way into conservatism and liberal-socialism in the 20th century (Hall, 1986:65). In the 1980s, based on the work of Friedrich

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Hayek and Milton Friedman, liberalism’s body of thought found its way into another political-economical ideology, that of neoliberalism.

Both classical liberal and neoliberal models of thought have been widely criticized. One important point of criticism is the contradiction of the claim of freedom that is made in liberal ideologies, as is argued by Isaiah Berlin. He argues that freedom often is a freedom to “the achievement of goals that individuals ‘ought to’, ‘rationally’ desire” (Berlin, 2002:39). The point that Berlin makes is that liberalism often promotes to be ‘open’ and ‘free’, but in reality this means freedom according to the rules, norms and values made by people, groups or institutions in society that have the power positions to determine these rules. Paradoxically then, claims of freedom could actually become claims of control and discipline (Berlin, 2002:275).

Despite the relative shortness of this account on liberal traditions, it should make clear that there are some core concepts on which liberal ideologies have reverted during the past centuries. We must keep in mind that, as Hall also argues, the formation and claims in liberal ideologies, or other ideologies for that matter, are the result of internal contestations, struggles and agreements. There is no coherency and it is not stable over time. We will see how hackers embed elements of various liberal ideologies into their own frameworks and that within their field this is also the result of struggles and power formations.

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4. The excitement of a world in progress: a short history of hacking It is sometimes hard to imagine the world the first hackers grew up in when you live in a time where people are able to access information anywhere, anytime on their computers and mobile phones,. In the 1950s there were no digital calculators, long-distance communication went by phone and mail and paper encyclopedias were an important source of information. When reading the history of hacking one should keep this in mind to understand the enthusiasm these first hackers experienced when making seemingly minor improvements. It will become clear that in the past sixty years hackers have been influential in technological changes, but also that technology shaped the hacker field. I will perceive technology as social products, like Thomas Douglas argues in his book Hacker Culture (2002), rather than phenomena that can be researched and discussed outside of its societal context. Technology tells us something about human relationships and how those relationships are mediated (Thomas, 2002:9).

For my account on the history of hackers I will draw heavily on the book Hackers (first published in 1984) by Steven Levy. Besides being a writer of technology related novels, Levy is a senior writer for Wired and previously journalist for New York Times, Newsweek and The New Yorker.

Although Hackers is not an academic work, his view on the world of the first generations of hackers is widely accredited. The basis of his book is formed by over a hundred interviews he conducted with hackers in the period of 1982-1983. It should be noted that he has an overall positive attitude towards hackers that might at times be too single-focused. Paul Ceruzzi argues that Levy gives hackers credit for innovations that actually have been done by the American computer industry (Ceruzzi, 1998:5).

I argue that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and will therefore put Levy’s history of hackers in relation to realms permeating the hacker field, like the computer industry, but also military and state institutions and socio-political situations.

My account of the history of hacking spans between the Second

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World War and today. I divide it into five parts, but these divisions are for analytical purposes only and certainly no signifiers of historical breaks.

I want to show that hacking culture evolved as a process with a relative continuity instead. Some of the principle aspects of hacker culture today were formed in the earliest days of hacking when hacking could still be considered a more or less homogeneous culture. I will discuss this era somewhat more thoroughly, with more quotes and stories. Later hacker culture seems to diversify into a plurality of genres, but some characteristics have survived the years.

4.1 Birth of the modern computer (1943-1958) My account of the history of hacking does not begin with hackers an sich, but with the birth of the modern computer, which is a precondition for the emergence of computer hackers. It was during World War II that Allied forces felt the need to decrypt coded messages the Germans sent with Enigma and Lorenz coding machines (Flamm, 1988:37-9). As it took humans a long time to decrypt the messages, they knew machines were needed for breaking it faster and more effectively. For this reason the Colossus was developed in England in 1943, which is often considered as one of the first modern computers (Douglas, 2002:12; Flamm, 1988:39).

Thus the computer was born out of the need to either break or conserve secrecy, funded almost completely by a military organization.

Similar projects were running simultaneously and independently in the United States. The US Army completed the ENIAC computer in 1946, which was designed to compute firing ballistics, but was first used to make calculations on creating the hydrogen bomb (Douglas, 2002: 13, Ceruzzi, 1988:15). The existence of these computers were state secrets at that time, but in the meantime computer systems were developed at American universities and the corporation International Business Machines (IBM). In 1952 IBM produced the 701, their first commercial computer that could be rented for 15.000 dollar a month (Ceruzzi, 2003:345).

By the end of the 1950s the first computers were entering large corporations and universities and people started experimenting and

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philosophizing about the use of technology in our society. Vannevar Bush for example, had already expressed his concerns about using technology for destruction, and he argued that he would rather see technology used for positive things. In his famous article As We May Think (1945) he desired a collective memory machine, which later inspired Douglas Engelbart to create hyper-text (Ceruzzi, 2003:260, 301). The first decades of the modern computer are thus exemplified by an unexplored technological world and it was not yet clear whether it would lead to utopia or dystopia.

This ambiguousness is also expressed in many science fiction novels and movies from that period.

4.2 The Golden Age of hacking (1958- 1968) The history of computer hackers begins at the end of the 1950s at the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Beside people pursuing their hobby in making train model tracks, TMRC also attracted people interested in electronics. Because beneath the tracks, trains were controlled by switchboards, relays and a massive matrix of wires (Levy, 2001: 21).

The technical part was referred to as The System, which was subject to constant improvements and perfections by the technical minded group.

They referred to playing around with The System as ‘hacks’, a word that had previously been used by MIT-students to describe college pranks.

Hacks were “not solely to fulfill some constructive goal”, but just the involvement with technology gave them fulfillment (Levy, 2001:23). To qualify as a hack, the TMRC members decided it had to “be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity”. The most engaged people working on The System named themselves hackers (Levy, 2001:23).

The first computers at MIT MIT was in possession of one of the first commercial computers, the IBM 04 mainframe computer.4 The technological minded TMRC members had 4 Mainframe computers are powerful computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and

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great interest in this multi-million dollar machine which took up a huge room and handled data through punch cards. But access to the computer was difficult, because it needed several professional operators and MIT did not allow students to use it. To symbolize the untouchable character of the computer, the students compared the operators with priests, standing between the ‘normal people’ and the ‘holy machine’ (Levy, 2001:19).

Operations took a long time to process on the IBM 704 and if something went wrong, the system crashed without providing information on what the error was in the entered code. It took a long time and a lot of “bowing and scraping to the priests” until the TMRC students were allowed to touch some buttons (Levy, 2001:25). Manuals and information on the machine were not openly available and kept away from the students.

(Levy, 2001:26). Although they were not allowed to touch or tamper with the machine, this was exactly what the hackers were eager to do. They wanted to improve and optimize the way it worked, just like they did with The System at TMRC (Levy, 2001:27).

The arrival of the first transistor-run computer5 at MIT meant a major change for the students. It was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an agency part of the American Department of Defense that was founded in 1958 for making new developments in technology for military purposes. The foundation of this agency and the funding of the TX-0 computer can be linked directly to the Cold War with the Soviet Union (Ceruzzi, 2003:7-8). The TX-0 computer, along with its cooling mechanism still took up an entire room, but was a lot more sophisticated than the IBM computers as it did not use cards for data input. Instead it used a Flexowriter, a kind of typewriter that punched symbols on to a long tape which were read by the computer. (Levy, 2001:28) People working on the computer could now stay at the machine as they ran their program and immediately alter it and rerun it. This made the TX-0 much more ‘interactive’ than the IBM 704 and this inspired a

financial transaction processing (Ceruzzi, 2003:63) 5 Transistors replaced vacuum (radio) tubes for making calculations. Transistors were smaller, cheaper, used less energy and produced a lot less heat and the invention is a essential one in the history of computing (Ceruzzi, 2003:65).

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new form of computer programming. The hackers were the pioneers of the TX-0 (Levy, 2001: 30). Hacker Peter Samson compared the TX-0 with playing a musical instrument on which “you could improvise, compose, and, like the beatniks in Harvard Square a mile away, wail like a banshee with total creative freedom” (Levy, 2001:32). What does freedom mean for the first generation hackers?

Freedom meant access in the first place. The TMRC hackers were lucky that this machine was not yet surrounded by the bureaucracy and strict MIT rules like the IBM 704, because MIT did not fully recognize its value (Levy, 2001:29). The absence of a strict hierarchy allowed them to actually get their hands on and explore the possibilities of this machine.

And so the TX-0 became the center of their attention and soon they referred to themselves as TX-0 hackers. MIT decided the computer should be running 24 hours a day, since the machine was too expensive to be used just a part of the day. The hackers matched their lifestyle according to this schedule. They would claim every block of time they could, night or day, to be able to lay their hands on this machine. They even made nightly visits to the computer hoping someone did not show up for their session so they could jump in (Levy, 2001:29). Since the hackers were privileged by not being pressured to attend classes, or having to work, they were able to spend all their time to the TX-0. This personal freedom enabled them to explore, play, tinker and write freely and learn from it.

A second aspect of their concept of freedom could be the control and power hackers experienced while programming the TX-0. When one of the hackers hacked nights away to write a program that made it possible to convert Arabic numbers into Roman numerals, one could ask: Who would ever use this? The answer to that question was irrelevant for these hackers as there was “ample justification in the feeling of power and accomplishment” (Levy, 2001: 33) when making a program. That a ‘neat hack’ was a justification in itself is an important underlying motive explaining why hackers hack. (Levy, 2001: 33). The presence of the TX-0 and its specific architecture provided the hackers a lot of opportunities, freedom to write all sorts of software with only their imagination as restriction.

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Unrestricted knowledge sharing could be seen as a third aspect of the concept of freedom for the TX-0 hackers. Since only several other universities owned computers and a limited number of people possess knowledge on the machines it was important to share as much of the scarce information there was available. Every new discovery was of great value to people working with them. The absence of copyrighted software and information gave them the freedom to learn from each other and build upon discoveries made by others. During the following decades of hacker history sharing plays an important role in shaping the field.

A good example of the importance of knowledge sharing in this early stage of computer programming is shown by the development and sharing of ‘tools to make tools’. An important tool one of the hackers made was the creation an assembly language6, which made writing of future programs a lot easier for others (Levy, 2001:32). A second tool that was an important improvement in computer programming was a debugging program called FLIT, which enabled the hackers to find bugs7 in programs while the program was still running (Levy, 2001: 33). Through making these two inventions available to other hackers they were able to write more freely and introduce a more daring style of programming and hence improve the work of others and develop new programs (idem).

Most of the TX-0 hackers lived at night when the computer was most available. They attended fewer classes and focused mainly on hacking. When the computer would not be available, they stared at their programs on the Flexowriter tapes, looking for bugs and innovations.

They would discuss their work with each other while eating junk food.

Their lives were centered around the machine. Their thoughts would constantly be on their programs and when not feeding tapes into the machine, they would be debugging their programs on paper and re-

6 Assembly language is a small piece of software that makes it possible to write in a certain programming language to give instructions to computers (like IF, THEN, ELSE). The software then converts the instructions to strings of binary code (10100100), which are needed for the computer to interpret the instructions.

Further reading 7 Bugs are (minor) flaws in computer code that causes programs to be unstable or non-functional.

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enter it later into the machine. It was almost as if all that information was attached to your being, as Levy expressed it “[...] your own mind had merged into the environment of the computer” (Levy, 2001:37).

Levy’s hacker ethic “Something new was coalescing around the TX-0: a new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic, and a dream” (Levy, 2001:39).

A micro society consisting of eager pioneers was slowly shaping a field with its own rules, values, capital and rewards, or as Levy expressed it: a “body of concepts, beliefs and mores” (Levy, 2001: 39). Levy argues that this was not debated upon but silently accepted and the hackers just lived by it. From the interviews Levy conducted with the hackers he interpreted some of those silently accepted values and rules and molded them into his famous hacker ethic. This ethic is mentioned in nearly every article or book on hackers, where it is either being reiterated or accentuated. In a recent celebration of Levy’s book twenty-fifth birthday in Wired magazine article Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists, Levy notes that he had a lot of positive reactions of people reading his book and that reading about the hacker ethic inspired them (Levy, 2010).

The hacker ethic formulated by Levy consists of the following six elements: 1.

Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!

2.

All information should be free.

3.

Mistrust Authority – Promote Decentralization.

4.

Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position.

5.

You can create art and beauty on a computer.

6.

Computers can change your life for the better.

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Where the first four points can be considered as normative ethical statements, the last two points rather seem to be statements of appreciation and do not address morality, but Levy considered them to be ethical.

Levy’s hacker ethic should rather be seen, then, as a set of beliefs and values. However, in most literature it is addressed as the hacker ethic, so I will continue using this term. Its origination should be understood in the relation to the hackers’ disliking of the local authoritative attitude of MIT. Despite this local formation of this ethic, it will become apparent in the rest of this thesis that it structured later generation hackers’ thoughts and practices and still lives on in hacker communities today. Especially the second point, all information should be free, turned out to be a controversial point that had an impact exceeding far beyond the borders of the hacker field. In what follows I will place the six points in the context in which they were created, though showing how some elements in this ethic are related to classic liberal ideology.

The first point Levy distilled -access to computers should be unlimited and total- is obviously related to the fact that the TMRC hackers were extremely eager to get their hands on the IBM 704, but simply were not allowed to. They could not take it apart to learn from it, or tinker with it and improve its functions, or to create new things (Levy, 2001:40). This seems quite an idealistic and naive principle in a time when computers were rare and cost a fortune. The hackers took in quite an elite position as they were among the very few people who were close to computers.

The second point - all information should be free - refers arguably to the computer manuals the hackers were not allowed to see. A free exchange of information (which for these hackers also includes computer programs) increases the speed of developments, since one can build upon already existent information without having to reinvent it. An example is the debugging software a hacker wrote for the TX-0. By sharing it freely to fellow hackers they were able to write programs more easily (Levy, 2001:41). The accumulation of information created collectively made it possible for them to write things quickly and more effectively. But not everyone, both inside and as outside the hacker group, agrees with this view. We will see a lot of controversy on this point later in this paper.

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Mistrust authority - promote decentralization, the third element found in the hacker ethic derives from the frustration the hackers experienced with the authoritative attitude by MIT employees. In their eyes the bureaucratic structure prevented access to computers and their beloved free flow of information (point one and two of the hacker ethic).

The hackers believed in a decentralized structure, or rather a less formal hierarchical structure for stimulation of knowledge sharing.

The first generation hackers did not care much about dominant physical appearances or socially constructed criteria. The fourth point in the hacker ethic - hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position- is exactly about this. A good example is the acceptance of a 12 year old boy who showed great interest in computers, but was disregarded by MIT officials. The hackers accepted him, because he was talented and that was the most important thing.

His age did not obstruct him from being making contributions to the collective knowledge of the hackers after he was given the trust by the hackers (Levy, 2003: 33,43,61). Levy notes that this element of the ethic certainly did not come into existence due to the “inherent goodness of the hacker’s hearts” (Levy, 2001: 43). “This conception of the individual, stripped of status, position, relationship or place” (Hall, 1986:39) points to the meritocratic characteristic of the hacker field. This topic will be more thoroughly discussed in the analyzing the hackers’ social world.

You can create art and beauty on a computer. This fifth point Levy distinguishes in the hacker ethic seems quite obvious today. But in the 1960s this refers to what the hackers perceived as beauty. As the first computers had limited memory to work with, the hackers tried to write software as efficient and clean as possible. They became obsessed with it as they would have contests in writing programs in the shortest and most elegant way. Writing a compact, efficient and thus beautiful program gave hackers credit and status. Writing an ugly program, attacking a problem with so called ‘brute force’ was not admired (Levy, 2001:43).

The last point in the hacker ethic that Levy distinguishes is that computers can change your life for the better. This is probably true for the first generation hackers, for computers certainly changed their lives.

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Before they got into this new world of computers, most hackers had trouble finding their way into mainstream society (Levy, 2001:46). Some of them had problems at school, because teachers did not understand them, or the classes were too easy for them. Most hackers were not really good at sports and did not share the interests of their peers. The hacker community provided them a way to create their own little society, with their own rules which in turn gave them the sense of freedom. They found something they were really good at: hacking. This unexplored world of computers gave them a purpose, a shared goal, and maybe even love as Levy suggests (Levy, 2001:134-5). There is no doubt computers did change their life for the better.

Especially the first four aspects of Levy’s hacker ethic can be related to classic libertarian concepts and debates. ‘Access should be unlimited and total’ is an expression of individual freedom libertarians have pleaded for since the 17th century, expressed in equality: “Everyone must have an equal chance to enter the competitive struggle – there must be no barriers to entry” (Hall, 1986:41). But the statement ‘All information should be free’ is an interesting argument when placed in the context of liberty, especially when information is understood as accumulated capital. It seems to contest generally strong plea of libertarians for individual property, and instead acknowledges the value of information for a collective and not the individual. ‘Mistrust authority – promote decentralization’ is another part of the hacker ethic that is also found liberalism, but even more so in anarchism. Liberalism does not necessarily oppose authority, but it does oppose authority that takes away individual freedom (Hall, 1986:39-40).

Within the small secluded field that the hackers created, they formed a specific norm set and value system, or hacker ethic as Levy called it, which was becoming their nomos. It was the based on their desire to tinker and creating technical beauty, but also on the opposition with the bigger field surrounding them, the large bureaucratic institute MIT. The nomos shaped their lives, practices and their work. Due to their strong believe in the cause, the illusio, and their investment, the doxa, encouraged them to keep playing with computers, always improving it

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and contributing to a great source of knowledge. Their ethic would not be constrained to this little field they created; it would spread to other parts of the world and permeate other fields. The values would be of major influence on later generation hackers.

The Right Thing First generation hackers were largely dependent on available technology for conducting their work. The arrival of the legendary PDP-1 computer in 1961 at MIT meant a major change for the hackers (Levy, 2001:52). The infrastructure of the machine was inviting for the hackers to play with. In one weekend a group of six hackers showed the power of the hacker ethic by converting the assembling program from the TX-0 to the PDP-1 (Levy, 2001:55). Soon all sorts of programs would be written on the PDP-1, like a music emulator that used the audio output of the computer (Levy, 2001:56). But the most elaborative hack until then would be made by a hacker with then nickname Slug. He developed Spacewar, one of the first computer games which kept the hackers busy for weeks. This game was an important creation as it was not just a simulation, it also made possible for players to play against each other and alter the game while the program was active. What Slug had created as something playful unintentionally created a significant step forward to real-time programming8 (Levy, 2001:61). The hackers were not just fascinated by the game because it was something to play with, but also because it showed the potential of the computer, it showed that there was still so much to discover.

The hackers believed that to every problem there exists a solution.

But for the TMRC hackers a solution should be elegant, efficient, clean and clever. They were always competing to create the perfect algorithm, which was known within their community as ‘The Right Thing’ (Levy, 2001:77-8). This label was a part of their nomos, the written or unwritten rules, and did not only apply to computers, but was more a way to interpret the world. The PDP-6 (PDP-1’s successor) is an example that the TMRC hackers considered The Right Thing (Levy, 2001:79). The electronic 8 Real-time programming makes it possible to manipulate a program while it is running.

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setup of the computer reflected the way this group of hackers reasoned.

It offered the hackers new possibilities for programming and demolished limitations experienced on previous models. The IBM 704, however, with its batch processing, was the opposite of The Right Thing (Levy, 2001:79).

The hardware, its processing and the bureaucrats surrounding this computer mirrored the way IBM ran their corporation: closed, secretive and hierarchical.

A nuisance for the TMRC hackers and a complete antithesis to The Right Thing were the time sharing systems that were implemented in computers.9 These systems caused more bureaucracy because computer users were required to get an account, and users were granted less control of the machine. The PDP-6 was free from such a system for a long time and the frustration was enormous amongst hackers when they heard it would be implemented in ‘their’ computer. They protested heavily, because they just could not live with an ‘inferior system’. After this pressure, MIT officials agreed to proposal that hacker would build the time sharing system themselves. For weeks the hackers Greenblatt and Nelson worked on it, and they got the chance to add new features to the PDP-6. They managed to, as Levy stated, ‘embody the hacker ethic within the system’ (Levy, 2001:124). Their time-sharing system enabled the PDP6 have two persons working simultaneously on it. They also managed to make the software that was written by any user accessible to all users.

The Incompatible Time-sharing System (ITS), as it was dubbed, ironically became the home for system hackers (Levy, 2001:125). ITS did not require passwords, urged the unrestricted hands-on practice and showed the power of information sharing by providing everyone their programs.

With the implementation of the hacker ethic the once-hated time sharing systems became The Right Thing (Raymond, 2000).

Apart from being computer wizards, the TMRC hackers had become masters of locks. Levy explains that “To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage” (Levy, 2001:102). Highly 9 Time-sharing Systems are basically operating systems that function in such a way that several people can work on a computer at the same time (Raymond, 2000).

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utopist as it is, they believed that access to files or tools should be allowed to everybody at all times. “Locks symbolized the power of bureaucracy (Levy, 2001:103)” and open access was considered The Right Thing. In order to gain access to the rooms that provided tools and information, they started a battle with the MIT administrators. Levy argues that “It was a game, partly out of necessity and partly out of ego and fun” (Levy, 2001:103). The locks in the MIT buildings provided a challenge to the hackers, because clever solutions were needed to break in. The ultimate goal was to obtain the master key that would provide access to any locked door. Levy argues: “Naïve as the thought was in the Real World, hackers believed that property rights were non-existent” (Levy, 2001:105). This is one more example of how hackers do not only reiterate aspects liberalism, but also contest them. MIT realized that they were losing the battle as the hackers outsmarted them every time, which ultimately led them to make a new policy: “[…] the violation would be tolerated as long as no one knew about it” (Levy, 2001:150).

The hackers’ social world “He had that breathless chipmunk speech pattern so common among hackers, along with thick glasses, modest height, and a fanatic taste for computers, bad movies, and pulp science fiction” (Levy, 2001:57).

Levy’s portrayal of the first generation hackers strongly resembles the stereotype of the nerd. He writes that the hackers only spoke about computers and did not discuss girls, that they were socially uncomfortable loners in absence of a sex life (Levy, 2001:81-3). The logic and predictability of computers made hacking an attractive alternative activity to that of having a relationship with human beings. “Hacking had replaced sex in their lives” (Levy, 2001:83). His depiction almost suggests as if the hackers were collectively suffering from autism, because they preferred to have a logical relationship with a machine rather than a human relationship.

He argues that they had a hacker relationship: a close relationship on the basis what they shared in terms of the computer and ethics, but not filled

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with richness of a real world10 relationship (Levy, 2001:135). Although they shared a culture, a social life and intellectual excitement, these hackers did not discuss their personal life, struggles or problems (Levy, 2001:134).

Hacker Ed Fredkin would later denote that: “[…] they were living the future of computers … they just had fun.

They knew they were an elite, something special. And I think they appreciated each other. They were all different, but each knew something great about the other. They all respected each other. […] I would say they kind of loved each other” (Levy, 2001:136).

This all-male group had a specific lifestyle that involved working all night, sometimes 48 hours in a row. They only ate Chinese fast food and they spent all their time thinking and talking about computers (Levy, 2001:84). The hackers tried to live a hacker dream where there was no “interference from the pathetically warped systems of the ‘Real World’” (Levy, 2001:129), but as much as they wanted to form a secluded bubble within the outside world, they had to deal with it eventually, as I will highlight later. Levy’s portrayal of the hacker is not an uncommon one and not confined to this era. While his depiction may seem somewhat overstated (as most of these hackers later did end up with families) it should not be overlooked that this was an all-male culture comprised of people with a particular background. My participant observation of today’s hackers actually shows some remarkable similarities with Levy’s description of these early hackers.

Levy shows that established hackers had a high standard when it came to computer skills, which could be really intimidating for some people: “To a newcomer, the ninth floor was an intimidating, seemingly impenetrable passion place of science. […] They would seem the smartest people in the world” (Levy, 2001:115). Status and acceptance within the hacker group at MIT was obtained by showing some serious hacker skills, cooperation and a joint believe in the mission of hacking (Levy, 2001:108). It did not matter as much who you were as what kind of hacker you were, and hence gaining access to the hacker group was not easy if your computer 10 The hackers referred to the Real World as the world outside their own group.

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skills did not match the standards. The hacker group clearly shows a resemblance with liberalism with its meritocratic character, in which: “[…] the energetic individual can rise to respectability and success, whatever his humble origins” (Hall, 1986:39). Instead of judging by age, gender or other ascribed social qualifications, these hackers gave access based on what you did, on what you were able to contribute to their field, with its specific nomos, values and stakes.

An example of a newbie showing the desired skills in the hacker group, and obtaining his spot in the hierarchy was Stewart Nelson. He came in as a relatively new member and obtained an almost heroic status by writing a program for the PDP-1 that was able to produce sounds through the computer’s audio output that was normally only used for notification sounds. He managed to give the tones identical frequencies to those used by telephone systems at phone companies. When he placed a telephone’s microphone next to the speaker of the PDP-1, it was routing a call all over the world, ‘joyriding’ the telephone networks.11 The word on this achievement spread quickly and Nelson’s position as a hacker at the TMRC was established (Levy, 2001:92). He had proven himself to be a true hacker by using his technical capabilities in a creative way, while being a little mischievous.

That acceptance into the group was more based on merit than individual characteristics or physical appearances, was shown by David Silver. He was fourteen when he was introduced to the TMRC hacker group by his father, a teacher at MIT. He made himself immensely popular by succeeding to open the safe that kept keys to all the locks at MIT, which allowed the hackers to get access wherever and whenever they wanted (Levy, 2001:111). Although Silver was young and did not yet possess all the required hacker knowledge, he was accepted within the group (at first more as a mascot), because the hackers saw his potential as becoming a skilled hacker. The computers at MIT and the hacker

11 As computers were not widespread yet, telephone systems were the most accessible complicated systems for people to explore. Hacking telephone systems became very popular among hacker groups in the 1970s and was known as phreaking.

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community attracted Silver so much that he decided to quit school and spend all his time hacking. He would later make a remarkable robot that was far ahead of its time (Levy, 2001:111).

A core group of hackers considered themselves to be elite and, as argued by Levy, they believed to have superior knowledge and goals compared to the outside world. (Levy, 2001:35). They thought that time should not be wasted on attending classes, but instead be used on hacking computers (Levy, 2001:35). Being the top of the hierarchy, the core group was able to shape the contours and impose rules of the newly formed field. In this field, being a hacker required an investment in the game.

Newcomers had to show a sense of this game and its stakes, in order to be allowed to play the game and obtain a position in the field. They had to accept the hacker ethic, be endowed with technological skills, be creative, show dedication to computers and invest in the group by sharing their knowledge. Recognition and status was based on one’s ability to play according to the rules of this game.

Struggles David Silver amazed friend and enemy by accomplishing a piece of complicated software that controlled ‘bug’, a small and an ugly looking but functioning robot. He managed to have the computer interpret images captured by a television camera connected to the computer. The robot was now autonomously able to pick up random objects off the ground. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab students, working in the same building as the hackers, were skeptical about this young hacker and his project.

They were mostly theorizing about AI and they considered hackerism unscientific (Levy, 2001:113). They were furious about the fourteen year old that was taking precious time from the PDP-6 for building this toy.

But when they first saw the robot picking up a wallet that was tossed on the ground, they were baffled. A youngster had accomplished what the AI students had been theorizing about. That they were extremely jealous, even resentful was marked by their attempt to kick Silver out on the claim that there were insurance issues due to the presence of a child being present at the lab late at night (Levy, 2001:111-3). It would not be the only

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confrontation with the AI students, in fact there was a constant struggle going on, fueled by the fact that they had to share the limited computer resources. But it was mostly their way of working, their philosophy and value system that clashed. An exception was teacher Marvin Minsky, founder of the AI lab at MIT. He admired and encouraged the hacker ethic, but had some difficulties keeping the hackers from doing things that exceeded MIT rules (Levy, 2001:58, 98)

The AI students and staff were not the only groups the hackers were having conflicts with; their particular hacker lifestyle and value system they developed, led to quite some confrontations. The particular and somewhat introvert vision on freedom caused conflicts with the authoritative bureaucrats in charge of the IBM 704 for example. And within the TMRC itself, conflicts arose with the members who were not hacking but wanted to have fun with the train models and creating landscapes. They were frustrated when the hackers messed with their infrastructure. (Levy, 2001:17). Another struggle was going on with the MIT administration as the hackers broke into rooms they were not allowed access to. Yet, they were very dedicated to the stakes in their field and kept living according to their own value system. They had ‘important missions’ to accomplish.

What we can understand from this short account of the pioneer hackers at MIT, is that they were a group of men having a hard time conforming to mainstream society, but were yet in possession of some remarkable skills.

They created their own micro society with an ideology, rules and values that Levy has named the hacker ethic. They were in a special position as they were able to spend nearly all their time hacking technology, without being bothered by obligations as work or classes. The field they had shaped, however, existed as a bubble in a larger world that functioned in a rather different way. And as time progressed, hackers would leave MIT in search for a job or a partner. Could this be the end of a special culture?

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4.3 The spread of the hacker ethic and the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley (1968-1982) By the end of the 1960s the notorious TMRC hackers had aged and most of them left MIT. Many would spread over the US and bring their ethic with them. Some hackers started their own company or became teachers at universities, but most of them became important figures at one of the many upcoming technological companies in need of skilled workers. A cluster of those companies was found in an area between San Francisco and San Jose that is mostly known as Silicon Valley. During the 1970s and 1980s a second generation hackers emerged in this area. Unlike their predecessors, these hackers were politically active and their mission was to bring computers to the masses. The fruitful combination of an upcoming computer industry and a group of eager hackers led to the personal computer revolution at the end of the 1970s.

Techno hippies: the fusion of two fields with similar ideals Silicon Valley was already an important military radio communication hub since 1909. During the 1960s, Hewlett-Packard was expanding its empire in this same region. In 1969, a hub of the Internet’s predecessor ARPAnet was created at Stanford University (Palo Alto). Stanford was (and still is) a major technology research center in the United States.

At this university, Douglas Engelbart made some important computer technological developments like the mouse and hypertext. Another important university in the area, UC Berkeley, attracted students with progressive political visions. The two universities functioned as major hosts of technology-minded people and played an important role in the upcoming computer industry. At companies like Intel and Xerox huge contributions were made to computer technologies we use today.

In addition to educating people for the upcoming computer industry, Berkeley University was important for another reason during the 1970s. This decade portrayed a shift from working class based protest movements to specific social movements like feminism, gay and lesbian groups, civic rights groups and black power struggles (Jordan & Taylor,

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2004: 44-6). In this time of diversified protest groups, the hacker ethic mixed with activist hippie culture at two groups: Lee Felsenstein’s Community Memory and a group surrounding the magazine Whole Earth Catalog, with Stewart Brand as leading figure.

Felsenstein had been part of the protest group ‘Free Speech Movement’ that conducted the well-known Berkeley student protests in 1964-65 to gain more rights for students and have freedom of communication (Roszak, 2000, Bazzichelli, 2008:145). It was an “expression against an authoritarian, centralising management” (Bazzichelli, 2008:145). Levy uses the quote “secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny” from Heinlein’s book Revolt in 2100, to express the cause of both the Berkeley students as the hacker ethic (Levy, 2001:161). Lee Felsenstein was part of Community Memory, a group of Berkeley students that set up the first electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS). Initially on one computer, members were able to spread messages in a non-bureaucratic and decentralized way, as the access point was separated from the data storage (Levy, 2001: 156).

The idea was to create a network of free to use computer terminals in public spaces (Roszak, 2000). By bringing computers to the people and giving them hands-on experience and a means to spread information, they thought to have ‘guerilla warfare’ and create a counter voice against bureaucracies (Levy, 2001:155-6). Lee Felsenstein’s Community Memory was not the only attempt to bring computers to the people. “All over the Bay Area, the engineers and programmers who loved computers and had become political during the anti-war movement were thinking of combining the two activities” (Levy, 2001:168).

In his book From Counter Culture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner explains how Steward Brand integrated hippie communes with a technological vision. After Theodore Roszak, he calls the communes a counterculture, as they turned away from traditional political activism and conflict and decided to start new communities that attempted to ‘live in harmony’ (Turner, 2006:4). Some hippie groups turned away from technology, because it would for instance support the military-industrial complex, as in the Vietnam War, or because technology was seen as the “emblems of bureaucratic alienation” (Turner 2006:13). But the group

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surrounding Stewart Brand read cybernetic books by Norbert Wiener and admired Marshall McLuhan’s vision on a global village: “To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many though they could see the possibility of global harmony” (Turner, 2006:4-5).

Brand brought several communities together in what Turner calls network forums, a series of meetings, publications and digital networks, where members could meet and collaborate (Turner, 2006:5,72). The Whole Earth Catalogue started in 1968 and contained articles on how to make a tipi, but also articles on computers and cybernetics (Roszak, 2000). Roszak notes that this hybrid taste is was “not confusion but synthesis.” They came to believe that technology could be used as a countercultural force, Turner argues (Turner, 2008: 38). The members of the Whole Earth Network acted as journalists, gathering information everywhere and gradually their magazine became a leading source of information (Turner, 2006:4).

For many techno-enthusiasts in the region the network was the way to gather the latest updates and Steven Jobs even called it the forerunner of Google (Jobs, 2005).

The culmination of hippie culture with the hacker ethic is a good example of field formation, as two fields with similar stakes and a similar nomos merged into one. Both the hippies and the computer hackers express liberal and anarchistic ideology that disputes strong central authority, bureaucracy, and secrecy and instead fight for personal freedom, freedom of information and decentralization of authority. It demonstrates the semi-autonomous character of fields, being in a constant process of influencing and being influenced by other fields. The hacker field, its values and its nomos should therefore never be understood as uniform and final, but rather as being diverse and in a constant and dynamic process of renegotiation, subjected to forces from both within and outside the field. The 1960s and 1970s counterculture Zeitgeist and the development of computer technologies by large corporations and governments clearly had their influenced in the field’s structural makeup.

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The first personal computers While counterculturists were trying to find a way to bring computers to the masses, an important precondition for this ambition would come from the computer industry. In 1971 Intel Corporation created the first silicon microprocessor, but it was not yet clear what its function would be (Levy, 2001:183, Ceruzzi, 1998:218). The answer would come from the amateur computer clubs in Silicon Valley. At these clubs hackers were creating electronic boards that performed a certain function: radio, video or logic functioning. For them, the incentive was not as much about making these boards performing specific tasks, but the fun they had in the act of making it (Levy, 2001:184). Information and experiences people gathered during their experiments on the boards was spread in magazines and hacker groups, which enabled other people to build on that information.

Ed Roberts, a hardware hobbyist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, was one of the people who would use publicly available information to mix it with his own creativity and use it for a commercial product. He was the first to build a computer around Intel’s 8 bit microprocessor, the 8080. In January 1975 an article was published in the magazine Popular Electronics, covering the creation of the “First Minicomputer Kit”, the Altair 8800 (Levy, 2001:190). This machine was not anything like a pc we know today, as there was no possibility of hooking it up to a screen, but instead used a series of LED lights to indicate what it was doing. Input was done by altering a couple of switches on the front of the machine, and there was no keyboard. Yet it was a computer, and hackers could use it to develop new things, after purchasing the computer parts for $397 and putting it together yourself (Levy, 2001:190-1, Ceruzzi, 1998:228).

When Roberts introduced the Altair, he hoped selling 400 Altairs to get out of debt, as his company MITS was near bankruptcy. This was the time before the personal computer came out, and the idea of people having their own computer was considered absurd (Levy, 2001:184).

However, the first day after the publication of the article they already sold 400 computers and add-on boards. In three weeks MITS’ bank status was plus $250.000 (Levy, 2001:191). The build-it-yourself computer was ordered by curious people from all over the United States. Due to the

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immense popularity and the small size of MITS -still an amateurish company- it could take over a year to finally get your parts. In the meantime MITS still had to develop the add-on boards they had already advertized and pre-sold to customers (Levy, 2001:194). The massive orders for a box that could hardly perform anything showed that more people were eager to get their hands on technology and play with it.

In March 1975 a group of thirty likeminded people showed up in a garage after two men, Fred Moore and Gordon French, posted fliers in the area that was supposed to attract technology minded people. Albrecht was there and so was Felsenstein and Alan Baum, a Hewlett Packard employee, brought his co-worker Stephen Wozniak (Levy, 2001:201). After everyone introduced themselves it became clear that these individuals were united by their desire to get their hands on hardware and make things. They discussed the projects they were working on, issues they experienced, whether certain numerical systems (hexadecimal vs. octal) should be used, etc. These people had found a place with people like themselves, to share ideas, ask questions and learn new things. They formed a historical association that soon would be named the Homebrew Computer Club (HCC12), just outside the Stanford campus (Levy, 2001:202-3).

“The people at Homebrew were a mélange of professionals too passionate to leave computing at their jobs, amateurs transfixed by the possibilities of technology, and techno-cultural guerrillas devoted to overthrowing an oppressive society in which government, business, and especially IBM had relegated computers to a despised Priesthood” (Levy, 2001:205).

Levy argues that the members saw their potential as a group to make exciting things (Levy, 2001:212). And they knew that outside of their club more people were eager to get their hands on computer, as thousands of people had ordered the Altair, which was just a box with switches and some LED lights. They realized that it needed something more to bring computers into every living room and they started to hack.

In a couple of months these hackers developed a niche in the world of 12 Although inspired by this club, the Homebrew Computer Club should not be confused with the Dutch computer club HCC (Hobby Computer Club, founded in 1977).

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computer systems (Levy, 2001:212). In a sense, the hacker ethic was being embedded in every piece of equipment they developed, because the hardware was open and accessible to anybody to alter. It was essential that information was shared with everybody, because there was no public information available yet. They were pioneers. Sharing information was the only way to get quick improvements (Levy, 212-3). Eric Raymond, a well-known open-source devotee and hacker, expressed it as follows: “To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much so that it’s almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones” (Raymond, 2000).

The mindset at HCC, their desire to create things, their willingness to share information enabled them to make a new step in computer history. It signified an attitude of everything is possible: do not let barriers (like security, laws, copyrights) hold you back, but take it a step further.

Not every hacker had the same idealistic and political attitude as people like Felsenstein or Brand, but what the hackers were collectively working on caused a major social impact. In November 1975 they were able to hook up a television screen to the Altair that enabled them to visualize data and programs (Levy, 2001:221). What the hackers did not realize yet is that they were working on products that could be turned into major financial profits.

BASIC and copyright controversies The computer language BASIC was adopted by the computer club, which made programming much more accessible as it uses normal English and is hence easier to interpret. At universities, including MIT, BASIC was not considered a high class language because of its limited structure and its lack of encouraging maximum access to the machine (Levy, 2001:175, Ceruzzi, 1998:232-3). But hackers like Lee Felsenstein, Ted Nelson and Bob Albrecht were trying to look for opportunities to give more people access to computers and BASIC seemed to support this aim (Levy, 2001:172). The People’s Computer Company had the intention to create

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neighborhood computer centers where people could be educated. They developed ‘Tiny BASIC’, a compact version of BASIC that would become a popular programming language due to its small size (Turner, 2006:114).

In January 1975, two Harvard college students saw the Altair article in Popular Electronics magazine and got excited about this ‘micro-computer’ (Ceruzzi, 1998:233). They had been making software since high school and were already making good profits, but they saw opportunities for making more money in developing interpreters for computer languages. Armed with an Altair manual and its schematics displayed in the magazine, they called Ed Roberts at MITS offering to show a version of BASIC that would work on the Altair. The two students, Paul Allen and Bill Gates were invited as Roberts already had plans to develop BASIC for his Altair. When they arrived in Albuquerque, they put in the tape with a BASIC version they had quickly written.13 It was far from perfect, but they amazed the workers of MITS: the Altair actually did something (Levy, 2001:225-7). Roberts hired Allen and arranged Gates to stay at Harvard, where he could work on the computers to create a good version of Altair BASIC. While people where waiting for the software, a hacker named Dan Sokol copied an early version of Gates’ and Allen’s Altair BASIC. He felt like he liberated it from the greedy college students and MITS, with the logic that BASIC previously existed in the public domain and was written on computers that were funded partly with public money (Levy, 2001:227-8). This program belonged to the taxpayers, according to Sokol, who made two copies of the paper tape on which the program was written and took them to the Homebrew Computer Club. Before its official release, Altair BASIC was sent throughout the US to dozens of other computer clubs (Levy, 2001:227-8). For these hackers sharing the software seemed the Right Thing to do.

For Paul Allen and Bill Gates, this action seemed far from utopist: this was stealing. They sold their BASIC to MITS in the idea to earn 13 They had written the software without having access to the actual computer, an action that could count on respect from the hacker community (see for instance Himanen, 2001:56)

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royalties for every copy they would sell, but after the official release, MITS did not sell as many copies of BASIC as expected. Gates hoped that the bugged version the hackers had obtained would lead people to buy the final version, but this did not happen. The hackers were able to debug it themselves (Levy, 2001:229). In a reaction of frustration, the nineteen year old Gates wrote an open letter to the computer hobbyists that would become world famous (see appendix I for the full letter). The core argument of Gates’ letter is that there will never be professional software if production stays in the hobby sphere and stealing software damages the development of a professional market. “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” (Gates, 1976).

A new market had emerged. Where the MIT hackers in the 1950s and 60s created programs for computers that were only found on maybe fifty other universities, the affordable Altair suddenly announced a potential market of millions of users and hence major profits. Gates saw this lacuna and jumped in. But his software was based on knowledge that was the result of thirty years of hacking. In the HCC hackers’ view, Gates betrayed the hacker ethic, he sold out (Levy, 2001:230). Despite this opposition, Gates launched a new era in which he would become the wealthiest man in the world. It would also mark a long-lasting debate over copyright issues and questions of ownership within the hacker world and wider society that continues today.

Apple: from garage to billion dollar company Stephen Wozniak (Woz) was a Berkeley student who was highly interested in technology. After he had been asked by a friend to come along to a HCC meeting he attended it every time. He was not a very prominent member, but he did have a respectable status at the club (Levy, 2001:247).

Wozniak’s dream was to build his own computer, to have fun and to show it off at the HCC. Since computer chips dropped in price rapidly, Wozniak was able to buy a handful of them and started to build a board.

He would gather information on chips and the required infrastructure by experimenting and asking other members of HCC (Levy, 2001:2513). It would be a puzzle for Wozniak, a challenge to make a computer

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with as little resources as possible. In April 1976 he finished a functioning computer in a wooden case with computable power comparable to that of the Altair but was more advanced with its video output, ‘mass’ storage and ability to read input with a cassette player. The members of HCC were highly impressed when Wozniak showed it for the first time (Levy, 2001:252).

High school friend Steve Jobs was very excited about the computer Wozniak built and saw a potential market for it. Soon the computer was dubbed Apple and the ‘two Steves’, as they were often referred to, were working out of a garage to sell it. Jobs was actively promoting the computer, while Wozniak was building them. For $666.66 one could buy an Apple including a copy of the internal schematics. A copy of BASIC Wozniak had written for it was given for free with the purchase of an extension board that made it possible to hook up a monitor or cassette recorder (Levy, 2001:253).

While the computer was being sold to dozens of hobby computerists, Wozniak created a new machine, the Apple II. Once again, he used experiences and information from HCC members to make this computer. At a certain moment he would ask his employer Hewlett Packard whether they wanted him to make an Apple computer for HP, but they considered consumer oriented computers to be unmarketable. Wozniak got permission to release it on his own (Levy, 2001:253). Jobs made a decision not yet seen in this market by hiring top-notch management to market the machine. Ed Roberts for instance, had the idea that building a quality machine was the only necessary ingredient for success. Led by Jobs and investor Mike Markkula, Apple blew them away. They became one of the main players in the beginning of the 1980s computer industry (Levy, 2001:254-260).

The birth of Apple and the massive commercial success the company would have at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s marked several important things. First, it showed that ordinary people were eager to buy computers. Second, that the open architecture of the Apples triggered people to develop new things on it. Third, it showed that a passion had grown into an industry. Levy calls it “[…]

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the triumph of the hardware hackers in making their passion into an industry” (Levy, 2001:266). Fourth, it marked a tension in the stakes of the hacker field, with on the one side the idealistic hacking and on the other the hacking that could be converted into individual wealth. And fifth, IBM would adopt Apple’s open architecture, which felt for the hackers like “they beat the system” (Levy, 2001:312). This radical departure from its traditional policy would give IBM huge sales and become the biggest computer builder for the next decade. People and companies were able to build things based on their open architecture, therefore adding more value to it.

The Homebrew Computer Club quietly lost its most talented members over the next two years after the introduction of the Apple II. New, fully operational computers were introduced by several companies and many members switched from building computers to manufacturing computers at companies like Atari, Commodore and Radio Shack. These hackers suddenly had to take on policies like maintaining company secrets instead of sharing information with friends. And there was less need to go to the meetings at HCC as the companies were now serving as information sharing communities (Levy, 2001:268-9).

The era between 1968 and 1982 marks an interesting division in the hacker field. The somewhat homogeneous group of hackers at MIT and their culture spread over the United States. At UC Berkeley and Stanford University the hacker ethic merged with counter culture movements who hoped that computers would become liberating technology. Just miles away, other hackers joined or started computer companies and were making good money with their hacking. The American society seemed ready for the arrival of computers into their living rooms and this could either happen by a commercial way or through a ‘revolutionary’ way.

4.4 Third generation hackers (1982-1991) What used to be a niche explored by universities, small companies and hackers grew into a mature industry in just a couple of years. The beginning of the 1980s, the computer industry was marked by a gold rush; it was

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booming. Apple grew from a garage hobby into a multibillion dollar company and Microsoft made a deal with IBM that is now known as the most profitable ever. Copyrights and patents became serious business.

Millions of dollars were being made in the new market of computer games.

But while some hackers made the transfer to the commercial world, others despised this ‘outselling’. These hackers had different views on property rights, and kept hacking and sharing for other rewards than money. But the 1980s would also become the decade in which hacking would get a different connotation. The omnipresence of computers in households led many children to explore networks, inspired by the Hollywood motion picture Wargames.

Commercialization With the rise of computer companies and their affordable ready-made computers, there was less of a drive for technology-minded people to do hardware hacking (Levy, 2001:268). In a way, this phenomenon was part of the hacker ethic and the dream of Lee Felsenstein: computers were spread to the public. While this process might have been initiated by utopian computer hackers, it was the commercial mass production that lowered the prices, allowing more people to afford one. A new industry arose that started making all sorts of software for those computers, so people could simply consume those products instead of having to make it themselves.

A trigger for a family to buy a computer was because it was able to do word processing, programming or calculation. But another motivator to purchase computers was that kids wanted to play video games. In the beginning of the 1980s videogames were still a field in the computer industry which was not fully explored yet. But this would soon change.

Within a couple of years small companies like Atari and Electronic Arts became huge corporations in this new market. At that time computers had a limited capacity and it was still possible for one or two guys to make a video game and a lot of money. All over America “[…] young, self-described hackers were working on their masterpieces […]” (Levy, 2001:347). The hackers annex programmers in this new industry were

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paid large amounts of money at some time (Levy, 2001:382-6). The programmers did not share their software for free anymore.

Levy states that “The Third Generation lived with compromises in the Hacker Ethic that would have caused the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper to recoil in horror” (Levy, 2001:372). He refers to the struggle that was going on within the hacker field with on the one side hackers that embraced the commercial influence and on the other side hackers that believed in a free flow of information. Levy writes: “A new criterion for hacker stardom had crept into the equation: awesome sales figures” (Levy, 2001:372). It highlights that the stakes in the hacker field were changing. Were they previously based on acquiring technological skills and peer recognition; suddenly money played a more important role.

A good example of how this shift became visible was seen at Apple, a company born out of the hacker ethic. Where it was built on collective knowledge from hackers and thrived on the open structure, it slowly changed to a having secretive culture aimed at making big money. The changed culture made Wozniak quit being an active employee at Apple in 1987, because apparently he missed the fun (Levy, 2010).

Turner argues that Steven Levy has played an influential role himself in structuring the hacker field. After being inspired by Levy’s book Hackers in 1984, Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly of the Whole Earth Network were excited about his idea of a hacker ethic and brought together 150 hackers from all over the US, among which Felsenstein, Greenblat, Draper, Stallman and Wozniak, to discuss en philosophize about it (Turner, 2006:135). It was a major networking event of people with similar interests, but from different geographical and cultural backgrounds. Steven Levy himself led a discussion on “The Future of the Hacker Ethic”, in which a split was marked between hackers that believed in free distribution of information (Brand: “Information wants to be free”) and others that did not want to share everything, because they wanted to make profits (Turner, 2006:136-7).

WarGames, cracking, and repression Due to a greater availability and declining prices, personal computers

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became more mainstream and were slowly entering American households during the 1980s. Then there was the emergence of networks and telecommunication. Although the internet was not yet available, people were able to connect each other using modems and regular phone lines as data distribution infrastructure. People set up BBSs, which allowed remote computer users to log in and read and leave messages or (small) amounts of data. Hackers from all over the United States (and later Europe) created and connected to these BBSs, forming a network and a networked culture.

The phenomenon of ‘the hacker’ became gradually known to the general public through media coverage and popular culture, and the portrayals were mostly not positive in nature. A combination between technological ignorance and actual break-ins fueled media reports on ‘whiz kids’ that suddenly seemed to have become an unknown security threat. During this decade a number of forces from both inside and outside the hacker field would change the field and the meaning of the word hacker. In this same decade hacker magazines like 2600 (since 1984) and Phrack (since 1985) were established, in which articles on specific hacks and hacking culture were published. A new generation hackers was taking shape.

The movie WarGames (1983) had a major impact on the hacker field for two main reasons 14 The first one is that it made millions of young American boys ask their parents a computer with a modem for Christmas (Sterling, 1993:84). The plot of the movie fires the imagination of the average teenager that wants to rebel. Many notorious hackers later 14 In WarGames a bored but digitally proficient high school student breaks into his school’s computer to change his grades and to impress a girl. His next object is breaking into the computer owned by a company that makes computer games, in an attempt to play an unreleased game. Not having the company’s telephone number, he lets his computer dial all the telephone numbers in the company’s area. He gets a connection, but instead of the computer company, he hacks into a system that appears to host games. What he does not know is that he logged in on a nuclear war simulator owned by the military. He starts a simulation thinking it is a game, while at a military control center the simulation is mistaken for being real: they think the USSR is bombing the United States. The young hacker seemed to have just started World War III. Eventually it is this same boy that has to save the world by hacking the simulation. The sometimes ambiguous character of hackers –on the line between good and bad- was incorporated into the plot, including a popular theme in 1950s Science Fiction novels: the fear of losing control over computers that turn against humans.

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admitted that it was WarGames that made them start hacking (Douglas, 2002:26). Unaware of the rich history of the word hacker or the hacker ethic, boys called themselves hackers and tried to access computers like the protagonist did in the movie (Levy, 2001:429). They founded digital bulletin board systems (BBSs) that were hosted on a computer and provided a place to share information or to socialize. As 2600 hacker Eric Corley (who goes under the nickname Emmanuel Goldstein15) pointed out, many ‘old-school hackers’ blame these teenagers for giving them a bad name (Goldstein, 2006:233-4).

The other reason that WarGames had a great impact was that it altered the public perception on what hackers are and what they are thought to be capable of. It fueled the imagination of ‘wizards’ controlling the world by using their magic on a computer. When Kevin Mitnick (nickname Condor) was arrested in 1988 for breaking into a computer system, he was put in solitary confinement for a year, for the judge believed he was able to hack into a defense system with a telephone call and launch nuclear missiles (Jordan, 2008:18). This false believe shows how computer technology was a black box for most people at that time (and today still), even for law makers and state officials. As more people realized that computers were already an important part of essential state systems, the idea of not being in full control over these systems caused feelings of fear and vulnerability, maybe even paranoia as Goldstein argues (Goldstein, 2008:180, 211, Thomas, 2002:27, Nissenbaum, 2004:200).

Hackers were suddenly people to be feared.

Nissenbaum argues that changes in the popular conception of the hacker have as much to do with “changes in specific background conditions, changes in the meaning and status of the new digital media […], as with hacking itself” (Nissenbaum, 2004:200). Despite all the myths surrounding ‘hackers’, does not mean there were no actual breakins, thefts and threats to important systems. In the 1980s more and more people, companies and institutions gained access to computers and they were quite unprepared to connect to others computers and networks with

15 Emmanuel Goldstein is a character in George Orwell’s book 1984

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their modems. The necessity for passwords, firewalls or virus-scanners was not yet understood. It was only a matter of time before people with computer knowledge took advantage of these low security systems, whether it were young adults looking for an adventure or adults trying to steal information. In an attempt to categorize these ‘virtual bandits’, media reporting on these issues called them hackers, a word that was already adopted to describe malicious practitioners, in for instance WarGames.

That the words hackers and hacking were gradually marked with a negative connotation caused a stir with older generations hackers. Lee Felsenstein said for instance on the 1984 hacker conference: “Don’t avoid the word Hackers. Don’t let somebody else define you. No apologies: we’re hackers. We define what a hacker is… nobody else.” (quoted in Turner, 2006:137). Despite his effort, the word hacker was already adopted by media and law makers. After the US government raided BBSs and arrested some people, mass media gave the raids serious media attention and helped creating the image of the hacker as ‘deviant evildoers’. Thomas (2005) made a selection of labels from several sources, like newspapers and television shows in the 1980s: “The media and other observers contributed to the demonization by portraying them as ‘modem macho’ evil-doers […], morally bankrupt […], ‘electronic trespassers’ […], ‘crazy kids dedicated to making mischief ’ […], ‘electronic vandals’ […], a new or global ‘threat’ […], saboteurs […], monsters […], secret societies of criminals […], ‘malevolent, nasty, evil-doers’ who ‘fill the screens of amateur [computer] users with pornography’ […], ‘varmints’ and ‘bastards’ […] and ‘high-tech street gangs’ […]. Stoll […] has even compared them to persons who put razor blades in the sand at beaches – a bloody, but hardly accurate, analogy. Most dramatic is Rosenblatt’s (1990) attempt to link hackers to pedophilia and ‘snuff films’, a grotesque analogy clearly designed to inflame” (p.608-9).

The rhetoric used by law enforcers, in media and later also in popular culture had a dramatic impact on the meaning of the concept hacker. From the end of the 1980s “[…] a hacker is at best benign, an innocent who does not realize his true powers. At worst, he is a terrorist. In the past few years, with the emergence of computer viruses, the hacker has been

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literally transformed into a virulent force” (Levy, 2001:433). So the whole hacker field suddenly had to deal with this newly emerged discourse.

Even if you do not conduct illegal activities as a hacker, you are a suspect that has to prove your innocence. It shows the power of labeling, and it shows how power to determine the dominant meaning is unequally distributed. Until today the hacker field has been unable to radically change the negative connotation they have to cope with.

Hackers have always pushed the boundaries of what is considered socially acceptable and what is not. “Hackers freely acknowledged that their activities were occasionally illegal. But in their view, illegality did not necessarily translate into unethical behavior” (Thomas, 2005:606).

In 1963 Steward Nelson already showed that it was possible to use computer-generated tones to access telephone networks all over the world (Levy, 2001:91). The legendary hacker Captain Crunch (John Draper) later found out that a free plastic whistle that came in a box of cereal produced the same tone (2600 Hz) as used by telephone switch boards at telephone companies. He started experimenting and built the so called blue box that enabled him to be an operator from his own phone and make free long distance calls. He told about his findings in a 1971 article in Esquire magazine, which not only got him onto trouble, but also drew the attention of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Draper taught them the technology and the two Steves started selling the boxes at Berkeley (Levy, 2001:246).

For Draper it was not so much about being able to make free phone calls as it was about the excitement of being able to break into one of the most advanced systems at that time. Wozniak and Jobs however, used the hack to make money at the expense of the telephone company (Levy, 2001:249). It highlights another concept within the hacking world: exploits. An exploit refers to using one’s knowledge to break into a system or account by taking advantage of a bug or vulnerability in a system.

The incentive could be to steal information or demolish for personal gain, in the form of money or peer recognition (Jordan, 2008:29). Most hackers at Silicon Valley and MIT I have been describing before, condemn

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using exploits for personal gain. However, most media did not make a distinction between ‘good hackers’ and ‘bad hackers’. For them computer related break-ins were hacks and the people doing it were hackers. In order to mark a difference, hackers came up with the word cracker in 1985, to refer to people that hack computer systems for personal gain (Raymond, 2004).

During the 1980s cracking communities emerged that organized themselves on BBSs. Crackers often left ‘trophies’ on systems they hacked (leave evidence in order to show others that it was you who hacked it) and shared their exploits on a BBS. These were immediately checked on its authenticity by other crackers. This “romantic act of self-expression” (Coleman & Golub, 2008:265) can be compared to for instance graffiti ‘artists’ who leave their tag on challenging locations in an attempt to impress their peers, being other graffiti artists. An original and creative hack will gain a hacker peer recognition, and therefore status in the specific field (Jordan, 2008:30-32). While sharing some characteristics with other types of hacking, the cracking subfield holds its own stakes, values, and beliefs that determine status and hierarchies.

The United States’ government acknowledged the growing problem of crackers, but did not yet have the legal instruments to provide the means for controlling them. In 1987 the Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force was established that was supposed to be leading the hunt on crackers (Sterling, 104). At the end of the 1980s several raids were done in cracking communities like Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception where notorious hackers like Acid Phreak, Phiber Optik and Kevin Mitnick were active. BBSs were confiscated and hackers put before trial. To scare hackers, US prosecutors try to set examples. Hacker Robert Morris for instance, initially faced 31 years of prison for stealing a document from Bell Company. Nissenbaum (2004) argues that the US government deliberately tried to demonize hackers, to construct them as the new enemy of the information age in order to justify repression (p.199).

The hackers did not possess the power to oppose this power play by US authorities, large corporations and mass media. Although regulation and punitive measures were obviously necessary for a new

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kind of crime, the way this was carried out seemed excessive, fueled by fear for the unknown. The negative discourse on hackers affected not just the people performing criminal acts, but also the non-criminal hackers, as we will see later. But over the coming 25 years hackers have tried to reappropriate the positive meaning of hacking. One of the tactics was to challenge authorities, stating that they, not the hackers, are the bad ones.

A famous example of this is The Hacker Manifesto by a hacker who calls himself The Mentor, published in hacker magazine Phrack (see Appendix 2 for the whole text): “We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.[…] I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all... after all, we’re all alike” (The Mentor, 1986).

Richard Stallman and the F/OSS movement Levy ends his book with an account of Richard Stallman, who he calls ‘the last of the True hackers’ (Levy, 2001:415). Stallman joined the hackers at MIT in 1971 and with pain in his heart he saw his beloved hacker ethic slowly fading (idem). He thought commercialism had “delivered the fatal blow to the idealistic community” (Stallman in Levy, 2001: 417).

The commercial interest made companies stop sharing their software’s source code and they were protecting it with copyrights and physical copy protection. For some hackers this was an insult, but for the most it also meant a challenge. Arguments by hackers to legitimize cracking the copy protection or to distribute copies were for instance “software is too expensive”, or, “you should be able to make a backup” (Levy, 2001:373).

Richard Stallman left MIT in 1983 out of frustration of the changed culture, but not without a master plan. He started a project called GNU (a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”) based on a UNIX operation system that existed in the semi-public sphere and gave it away to anyone who wanted it conform his ideals that software should be free (Levy,

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2001:419). In 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which was supposed to provide software that could be copied, shared, circulated and modified by others (Coleman, 2009:423, Bazzichelli, 2008:146). In 1989 he provided a legal framework to prevent people from claiming copyrights on the free software. He called it the General Public License (GPL), which is also widely known as Copyleft. Bazzichelli (2008) claims that this concept critiques the copyright logic and should therefore be seen as a political vision, with technology as a ‘vehicle of freedom’ (p.147). Coleman (2009) argues that Stallman provided “[…] the rudiments of a rival liberal legal vocabulary of freedom, which hackers would eventually appropriate and transform to include a more specific language of free speech” (p.424). And indeed, this way of thinking about freedom is found at the heart of today’s nomos in the hacker field, as we will see later in the ethnographical account of hackerspaces.

GNU/GPL turned into a massive movement with thousands of contributors. In 1991 programmer Linus Torvalds wanted to rewrite UNIX for using it on a personal computer and started a project on building a kernel16 that he called Linux. He requested feedback with fellow programmers and within a year they collectively created a high quality operating system (Coleman, 2009:424). The success of Linux marked the beginning of an open source software movement, also known as F/OSS (Free and Open Source Software)17. In the after word of Levy’s 1994 edition of his book Hackers he seems full of sorrow. He thinks the ‘true hackers’ have disappeared and a culture slowly dying, with the loss of the hacker ethic and Stallman as the only ‘true hacker’ left. But in a Wired article celebrating Levy’s book Hackers being twenty-fifth years old, Levy looks back on this conclusion: “Was I ever wrong” (Levy, 2010).

What Stallman had started can be seen as a successful rebirth of the 1960s hacker ethic. By insisting on making the software’s source codes available resembles the ‘access should be unlimited and total’ expressed in the hacker ethic. ‘Information should be free’ is a strong feature of the 16 A kernel is the most central and invisible part of an operating system that serves as a bridge between hardware and software.

17 Or FOSS, FLOSS

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open source community. Knowledge is shared, information is openly available and people are often willing to help. This is exactly what the first hackers had in mind when they tried to gain access to the computer manuals. Another major strength of F/OSS is the decentralized character, something the hackers in the 1960s also strongly encouraged. With the horizontal structure and absence of one party owning software makes the development process more democratic and hierarchical structures less rigid.

Bazzichelli (2008) interprets this as a rhizometic model, after Deleuze and Guattari, who used this concept to describe a nonhierarchical, multiplex type of research and theory. It opposes the dualist categories, the binary opposition of sender and receiver as everyone is potentially receiver and transmitter (p.148). With the horizontal structure there is no center and the lack of a single apparatus of control therefore requires the free flow of information. This model can therefore be seen as a critique on copyrights and neo-liberal intellectual property regimes that are based on ‘possessive individualism’ (Coleman and Golub, 2008:268).

Coleman and Golub argue that hackers and F/OSS developers influence general culture with their practices: Free and open source software practice thus not only questions current regimes of copyright and patents but also provides an alternative template for the rearticulation of long-standing ideals of liberal freedom, such as free speech, but in a technocultural mode distinct from previous property regimes (Coleman & Golub, 2008:268).

While the F/OSS community and their practices may have philosophical connections and cultural implications, it is also really practical. By making the source code available, users of the software (individuals or companies) can benefit from a large knowledge base and quick innovation (Von Hippel, 2005:99). By sticking to open source, “the computer is by definition a democratic tool, open to use by everyone” (Bazzichelli, 2008:146). Open source should, however, not be interpreted as in total opposition to capitalism or intellectual property. Rather, as Kelty argues, hackers: “[…] wish to maintain a space for critique and the moral evaluation of contemporary capitalism and competition” (Kelty, 2008:76).

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Hackers in Europe During the 1980s several hacker groups emerged in Europe, most notable in Germany, Italy and The Netherlands. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Berlin was founded in 1981 by a hacker named Wau Holland.

Its aims resemble those of the activist hacker groups in Silicon Valley like Community Memory or People’s Computer Company. Just like the American counterparts, the CCC focused on the freedom of information and communication, free access to technological infrastructures and computers for everyone (Bazzichelli, 2008:140). Gonggrijp argues that the name Chaos was not chosen “[…] because we cause chaos. If anything, a lot of our collective work has actually prevented chaos […] we do understand some small part of how chaos works, and we have been able to help others deal with it better” (Gonggrijp, 2010b).

Manuel Castells argues that Amsterdam hacker culture did not develop in a social vacuum, as there is a “long tradition in alternative computer development, rooted in the strong academic community of physics researchers” (Castells, 2001:148). People from a BBS culture and others with a more political background, participating in squatter movements got together around the hacker magazine Hack-Tic. Netherlands’ most well-known hacker Rop Gonggrijp was the central author. They were influenced by the CCC, but also the 2600 magazine (Riemens, personal conversation). In their first issue they pose themselves as a critical group fighting against a ‘small club of powerful gentlemen, regulating the information society and deciding top-down what is good for us’ (Hack-Tic, 1989:3, translated by author). They are suspicious of big institutions having a lot of influence and keeping information of ordinary citizens in databases. Hack-Tic also admires open systems in which everyone is able to be a producer, not merely a consumer following the rules of the maker (idem). To put their critique or activism in practice, they wrote articles for instance on how make free phone calls, how to use UNIX, but also informing about the insecurity of electronic systems.

In 1993 Hack-Tic started XS4ALL, the second Internet Service Provider (ISP) for consumers in the Netherlands with the aim to bring information

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to the general public.18 The people from Hack-Tick were also the cofounders of De Digitale Stad (the digital city) in 1994, a citizen network that functioned as a digital ‘public sphere’, combining “local institutions, grassroot organizations and computers networks in the development of cultural expression and civic participation” (Castells, 2001:146).

According to Castells, this hacker group was at the center of European citizen networks in the countercultural movements (Castells, 2001:149).

They had close connection to the university world, with inspiration of academic researchers and student politics, and they were able to reach to a broader base then just their own network (Castells, 2001:149).

Hackers in Italy have a history that closely connected to that of activism. Leftist communities in Italy in the beginning of the 1980s used technology as a channel for sharing knowledge and free communication (Bazzichelli, 2008:139). According to Bazzichelli, who spent years in the Italian hacker scene, is the idea of hacker ethics in Italy closely linked to social hacking. A social hack refers to a communal idea of hacking, as a collective networking practice instead of seeing it as an individual trait (p.139). BBSs provided the means to socially organize. The goal was to create “new counter-information spaces, participate in debates on activism, cyber information and in social hacking, computer networks, communications, new information and in social hacking” (WikiArtPedia, cited in Bazzichelli, 2008:150).

The European hacking culture in the 1980s is associated with a political leftist, anarchist culture aimed at being critical to major institutions. Computers and computer networks are seen as the means to democratize and liberate people; ideas closely connected to those of Lee Felsenstein at the Homebrew Computer Club and Free Speech Movement in the Silicon Valley. Felsenstein almost reached a mythical status among Italian hackers who admired his idea of opening up technology for everyone (Bazzichelli, 2008:144). The influence of ideas from a subfield of hacking in the United States to the hacker scene in Italy shows how 18 XS4ALL has a rich and interesting history that is closely related to hacker issues. For more information on their history one could look on their website: http://www.xs4all.nl/overxs4all/geschiedenis/index.php (Dutch).

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fields are always formed in relation to other fields and history. And as we will see later, the formation of this idealist, leftist idea of hacking will influence the hacker field for the coming decades.

The 1980s mark major changes for the hacking field. A computer industry emerged, and computers became more mainstream in households and businesses. Some first and second generation hackers joined the commercial vibe, while others were trying to live by the hacker ethic. The movie WarGames both popular changed the conception of what a hacker is and initiated thousands of kids into hacking and cracking. Cracking became a synonym for hacking, which meant for a large group of ‘innocent people’ that they were being labeled as criminals. The emergence of networks meant the spread of hacker culture all over the world and made it possible to break into computers remotely.

4.5 Hacking today (1991-2010) Where hackers were already connected to networks in the 1980s, the introduction of the internet marked a new era of connectivity. For activist hackers the internet promised to be the democratizing technology they have long been waiting for. Other hackers and crackers saw it as a great opportunity to illegally explore computer systems of state institutions and corporations. The internet also spread hacker culture more quickly in more countries. Germany, the Netherlands and Italy became gravitational centers of hacking, where hacker culture was being celebrated in conferences, camps and later in hackerspaces.

The impact of global networks This is not the place to thoroughly cover the technical aspects, the history of the internet, or its social, political and economical consequences, but some of its principles are necessary to understand hacking today. As I briefly mentioned above, fueled by the Cold War, ARPA had invested in a decentralized information network to prevent a total breakdown after a possible attack. This network was initially set up between four different universities, among which MIT and Stanford. In the 1970s the ARPA

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network was merged with other network initiatives using a standardized protocol called TCP/IP. In the 1980s the number of networks only, and Europe, Asia and Australia were slowly converting to TCP/IP too, which allowed making intercontinental connections. In 1989 Tim BernersLee, a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) employee, implemented Engelbart’s hypertext concept into networks (the http protocol), which he called the World Wide Web. By granting public access, he made sure this technology would become widespread (Wikipedia, 2010a). The introduction of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) allowed people to access this network via modems, a computer and a web browser.

For the utopian hackers of the Whole Earth Network the birth a worldwide network was in line with their ideals that they derived from cybernetic-theorist Wiener and his vision of the world as an information system, along with McLuhan’s idea of a global village. In 1985, Brand and other members had already started the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a famous and much cited virtual community that still exists today. “To its users, the WELL became not simply a computer conferencing system but a way to recreate the countercultural ideal of shared consciousness in a new ‘virtual community’” (Turner, 2006:142).

With its open infrastructure, free access, self-governing principle and community minded architecture, the WELL became a forerunner of what many people hoped that the Internet would be (Turner, 142-3).

The internet was a huge success and grew so fast is, according to Jonathan Zittrain, because you did not need a membership, there was no censorship, no business plan and (initially) no financial interests, like other commercial networks like CompuServe and America Online (Zittrain, 2008:7,30). The internet offered huge possibilities and triggered creative manifestations. It should be no surprise then, that many hackers and hacker communities who were already connected to networks and BBSs, were early adopters of the internet.19 A whole new world opened for them, of which the possibilities and borders were not yet known. “[…]

19 FIDOnet, a network of BBSs already connected 32,000 people in 1990 (Zittrain, 2008:25)

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the hacker scene brought significantly more people into the scene who spent every waking hour trying to figure out ways into all manner of machines” (Goldstein, 2008:298). For many activist hackers, the internet seemed to have the potential for what they had been hoping for: a large, decentralized system for the distribution of information. Not only among hackers, but also in the academic world this led to utopian optimism of freedom and democracy, flattening of hierarchies, equality, prosperity, etc (Castells, 2001:2-5).

“In the year 2000, the bureaucracies of the cold war era would be ‘flattened and networked through the widespread adoption of new technologies’. In their place would arise ‘a new civilization, a global civilization, distinct from those that arose on the planet before.’ It would be a civilization marked by a singular understanding: ‘We’re one global society, one human race’ (Turner, 2006:233, quoting Schwartz & Leyden).

While there is no doubt that the internet had great socio-political, economical and cultural impact in a short period of time, it is by now apparent that existing power structures and inequalities are more or less intact and that the internet did not (yet) bring the desired democratizing effect. The internet rapidly became the domain of a commercial interests and in “[…] only a few years, there had been a dramatic shift from the dreams of the electronic free commune to the harsh world of a dot.com business in crisis” (Castells, 2006:152). Network technologies also allowed the quick development of a global economy and facilitated further development of our capitalist society.

The internet also had a lot of positive effects however. Yochai Benkler argues that with the arrival of worldwide networks and presence of ‘cheap’ technologies the general public is once more able to take control in cultural production. In the industrial model of cultural production a fairly small group is able to determine what we experience and controlled, locating “[…] individuals at the passive receiving end of the cultural conversation so that efforts to take these materials and remake them or efforts to participate as a cultural speaker, by and large required permission” (Benkler, 2007). What we are seeing now is that through a combination of technologies people can take:

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“[…] more of the information environment, make it their own, use it as found materials to put together their own expressions, do their own research, create their own communications, create their own communities, when they need collaboration with others” (Benkler, 2007).

But not everyone is pleased with people having access to these technologies that make reproduction and distribution of information easy and incredibly fast. The cultural industry slowly lost control of the distribution of their products and showed considerable panic by starting lawsuits and copyright lobbies. Similarly, states and institutions tried to regain control over the spread of information that could potentially harm them, as seen for instance in China and Egypt recently. A lot of people still believe in the revolutionary potential of internet technologies, for instance expressed by John Perry Barlow in the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: “We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear” (Barlow, 1996).

A plurality of hacking practices My account on hacking history so far has mainly focused on the ‘positive’ hacker practices, but by doing so the danger of creating a binary model arises. This model places on the one hand the ‘bad’ hacker conducting illegal activities and on the other the ‘good’ hacker who is creative and invents new things. This rather normative dichotomy fails to acknowledge the plurality of hacking practices and the occasionally thin line between what is considered good and bad. I will explore these two subjects here to prevent falling into this pitfall.

When one searches for hacker typologies on the internet, the distinction between white-hat hackers, gray-hat hackers and black-hat hackers is often found. The first category is about people breaking into a system and telling the owner about the security flaw. The black-hat

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hacker would immediately exploit the place and the gray-hat might do something in between. These categorizations lack two things: first, they see hacking as a singular activity: breaking in. Second, they do not address someone’s motivation of breaking in. Benschop (2001) makes a wider categorization of hackers and their motivations, but also warns that the boundaries between those categories are seldom clear. The first category is what we have seen as white-hat hackers above. The second distinction he makes is cyberhooligans, who are people that break in to get attention.

The third category is netactivists, which is closely connected to the fourth: hacktivists. Where netactivists are more concerned with using the Internet for providing political information, coordination and lobbying, hacktivists can use illegal means for getting attention. The fifth category is the cracker, who we have seen before. The sixth category Benschop distinguishes is the cyberterrorist, who uses hacking for commanding political aims or to damage other nation states.

The categories have one thing in common: people that use computers and networks to break into systems, but the motivations behind the practices differ widely. One can have idealistic and political reasons to break in and change or damage information, and others may do it to earn money. While some of the categories are major reasons for concern in our networked society, we should be careful with naming hackers in one breath with cyberterrorists. As seen in my account of hackers above, there are hackers that have affection for technology and a proportion of them has a thorough knowledge of security. But having the knowledge and skills does not automatically mean that they break into computers for personal gain.

The second aspect I want to address in regards to hacking is the moral designation of both practices and people. These normative labels are not fixed over time and differ per cultural situation. Consider for instance the case of German hacker Karsten Nohl who broke the OVchipkaart (new Dutch public transportation card) encryption that uses RFID technology20 to transfer information. With the hack he showed the 20 RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification and is a technique for transferring data wirelessly over short distances

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possibility of ghosting, someone being able to remotely copy your card including personal information (de Winter, 2008). Is Nohl conducting an illegal activity by breaking the encryption and should therefore be considered ‘bad’, or is he contributing to the greater good by showing the security flaw and therefore ‘good’? And what about Nohl’s decision to release the algorithms used for encryption? It probably depends on who you ask. The companies and government that invested three billion euro into the system might not be so pleased with his hacked system, while consumers and consumer organizations might be glad it was discovered before other people take advantage of it.

Making normative distinctions on what good and bad hacking is, is one thing, but determining whether a hacker is good or bad is another.

A hacker, like any other person, can have multiple identities or can conduct several practices. He or she can be an open-source programmer during the day and steal credit card numbers at night. Hackers are often in possession of a considerable amount of knowledge on security. While this knowledge could be used for the protection of systems, it can also be used for breaking into systems. Could money lure them into stealing?

I will further explore the boundaries of good and bad in my empirical account of hacker communities in the Netherlands.

Celebration of hacker culture at cons and camps Especially in the early days of academic research on ‘cyberculture’ hackers were portrayed as solitary people mostly operating in the virtual world (Coleman, 2010:68). But these studies overlook the fact that most hackers have face-to-face, local meetings. During the 1970s HCC already drew people together on their weekly meetings, and in 1976 a Computer faire was held that was described by Levy as “the hacker equivalent of the Woodstock movement of the 1960s” (Levy, 2001:266). During the 1980s hackers in the United States and Europe became more aware of each other through the use of electronic networks and later the Internet.

In 1989, the Hippies from Hell / Hack-Tic announced the Galactic Hacker Party, a hacker conference and party to bring hackers from all over the world together. Among the visitors were Lee Felsenstein, Wau Holland,

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Steven Levy and John Draper (Captain Crunch) (Bazzichelli, 2008:143).

Since then many international conferences have been organized.

Coleman, who has been attending hacker conferences for eight years, has written an ethnographic article on ‘cons’ (conference in hacker lingo) and describes the internal dynamics and the significance of cons for hackers. She argues that the conferences are important for hackers to share information and knowledge, but meeting old friends and make new ones is the most important aspect. The cons make visible and celebrate the hacker’s social world, where rituals serve to confirm their culture.

Everyone is a participant, engaging in talks, hacking, gaming, “copious eating and drinking”, sight-seeing and the fun to have as little sleep as possible, while compensating this with a surplus of caffeine (Coleman, 2010:50-3). People present their own work on technical matter, but also on politics, legal matter and privacy. New York hacker Emanuel Goldstein wrote about the cons: “Apart from simply impressing those around you with your seemingly superhuman abilities […], you got to meet some really interesting people and explore technologies that most folks didn’t even know it existed.” (Goldstein, 2008:15-6).

A hacker camp is the outdoor version of the con. In 1993, Hack-Tic wanted to revive the success of their Galactic Hacker Party in 1989 and decided to go camping: “That’s right. On august 4th, 5th and 6th 1993, we’re organising a three-day summer congress for hackers, phone phreaks, programmers, computer haters, data travellers, electro-wizards, networkers, hardware freaks, techno-anarchists, communications junkies, cyberpunks, system managers, stupid users, paranoid androids, Unix gurus, whizz kids, warez dudes, law enforcement officers (appropriate undercover dress required), guerilla heating engineers and other assorted bald, long-haired and/or unshaven scum” (Gonggrijp, 1993).

More than a thousand people (who probably fit in one of the above stated categories) showed up to the ‘Hacking at the end of the Universe’ hacker camp and made into a massive event (Goldstein, 2008:271). It became a tradition. Every 4 years a new hacker camp was organized in the Netherlands: Hacking In Progress (1997), Hackers At Large (2001), What

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The Hack (2005) and Hacking At Random (2009). In Germany a similar tradition was started in 1999 by CCC and today many smaller camps are organized annually in Europe.21

Hackerspaces The massive attendance at the cons and camps not only signified that many people shared an interest in technology, but it also created awareness among hackers that people enjoyed meeting face-to-face and work on projects collaboratively. The urge to meet and collaborate, but also the need to get an internet connection led to the emergence of hackerspaces22 in the 1990s. Germany and Italy where the first countries to host hackerspaces and later other European countries followed. At the moment of writing a ‘third wave’ of hackerspaces is thriving: hundreds of hackerspaces23 have either just been set up or are in the process of opening up in the United States and Europe (Farr, 2009).

Hackerspaces have not been subjected to much academic research yet, and with my participant observation I hope to contribute to understanding the significance of hackerspaces. Within the hacker community much debate is going on determining what a hackerspace is (Moilanen, 2009). Nick Farr shows for instance that a definition like “a place where people can learn about technology and science outside the confines of work or school” is much too broad for many older hackers who have been around since the first wave of hackerspaces (Farr, 2009).

As I will explore the diverse meanings and personal explanations of hackerspaces later in my participant observation, it is sufficient for now to describe hackerspaces as local spaces where hackers can meet, share knowledge and work on projects.

Berlin was one of the first cities to host a hackerspace. C-Base, sometimes referred to as the ‘mother of hackerspaces’, was established in 21 A nice impression of the atmosphere at a hacker camp is found here: http:// www.archive.org/details/ccc_campvideo_2007_short 22 Or hacklabs, co-working spaces, clubhouses, hideouts, space stations.

23 For an indication the number of the known (public) hackerspaces that are either setup or in the state of opening, look at http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_ Hacker_Spaces

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1995 and continues to live on today. It forms a hub for people interested in a wide array of techno-associated activities, but also music, theater and art exhibitions (hackerspaces.org, 2010, Wikipedia, 2010b). Another major and older hackerspace is found in Cologne. C4 was set up in 1998 as part of the Chaos Computer Club, which I have mentioned earlier.

Today Germany hosts around fifty hackerspaces all over the country24, creating a dense network of places for hackers to visit.

In 1999, an initiative was started to create a network of hacklabs in Italy. In a short period 19 of those labs were founded all over the country with the aim to distribute “[…] the principles of hacker ethics and a particular critical, libertarian and experimental attitude towards technology” (Bazzichelli, 2008:166). Hackers could meet here and reflect on social matters, but also exchange hardware. The spaces were functioning as training grounds where knowledge on technology, communication, privacy and related issues were shared (Bazzichelli, 2008:166-7). The Italian hacklabs integrate hacker activism (hacktivism) with networked art activism (artivism) in the line of avant-garde and neo-avant garde art, expressing freedom of expression and communication (Bazzichelli, 2008:20-1, 185). Italian authorities were suspicious about the activities going on in these hacklabs as they hosted a server offering cryptographic services for private communication. In 2004 the server was confiscated by the police, also referred to as the second Italian crackdown after authorities raided Italian BBSs in 1994 (Bazzichelli, 2008: 168, 81).

The first initiative in The Netherlands is found in 1999, when ASCII (Amsterdam Subversive Center for Information Interchange)25 opened its doors, consisting of ‘politically aware hackers’ and free software developers (ASCII, n.d.). Like the Italian hackers, this group was politically active and they saw the Internet as a means of empowerment (ASCII, n.d., Bazzichelli, 2008:191). Its initial aim was to provide Amsterdam squatters with internet access and e-mail. Later they focused on supplying

24 For a map see http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Germany 25 ASCII is also an abbreviation for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which is a widely used character-encoding scheme and a well known word amongst geeks and hackers.

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knowledge and resources for activist groups having difficulties finding it elsewhere (ASCII, n.d.). After having to move several times from squat to squat the group fell apart, but some members are still active in current hackerspaces (Riemens, personal conversation). Since 2009 new initiatives have emerged with the successful opening of Revelation Space in The Hague and Randomdata in Utrecht. In 2010 hackers in another eight Dutch cities are planning to open a space.26 Other hackers from ASCII found their way into hacking communities organized in squats in Amsterdam and Utrecht (Bazzichelli, 2008:191). The whereabouts are less permanent as police raids force them to move through the city and find a new squat. Compared to Revspace and Randomdata, these spaces seem to have a less open or public character and are closer connected to political activism. What is interesting to notice is that groups of Italian and Spanish hackers have found their way into these hacking communities after experiencing strong oppression by authorities in their own countries (Riemens, personal conversation).

Amsterdam has proven to be more tolerant to activism.

The United States have a long history of hacking as was seen in this chapter and although some hackerspaces can be traced back to the 1980s and 1990s, these spaces do not seem to have the semi-open character as the ones today. In 2007, a group of American hackers decided to organize a trip (hackers on a plane) to German and Austrian hackerspaces in order to understand the connection of hackerspaces within local community, something the US hackers highly admired (Borland, 2007). With the information gathered at C-Base in Berlin and Metalab in Vienna (amongst others) they flew back to the US and started establishing hackerspaces in New York City (NYC Resistor), Washington (HacDC) and San Fransisco (Noisebridge) (Tweney, 2009). They might have started a hype, as at the moment of writing almost 200 hackerspaces are either set up in during 2009 and 2010 or are about to open.27 While hackerspaces that function as semi-public meeting places 26 See http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Netherlands for a list of current hackerspaces and planned ones.

27 http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/United_States_of_America

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for techno-enthusiasts might be a fairly recent phenomenon, it should be understood in relation to other community formation initiatives in the 20th century. Hippie communes in the 1970s share commonalities with hacker communities in that people with common interests try to create a micro-sphere with its own politics, organization and economy, often imbued with utopian ideas (Kanter, 1972: 1-3). Like the communes, people in hackerspaces are looking for freedom, which means not being determined by greater (capitalist) society. The emergence of hackerspaces should also be understood in relation to other counterculture movements as seen at Berkeley in the 1970s and the European activist hacker scene in the 1980s in Germany, Italy and The Netherlands (Grenzfurthner & Schneider, n.d.). By connecting the first hackerspaces to these movements makes it understandable why the first wave hackerspaces in Europe sometimes started in squats, being centers of political activism and counterculture activities.

4.6 Conclusion In this account on the history of hacking I hope to have addressed some of the essential events, issues and debates that have structured the hacker field over the past sixty years. It should be clear by now that the hacker field, like any field, is relatively autonomous and shaped both from within and outer forces, such as socio-political circumstances and corporate activities. The Cold War, 1970s hippie culture, the invention of the microchip and a movie like Wargames all influenced the hacker field in their own way. What I also hope to have emphasized is that speaking of the hacker culture is problematic, because within the hacker field(s) there is much diversity, and a plurality of values and practices to be found.

But despite the diversity and the fact that the field is subject to constant change, discussions on freedom, openness and property are a constant factor and continue to structure the hacker field. In the next chapter I will explore how Dutch hackers articulate these subjects and how it structures their world views, their practices and even their daily lives.

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5. Becoming a hacker. A participant observation.

In January 2010 my friend and freelance research journalist known by his nickname Bicyclemark, introduced me into the world of hacking. He just returned from giving a presentation at 26c3, the 26th edition of the annual hacker conference in Berlin by the Chaos Computer Club. With much enthusiasm Bicyclemark told me about the conference and how hackers would tinker with technology, build things, critique copyright systems and philosophize about the world. From that moment on, everything fell into the right place for me. I started to read about hacking, watch videos on the history of hacking, and began to think about how I wanted to perform my research and which themes to focus on. Not long after that, Bicyclemark introduced me at Revelation Space (Revspace) in Den Haag, one of the two semi-public hackerspaces (at that time) in the Netherlands.

A new world opened for me.

During the next ten months I was a regular guest of Revspace, but also Randomdata, a hackerspace in Utrecht, and occasionally at Slug, a hacker community that organizes itself in Amsterdam’s squats. I also attended 2600NL-meetings in Utrecht, where hackers from all over the Netherlands came together to have dinner. In March 2010 I went to the United States and visited Pumping Station:One, a hackerspace in Chicago. In the summer of the same year, I was part of the hacker crew that organized Hack in the Box, a security conference, and I spent three days on a camp-site amongst hackers at a hacker camp called eth0. My bachelor degree in new media, my general interest in technology and the recent sociological perspectives that I gained provided me with a position that was helpful for studying this field.

In this chapter I connect my personal experiences in these hacker surroundings with aspects that I found in my analysis of the history of hacking and relate it to liberal traditions. As stated earlier, I will use a relational perspective that leans heavily on the work of Bourdieu. This means that I analyze and describe the specific nomos, illusio and forms of capital of the hacker field, in order to give the reader a feeling of the

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game and an understanding of the dynamics. This chapter is divided into five subsections, but this division is for analytical and organizational purposes only, and not to mark boundaries. Elements of the hackers’ lifestyles are for instance inseparable from their practices and the settings they operate in. However, I will focus more thoroughly on each of these aspects in separate subsections to gain a better understanding of each of these aspects.

5.1 Gaining entrance and exploring the hacker field One of the most challenging aspects of using field analysis is drawing the boundaries of your field. On the question where one field ends and another starts, Wacquant and Bourdieu state: “The limits of the field are situated at the point where the effects of the field cease” (B&W, 1992:100), but as Emirbayer argues, this is rather difficult to determine in a theoretical framework that studies relations, rather than substances (Emirbayer, 1997:304). Analysis is complex for at least three reasons. The first being that hackers are --like other people-- not bound to just one field, but operate in many fields. The second reason is that, although the Dutch hacker field may operate on a local level, it is also part of a greater international field and influenced by world-wide external forces.

A third reason is that the boundaries are continually at stake in the field itself (Emirbayer&Johnson, 2008:8). In the first part of this chapter, I give an account of my first steps into the field, and how I gained trust in the communities. This will then provide a framework through which I can mark some boundaries of the field that I will use in the rest of this thesis.

First contact In February 2010, Bicyclemark introduced me at Revspace in Den Haag.

We arrived somewhere during the day at what seemed to be an abandoned building in an industrial area. There was no sign on the door, but by the description on Revspace’s website we knew we were at the right place.

After ringing the door bell a guy with the nickname Brainsmoke28 came 28 I will use mostly use nicknames to address individual hackers in this thesis.

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to the door. He was completely dressed in black in the type of garment I associated with hard rock fans and squatters. After a short introduction he let us in, and guided us to the hackerspace on the first floor. We entered a large empty space with some furniture only in one corner. Most of the windows were darkened and the strip lightning on the ceiling was covered with translucent cloths that gave a warmish light.

Only one other hacker was present at the time, a guy who goes under the nickname GMC, and after introductions he gave us a tour of the massive hackerspace and the non-inclusive empty car showroom underneath it. The space is set up in what used to be the office of Chrysler car dealer. The Den Haag municipality bought the building to demolish it and build residential buildings at the spot, but after some funding problems they suspended the project and Revspace was able to rent it from the municipality for a low price. In the office section, Revspace members dedicated a separate room as server space, and in the back a storage room with outdated computers and gadgets to play with. Another room serves as soldering space, and the adjacent room is used for people to work on all sorts of projects. The present kitchen and toilet facilities provide in people’s basic needs. The largest space seemed quite unallocated, but at the time of my first visit the space had just opened its doors, and the amount of members was not so large yet.

I felt quite awkward at my first contact, and it was mostly Bicyclemark who was talking with GMC, who he knew from previous hacker camps and cons. Most of the time, we were sitting on the couches, where the hackers were doing something unknown to me on their laptops. I did not know whether it would be rude to interrupt them. After a while of just sitting, I felt like I should ask something, so I inquired whether there were any projects going on in the space at the moment.

Brainsmoke explained how he wanted to make an RFID29 based lock on I do this partly because hackers often identify themselves with their nickname and partly to make it a little more anonymous, something most hackers really appreciate.

29 RFID stands for Radio frequency identification, a technique used quite often today in for instance public transport cards, passports and toll ways to transfer information.

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the hackerspace door, and told us how he would implement a security measure that would prevent man-in-the-middle-attacks30. It was already pretty technically challenging for me to understand, despite his effort to explain it in layman terms.

The first visit to a hackerspace did not give me the amount of information I was expecting, based on what Goffman made me believe: “The first day you’ll see more than you’ll ever see again” (Goffman, 1989:130). I realized then, that going to a hackerspace during the day was not the best decision. GMC told me I should come back on Tuesday nights, when it tended to be the busiest.31 There was some time in between my first and second visit because I was focusing on reading the history of hacking, in order to understand the hacker field better. Another reason was that I made a trip to the United States, where I experienced my second hackerspace: Pumping Station:One (PS:One) in Chicago. This was quite interesting for me, because I was able to recognize some similarities and differences with its Dutch counterparts.

The visit to PS:One gave me a new boost into my research project after my first experience, for two reasons, the first being the presence of a more than two hackers. I arrived at a semi-busy night at the hackerspace that was housed in what appeared to be a closed-down industrial building. The inside was recently refurbished, however, and looked clean. About six people were working on their projects in the hackerspace and during the visit about ten more people walked in. I was given a tour

by Eli, one of the founders of the hackerspace. She showed me the wood work shop (see figure 2), a separate place where people could work with metal and weld things, and a corner with tools for doing electrical work.

Tables were placed throughout the space where people could just hang out with their laptop, or work on projects. Eli introduced me to a couple of other hackers, and they were all welcoming and eager to know that I was writing my thesis on hackers. I talked for over an hour with them 30 Man-in-the-middle-attacks are attempts to steal information when transferred from A to B, which can occur for instance on networks, phone calls or wireless transmission of data.

31 A thorough description of the setup of Revspace and other hackerspaces and an analysis of what people are doing there is found later in this chapter.

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Figure 2. PS:One’s wood workshop

Figure 3. PS:One: Just fucking do it!

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on all sorts of things: where the idea came from to start a hackerspace, what difficulties and legal issues they experienced setting it up, about the membership structure and what kind of projects were going on.

A second reason that this visit boosted my research was the contagious presence of creative energy. The people I talked to were all very positive about the hackerspace and the possibilities it offered them.

They appreciated the diverse backgrounds of the members (I met a chemist, a biologist, a musician, a photographer, an ex-lawyer, someone who works with fabrics and a couple of computer-hackers that night) and the cross-fertility that arose from this diverse crowd. Most people were visibly working on their projects. “Just fucking do it” (see figure 3) was written on a wall, which was the credo of the hackerspace and founding member Eric Michaud. He sparked my enthusiasm about hackers with his breathless monologue on the constructive character of hacker culture and why it forms an interesting alternative to capitalist models. Michaud also introduced me via e-mail to Fish_, the hacker that started Randomdata, a hackerspace in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Back in the Netherlands, I learned about the existence of 2600NL, an initiative to bring hackers from all over the Netherlands together.32 They organized a monthly meeting in Utrecht and I thought it could be an excellent opportunity for me to meet more Dutch hackers. The way to sign up for the meeting was to edit a wiki on their website, but I felt a little out of place to just add my name there, not knowing anyone. I decided to announce myself first on the IRC-channel33 stated on the website. I wrote that I wanted to attend the meeting and asked whether anyone had a problem with my attendance. I told them about my research project and to avoid any possible suspicion I gave them a link to a blog on my project that I kept at that time.34 A hacker who goes under the nickname 32 2600 is a famous number in hacker history, because it refers to the sound frequency used by phone phreakers to hack the telephone network. The first hacker magazine adopted this number as its name and is famous among all hackers.

33 IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, a first-day internet communication method that is preferred by most hackers for its less-traceableness, its old-school visual style and the easy of access through multiple platforms.

34 The blog is called ‘Hacking as a way of life’ and found on heelveelkoffie.nl

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DipSwitch thought it was ok as long as I did not have the intention to ‘mess around’ during the meeting. I promised him I would not do this.

I arrived a little early at Utrecht Central Station, where the hackers arranged to meet each other in front of the Burger King, before walking to the final destination, an Irish pub. From a distance I waited for more people to show up and it occurred to me that the people joining the group were all guys, mostly between the ages of 18-35, dressed in dark clothes.

When I arrived at the circle of hackers, I introduced myself with my first name, and was surprised to hear everyone mumbling their nickname back. We were not in a dedicated hacker setting or in an online space, but standing in a public space amongst non-hackers. The fascinating part was that some hackers seemed to be a little ashamed to say their nickname out load, maybe because they might have not used it in offline or in nonhacker settings so much yet.

I learned that the 2600NL meetings were initiated to socialize with the people who they met online in the IRC channel(s) in real life.35 At the first meeting I attended, about twenty guys were having dinner and beers on a long table. I still felt awkward in the group, and I was afraid they would not like the idea of being studied. Some of the hackers were a bit reluctant when I told them about my plans to write a thesis on hackers. This had mainly to do with the general suspicion for coverage by outsiders. The hackers I met were well aware of their general negative image in the ‘outside world’, of which I was still a part at that time. As I mentioned in the historical section of this thesis, journalists (or media in general) have played a major role in creating this image, and I think, although most hackers were really positive about my research project, I was being placed on the same base by some hackers. This changed when I told them I was currently writing on the history of hacking, why hacking interests me, and why it made me enthusiastic to do this research. I avoided using words like ‘illicitness’ or ‘breaking in’, and 35 In real life (IRL) is an often used expression in the hacker surroundings and online culture to contrast online communication or being in virtual environments with physical ones. In early academic works on virtual reality the division between real and virtual was sometimes made, but today academics prefer to use virtual / actual, or virtual / local.

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instead I showed my general (and sincere) excitement about the openness and creative part of hacking. I also told them that I did not want to be an outside observer, but participate and learn from being in the situation.

Other hackers responded in positive manner the first time I met them when I told them I about my research they started asking me questions.

And then there was a group of hackers that did not understand why it would be interesting to do research on hackers: “How can you write a whole thesis on that?� one hacker asked me.

Most people inquired about my computer skills as if they wanted to determine whether I was a complete outsider who would never fully understand what was going on, what hacking was really about. My answer was that I grew up using Commodore 64s, Atari STs and Amiga 500s36, that I have always been interested in technology, and that I once started a computer science program but never finished it. I mostly observed approving gestures after telling this as if I they acknowledged was not a complete noob37. I showed that I was in possession some specific technological knowledge and skills that I acquired from an early age.

These sources, what Bourdieu would specify as cultural capital, gained me some trust within the communities. It also allowed me to understand at least the general line of reasoning of their technological conversations.

This did not mean, however, that I felt really comfortable being in hacker surroundings during the first months.

During the next few visits I felt a little out-of place, like an outsider and an observer in these groups of techno-specialists caused by a missing sense of the game. My (academic) habitus, goals and interests did not immediately match those of the hackers. It took me several months to get a better feeling and understanding of what was going on in this hacker world. Being able to understand the field better also initiated my

36 These are all computer models from the 1980s, which are still used by hobbyists today.

37 A noob (sometimes spelled n00b) is a widely used term in both hacker culture as online and gaming culture to describe a person that has a limited knowledge on a certain subject, or computer knowledge more specifically. Noobs differ from newbies in that the first category is not expected to learn anything in the future, whereas newbies just need to learn more in order to lose their label.

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acceptance within the hacker groups. However, during my research I never became a full insider, or part of the inner circle. This was caused by a number of reasons. The most important one is that I was unable to match the level of dedication that most hackers display to invest in their field. Unlike Goffman’s advice for field research, I was simply unable to “cut [my] life down to the bone [and] remove myself from all resources (Goffman, 1986:127)”, because I had a job and a social life that I did not want to give up. Another reason was that, despite my effort to become a hacker, I was still a researcher – I had different motivation to be around in hackerspaces than the hackers. A third reason was that I had limited computer skills compared to the hackers. Most of them have professional skills and work as professionals, day and night, year in, year out with all aspects of (computer) technology and I was incapable of showing these skills that seem to be necessary to penetrate the inner circle.

In an attempt to get closer to the groups of hackers, to show them that ‘I was at their side,’ I applied stickers from several hackerspaces on my laptop (see cover), like many hackers have. Having these hacker symbols on my laptop made me feel less standing out. One time at Revspace the stickers notably did their work: after I introduced myself to people I just met before, and told them about my research, one hacker made apprehensive facial gestures, but said “[…] at least you’re one of us”, pointing at my laptop. I always brought my laptop to hacker gatherings (except for dinners), because I was able to do what hackers do a lot (doing something on your computer), it made me feel less outof-place sitting around, and I was able to write field notes at the spot. I also installed Ubuntu on my laptop, which is an accessible distribution of Linux. I wanted to learn more about Linux, but I also installed it to show that I was not dependent on Windows and to fit in.

After I visited Revspace a couple of times, people seem to recognize my face, although I saw different members every time and had to introduce myself again. Randomdata in Utrecht has only a handful of active members and pretty soon everyone knew me by name there. My embeddedness in the field reached greater depth when Fish_ (Randomdata) asked me to be part of a volunteering crew of a security

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conference in Amsterdam called Hack in the Box (HITB). This conference was previously organized in Kuala Lumpur and Dubai, and premiered in Amsterdam in July 2010. Volunteering at this event did not only sound like something fun, it also promised to be an ideal opportunity for me to get closer to some hackers, which is exactly what happened.

Getting into place: Hack in the Box The conference was organized in the Krasnapolsky Hotel, one of the most prominent hotels in Amsterdam.38 It was strange to see a hacker crew in this setting, dressed up in dark clothes and crew T-shirts with their nicknames on the back. I was welcomed by everyone the morning I came in. Fish_, the coordinator of the Dutch crew, introduced me to the Malaysian crew, among which were six hackers. Everyone was friendly and in a good mood. Because of the presence of about 25 crew members for a small conference (about 250 attendees) there was not much to do during the day and most people, including me, were just socializing or watching parts of the talks. Fish_ assigned me to be in charge of ten twoway radios that were used by the crew to communicate throughout the building. I thought this was a rather large responsibility, not because the radios were that important, but because of the value of the devices (around 500 euro per device).

The so called winter garden of the hotel, a giant glass room with romantic decorations on the wall, had traded its normal setting of chicly well dressed tables for a hackerspaces village (see figure 4). This meant that five hackerspaces (Revspace, Randomdata, Hack42 (Arnhem), Hackerspace Brussels, tmp/lab (Paris)) had their own stand to promote themselves. Toool, the Amsterdam lock picking collective also had a stand where one could learn about locks and how to pick them. Then there was a CTF stand (see a description below), a web-hacking challenge stand and four stands occupied by major sponsors (including Google).

38 I have been told that renting the part of Krasnapolsky the 4 days (2 days of trainings and 2 days conference) cost around 120,000 Euros. A non-discounted ticket for the whole four days cost 2,700 Euros and students were able to buy a discounted ticket for around 300 euro. A lot of people were sent by their companies that paid for the expenses.

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Figure 4. Hackerspace village at Hack in the Box. Photo courtesy of hackinthebox.org

There were two conference rooms, two smaller rooms for trainings (for the first two days) and a ‘lab room’ for workshops and lightning talks. On the last day I was responsible for everything happening in the lab room, which implied making sure the speakers were there, and setting up the audiovisual devices.

During the first conference day, Rufi0 and KLKS, two hackers part of the Malaysian crew, were setting up a hacking game called Capture the Flag – Mass 0wnage39 (CTF). They explained the setup to two Dutch hackers (DrWhax and Junk). The game simulates situations found on real systems, networks and the internet on a local network. Teams of hackers have to find clever ways to break into it and find the thirty flags that the game masters have hidden, and fast times are important. They want to bring “black-hat hacking fun of hacking into the competition”.

While they were explaining the technical details of setting up this game

39 When someone is 0wned, (owned, sometimes spelled p0wned, 0wn3d) an indication is made of a significant domination of one person/group over the other, based on specific skills or knowledge. It is a term often used on the internet and in gaming culture and originates from hackers in the 1990s.

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the two Dutch hackers were listening in awe, clearly impressed by Rufi0 and KLKS’s skills, and the months of labor they put into it. However, the status that Rufi0 obtained just a minute ago vanished when he was challenged to do a web hacking test on the 2600nl website. This is supposed to be a fairly easy challenge for most computer hackers, but he was only able to beat it after 10 minutes when the suggestion was made to search for the answer on the internet. His inability to solve it quickly instigated some mild humiliating laughter by the other hackers and perhaps some embarrassment for Rufi0. It is an example how hackers like to play around, challenge each other and how hierarchies are based on the specific cultural capital in the form of technical knowledge and practices.

During the three days I was part of the HITB crew I got to know some hackers a little better, I learned things in the talks I attended and got a better understanding of how closely connected the hacker field and professional computer security are. The founder and executive officer of HITB goes under the nickname L33tdawg and is a hacker, yet he organizes a conference that aims to train and inform companies on vulnerabilities.

Two worlds that many people would not imagine together are connected here. For the hackers themselves it is not so surprising. They tend to have professional skills on security of networks and are often not the black-hat hacker that people maybe expect, but rather warn institutions on their vulnerabilities.

A talk on vulnerability of ATM machines was cancelled, because the Italian speaker was afraid he would get arrested, after ATM manufacturers threatened him they would send the police (De Winter, 2010c). The closing talk of the conference was called ‘The Traveling Hacksmith’, given by Saumil Shah was a noteworthy experience. Shah explained how he frequently has to travel and spend much time in hotels.

He was getting annoyed of paying five dollar an hour or 20 dollar a day for access to wireless internet. Shah then showed the audience a couple of examples of how he used simple hacks to pay less, nothing, or even provide free access for everyone at the hotel. After every explanation of how he was able to hack the systems, he could count on roaring from

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the crowd, who clearly enjoyed his clever solutions. Shah motivated his hacks by stating that the hotels were overpricing the service, and that he would have been willing to pay if it were a normal price. He argued that “The abuse of the hotels being the internet access monopolists legitimizes hacking the systems, as long as you don’t damage anything, or use it for your own profit.” In other words, he legitimized his hacking based on his own moral judgments. He felt that the hotels were unfair, and he thought he should be able to resist the abuse.

Acquiring a feeling of the game at eth0 A couple of weeks after HITB I attended eth0, a hacker camp organized on a camp site in a rural area, where I would spend my first all-nighters with hackers. HXX, a Dutch foundation that sponsors and organizes hacker events, also sponsored this event. As I wrote before, camps have become a tradition in the Netherlands since the first one was organized in 1993. I have noticed that hackers are constantly referring to things that happened at prior events, especially at HAR 2009. Weeks before eth0 people were already getting excited about the idea of being amongst friends and likeminded people for four days and three nights at eth0. This camp gave me an opportunity to experience what hackers do, go through, and what they are subjected to. Of all experiences during my research I did not come any closer to the game than these four days that I spent non-stop with hackers. I joined the rhythm of the camp, and tried to participate and embed myself as much as possible. I talked to many people, heard dozens of stories, attended talks, organized barbecues, and just went with flow, trying to absorb the dynamics of this hacker life celebration.

An apocalyptic setting was created at the entrance of the camp where old army vehicles overgrown with ivy, and a ‘man’ with a protective suit and gas mask was placed in one of the cars (see figure 5). The organizers had smashed old office furniture and gave it a rusty look, and the labels on some metal drawers created a striking criticism to government control and neglect of people’s privacy, yet in the form of a joke. The labels stated: “Confidential department”, “Pictures and fingerprints”, “Standard forms for bugs & house searches” and “State

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Figure 5. Apocalyptic setting at eth0

secret – very secret” (see figure 6). This setting was probably created to support the theme of this event: ‘In a digital age hackers save the planet’.

Next to the entrance was a farmhouse where lectures and workshops were given and also housed the eth0-radio studio. The main tent was converted into a shoe free lounge, where hackers could sit on mattresses, drink something and socialize, or work on their laptop (see figure 7).

Another tent served as a space to do hardware hacking (see figure 8), an old army tent was dubbed as the ‘retrotent’, where people could play games on old game consoles. Revspace also arranged an army tent and tried to get all the hackerspace together in a ‘hackerspace village’.

I got a ride from DrWhax, and when we arrived we searched for a space to set up our tents. He knew some people in the corner of the camp site where we set up our tents next to. We arranged our tents in such a way that they were standing in a shape of a crescent and we covered the space in between with a large plastic sheet that functioned as rain cover (see figure 9). We placed a table and chairs underneath, which formed the center of our ‘little village’. Soon we would have electricity and network access, an essential element for the hackers. The sight of hackers in black clothes working on their laptops, sitting in front of their tents, on

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Figure 6. Hacker humor

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Figure 7. The main tent and lounge area at eth0

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Figure 8. Hardware hacking tent

Figure 9. Typical setup of tents at eth0

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a grass field in daylight, in what many would describe as “the middle of nowhere�, gave an intriguing contrast to the settings I was used to (see

Figure 10. Hackers in another setting than what I was used to.

figure 10).

The first day I met a lot of new people, who were mostly hackers from all over the Netherlands, but also an American hacker. I also met people that not necessarily identified themselves as hackers, but rather as technology aficionados, or DIYers. After most people had set up their tents, they socialized with old friends, mostly in small groups.

At our tents there was also a group hanging out, and stories were told continuously about things that happened at previous hacker camps, on technical matter, but also on laws and privacy. They liked to joke around and tell heroic hacking tales, trying to impress others. After eating a pizza in a nearby village, it got darker on the camp site. Hackers gathered at their tents, mostly sitting in circles, working on their laptops while telling

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stories and drinking a beer, vodka, Club Mate or coffee. At 3am still no one from the group where I was sitting had gone to bed.

The next morning started with coffee. People were still half asleep, and crawled behind their laptops again. After a couple of hours everyone was a little more awake and suddenly a conversation on religion was going on between four hackers. As most hackers I met are atheists, I was quite surprised by their nuanced analyses on Islam and Christianity and their alleged social influences. Hackers share a lot with what Hall observes in liberalism: “[Liberalism] favours free-thinking, rationalist and skeptical modes of thought, regarding religion as a private conscience, not a matter for the state to legislate” (Hall, 1986:39). Hackers tend to be rational with a strong preference for logic, and religions based on elements that are not directly observable or verifiable do not comply with hacker logic.

That afternoon I was guest at on an eth0 radio show, where I was being interviewed by DrWhax about my research project. The thought that my research ‘objects’ would be listening what I, as a semi-outsider, had to say about ‘their world’ was confronting and made me nervous. I also did not want to give away too much of my findings and opinions in order not to influence later discussions. In the end, the interview stayed quite on the surface, and we did not discuss my research in too many details. A couple of months later I was interviewed another time by DrWhax on Signal, a radio station dedicated to hacking and is organized

by Dutch hackers. During this interview I was much more relaxed and was able to discuss some more details.40 That night was fruitful for me. After we did grocery shopping, we joined a barbecue organized by members of Revspace and made it into a big social gathering (see figure 11). During dinner people were mostly socializing, telling stories and sharing knowledge. I had an interesting conversation with a guy who works as a computer forensic for a major American telecommunication company. When a computer crime is committed against that company, he has to trace and collect evidence of the criminal on digital media. Just like at HITB, two worlds that seem 40 A recording of this show is found here: http://signal.hackerspaces.org/ archive/2010-09-09-2200-hackerspace-hour.mp3

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to oppose each other may actually be not so mutually exclusive. There might have been hackers at eth0 that commit crimes of the type he researches, and there were definitely people that possess those hacking skills. Although his work is related, he told me he likes to hack in his free time and socialize at hacker events. That does not mean however, that he does not learn new information that he can use for his job.

At night, groups of hackers were gathering around a large bonfire where copious amounts of alcohol were being consumed, and an occasional joint was shared. The atmosphere was energetic as people were visibly enjoying the presence of many like-minded and sharing thoughts on topics they like the most. Their culture, beliefs and practices were being confirmed, appreciated and celebrated, creating group engagement. Social ties are being formed or strengthened. With its highly flexible character, the hacker camp creates a temporal space that is “pregnant with possibility� (Coleman, 2010:53). People get connected, ideas are born, and plans are made. At HAR2009 camp for instance, a couple of hackers from Den Haag were inspired to create a hackerspace

Figure 11. Barbecue at Revspace’s tent

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and four months later they opened the doors of Revspace.

The last night, I had a long conversation with a hacker from the United States named Flyko about his road to becoming a hacker, what the concept hacker means for him and how it structures his life. He also identified me as a hacker after I declared myself earlier that day not to be one: “We’re all potentially hackers. You’re a hacker, you said to me earlier that you are not a hacker, but I thought, yeah, like that’s gonna last, haha.” I realized then that I slowly integrated into the hacker field, developed a feeling for the game and learned some of the stakes and the elements of the nomos.

I became passionate about the hacker attitude and the causes they fight for. I also became more politically aware than I was before this research, especially on the subjects of privacy and property rights. Slowly the rules of the game were becoming part of my own habitus.

5.2 Hacker lifestyles, manifestations of the habitus Current values found in the Dutch hacker field stand in longer tradition.

It is the hackers that collectively embody the immanent rules in their habitus, and by believing and investing in the game, they consciously and unconsciously create continuation of the past. At hackerspaces, cons and camps, ‘new’ hackers are exposed to these structures that create the specific hacker culture, with its traditions and rituals. Over the course of fifty years, hackers have developed a specific lifestyle that is closely related to this hacker culture. The shared lifestyle gives individual hackers the possibility to identify with the group, a sense of belonging and provides the possibility to separate their group from others. In what follows, I discuss and analyze some of the distinctive aspects that I have come across. I want to emphasize, however, that I do not have the intention to make stereotypes.

Particularities of hacker lifestyles The first thing that struck me about hackers was the type of clothing they were wearing. In general I would typify the dress code as laid-back, dark, geeky, not according to the latest fashion and not mainstream. Jeans,

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T-shirts and hooded sweaters seem to be the most popular.41 At 2600nl meetings and at other hacker gatherings, like eth0, almost everyone wears a T-shirt that is somehow related to hacking. They generally wore T-shirts from previous hacker events and especially HAR 2009 and CCC T-shirts were much observed. Other T-shirts commemorate programming languages and open source software. The hackers clearly use the externally visible aspect of clothing to show their involvement in their own field, and the mutual dress code gives a great sense of group solidarity. At eth0 I wore the crew T-shirt with my nickname on the back that I obtained at Hack in the Box, which granted me to blend in with the crowd.

Hackers have been using nicknames since the 1960s, and are an important aspect of the hacker lifestyle and hacker identity. Hackers refer to you by this name, which is often the only name they will know of someone, especially when a hacker is solely met on IRC. Using a pseudonym has something mysterious about it, hiding your given name and performing hacks that by times touches the illicit. The choice of names add-up to the mysteriousness as a part of the hackers have nicknames that sound quite dark or fantasy-like. I asked some hackers why nicknames were so commonly used amongst hackers; they mostly answered that it provides anonymity, something hackers highly value.

DrWhax noted that using a nickname removes any bias that could arise using a real name. His argument coincides with Levy’s hacker ethic: “Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position� (Levy, 2001:43). Another hacker told me he thinks that hackers use their nicknames in offline environments just for the sake of convenience because people already know each other by that name from IRC. In the beginning of my research I mostly introduced myself with my normal name, as I was not used to using my nickname in offline settings, and because I was a little ashamed of using elginno. It is almost impossible to use your given name however, since hackers want 41 One well-known exception at international hacker events is Nick Farr, who always appears in suit. This should be interpreted as a critique to corporate, mainstream dress-codes.

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to know your nickname to determine whether they know you from IRC. I gradually got accustomed to people using my nickname, especially when I was part of a hacker crew at Hack in the Box, where elginno was printed on the back of my crew shirt.

In general, hackers like to play music while they hack. The hackers at Revspace, Randomdata and eth0 seem to have a preference for all sorts of electronic music. One sub-genre in particular forms a shared symbol for hacker culture: the so called 8bit-genre. For a lot of outsiders it may sound as repetitive noise, but for hackers, and for me, it has a sort of nostalgic character, because this music has its origins in 1980s and 1990s computer game music. It is completely computer-generated, and consists of fast paced sounds in the 8-bit spectrum. During eth0 a lot of other electronic music was constantly played at the tents, but I also heard (hard) rock music. Pop music does not seem to be a much admired genre among hackers, which is probably due to its mainstream character. Generally, hackers do not like to mimic to ‘what the masses do’, and obscure, unusual cultural objects seem to be more appreciated within the field.

When it comes to drinks, it is all about caffeine. Club Mate, coffee and energy drinks pretty much describe the (non-alcoholic) fluidal diet of hackers, where Club Mate is the drink and has acquired a high symbolical value (see figure 12). This caffeinated cold tea is brewed in Germany, and became a popular drink among hacker groups in Berlin. It slowly became a tradition that spread to other parts of Europe. Although I do not think it is particular tasty (the manufacturer motto of the drink is “One gets used to it!”), it is highly popular among Dutch hackers. The amount of caffeine is not very spectacular (20mg/100ml), but, hackers have told me that the special consistency of ingredients makes it more effective in the long run. They even make a special cocktail called Tschunk that has Club Mate as the main ingredient, and further consists of rum, ice, lime, and sugar. Every ‘self-respecting hackerspace’, needs a stockpile of Mate. The popularity of Club Mate in the European hacker scene has already spread to the United States, where a group of east coast hackers have started to import and distribute the tea.

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Figure 12. Club Mate

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The consumption of all these caffeinated drinks is related to a tradition amongst hackers that was already started by the TMRC hackers in the 1950s. Once working on a project, you do not want to stop until it is done. “Problems that you come across are a challenge, and solving them gives a great, almost addictive feeling�, a hacker at eth0 told me. The night is not an excuse to stop working, on the contrary, it is considered a perfect time to make progress. Although hackers can drink Club Mate all day, the night is the moment when it is most wanted. A walk over the camp site of eth0 at night gave a good feeling of how the hackers like the night time. During the day, it looked like they were collectively waiting for the dusk to kick in. As soon as it got darker, people became more active and started to talk more. More heroic stories about the past were being told, which may or may not be the cause of the copious amounts of alcohol that were being consumed. Other hackers took the night as an opportunity to work on their projects while drinking Club Mate. They were typically sitting between the tents that were set up in groups, and sometimes in the absence of lights the faces of the hackers would be illuminated by just the light of their laptops.

Where Club Mate is the hacker drink, Linux is the hacker operating system; it what the TMRC hackers would consider The Right Thing. As I described in the previous chapter, Linux is an open source project among thousands and thousands of software programmers that has its roots in the 1980s, started by MIT hacker Richard Stallman. Linux comes in many different releases and has become more accessible for the general public since the introduction of point-and-click GUIs.42 But hackers generally use command codes in terminals to operate their computers. In order to fully operate a computer this way requires 1) a lot of memorizing of commands 2) a thorough understanding of how an operating system works and how to address the internal components of a computer 3) the ability to think in an abstract manner 4) a lot of practice. Bucciarati, an Italian hacker based in Amsterdam, showed me how deep this knowledge can go at a 2600nl meeting: 42 GUI = Graphical User Interface, is a type of user interface through which users are able to visibly operate a computer.

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After one of the hackers showed the group his rfid reader, Bucciarati eagerly wanted to connect it to his laptop. He plugged it into a usb port and placed an OV-chipkaart on the reader. A group of hackers that had gathered behind him were watching with admiration how he was trying to address, reverse-engineer and crack the security of the OV-chipkaart. With inimitable speed he was switching between five different input terminals, searching on one, typing in another, copy-pasting between them. He typed long codes incredibly fast and between every search he turned his head to the right, as if he was only using his left eye for distilling the desired information, like a heron concentrating to catch a fish. The only that was holding him back from cracking the card in the restaurant was time, as each of the 40 sectors of the card would take 20 minutes.

In the eyes of hackers that use Linux, Microsoft Windows users are consumers who do not understand what is going on and they just use it the way that Microsoft tells allows them to and make use of the options they provide. I have seen on several occasions that hackers were being ridiculed by fellow hackers for using Windows on their laptop. One hacker stated he used Windows because of his affection for video games, and most games do not run on Linux. But beside this argument, there are just no reasons on a technological level why Windows would be preferred over Linux in a hacker’s view. Using Linux has a high symbolical value.

Knowledge about Linux is an acquired skill that is not just for anyone; it manifests as embodied cultural capital in the hacker field and has a high symbolical value. When Bucciarati was working on 4 separate terminals, trying to address an OV-chipkaart, other hackers were gathering around his laptop, watching with awe how quickly he typed the long command lines. He received respect and it clearly gave him status.

Before my first visit to a hackerspace I installed Ubuntu (Linux with a GUI) on my laptop. I do not possess the knowledge to use command lines, but at least I was able to show the hackers that I was working with Linux, so I would not be judged as being a mere consumer. When I was asked about the operating system I was using, I answered that I recently started using Ubuntu. This was mostly answered with approval, I think because it showed that I was eager to learn (which is true), which made me into a newbie and not a noob. Apparently they did not expect from someone from outside the hacker field to be an expert in Linux; those

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expectations are reserved for the active hackers in the field.

Deeply ingrained in the habitus of hackers is their resistance to authorities and rigid bureaucratic structures, something Levy already described in his hacker ethics. One of the things through which this became apparent to me is the perceptions on educational systems some hackers have. A majority of the hackers I met during this research project were computer, network or security professionals. But what was striking to me is that a proportion of them did not have a degree that one would expect with such a high knowledge and skill level. A few hackers told me they did not do well in schools, with its rigid structure and standardized tests.

DrWhax, 18 years old, is working on a MBO43 degree, but does not enjoy it. He dislikes it when he has to solve computer problems in the way that is prescribed in his text books. He knows more efficient and advanced methods that he has taught himself on the internet or that he gathered at hackerspaces, but he is not allowed to use them. Fish_ had similar problems at school. He also holds an MBO-degree, but has found his own way and is now a well-paid computer security expert, and he started a hackerspace in Utrecht. I also noticed that hackers have a critical view on diplomas and certificates. To give an example, Pretje, a hacker I met at eth0, told me a story about how he outsmarted people with Microsoft degrees “Certificates say nothing. Those guys at Microsoft don’t even know how their own software works” (my translation). He then explained how he changed user settings for networking, using the command prompt44 in Windows, instead of going to the start menu, configuration screen and then user settings. Pretje laughed about the Microsoft people, who did not understand what he was doing. Pretje’s point is that he may not have the official diploma, but knows the operating system on a deeper level than the ones who do have a diploma, and questions the actual value. Eric Michaud and Sacha from PS:One both have academic masters titles, but 43 MBO = middelbaar beroepsonderwijs are mostly practical programs in the Netherlands that prepares one for a specific job, mostly on service level.

44 The command prompt is a piece of software in Windows that allows users to give commands and operate a computer with written commands, instead of point-and-click commands.

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were skeptical about the actual value of the diploma: “It’s a waste of time, you learn a lot more in daily life and hackerspaces”. Their skepticism for institutionalized diplomas and education was another indication for me that hackers do not always respect elements that people in their surrounding society use to obtain status positions. Like the TMRC hackers that did not attend university classes because they had their own and ‘more important’ projects, these hackers have goals, mindsets and lifestyles that do not always match of the ones that their society expects them to have. Hackers prefer to be judged according to their field-specific qualification system: making good hacks.

Similarly, most hackers do not like the idea of being mere consumers; buying products and using it the way the manufacturer intended. Instead, they prefer to make things themselves if possible. This could be for the fun of making it but also to make it cheaper, better and open-source. This mentality is widely known as Do It Yourself (DIY), which is not confined to the hacker field, but is a fundamental aspect of the hacker lifestyle. DIY emphasizes at least two major things in the hacker field. First, it shows the creative mindset of the hacker field. Second, the DIY-mentality is part of the hacker’s construction of personal freedom.

By making things themselves instead of having to fully rely on others, especially large corporations, hackers gain a degree of independence.

Hackers at the Amsterdam based hacker group Slug, for example, are building an online social network and publishing platform that embeds hacker principles. People joining the network have control over their own data, and the servers are decentralized and the platform is free of advertisements.45 An example of a less serious DIY project is Blinky, made by hackers from Randomdata. Blinky is a board with LED-lights that is able to shape letters, and people can post messages to by entering them on a website.46 Blinky has now become Randomdata’s mascot and is brought to every major hacker event.

Open hardware and software make DIY projects a lot easier. One 45 https://n-1.cc 46http://www.randomdata.nl/wiki/index.php/Adruino_14_segment_LED_ board

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can adapt products according to personal preferences and needs, and when a part breaks, it is easier to fix it yourself. 3D-printers are the next step for DIY’ers. These machines have started a movement of which the outcome is not yet known.47. You simply download designs from the internet, or design something yourself and start printing them. Suddenly 3D-printers put individuals in the position to create physical objects from virtual models. A hackerspace from New York City developed the Makerbot (see figure 13), an open source 3D-printer that you can either make yourself or order as a construction kit. The RepRap, another 3D-printer project, is almost self-replicable as it can print its own parts. The 3D-printer has the potential to take away a part of the production that is now controlled by industry into the hand of the general public. The materialization of easily distributed information will, of course, cause a new chapter in copyright issues, a topic I will discuss more thoroughly below.

47 3D-printers work with the same principle as conventional desktop printers in that they drop small parts with a print head that can move. 3D-printers however, can move on x,y and z axis and drop small melted plastic particles on top of each other, slowly forming objects in the way that the computer (user) tells it to.

Figure 13. MakerBot, an open source 3D-printer

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A hacker work ethic, sharing and rewards Hackers have a work ethic that is not bound to a nine-to-five-mentality but are generally willing to work 24 hours per day, seven days a week on their projects. They can be very concentrated, dedicated and devoted to their work. This is partially explained by the fact that their projects involve their own passion and require a lot of creativity. Mikka Himanen juxtaposes this work ethic to what Max Weber described as the Protestant (work) ethic in his book The Hacker Ethic (2001). Many argue that the Protestant ethic has structured capitalist societies and is still deeply ingrained in our thinking today. In this ethic labor is seen as an end in itself, a calling. The same can be argued about money, as Weber stated that “The summum bonum of this ethic is the earning of more and more money” (Weber, in Himanen, 2001:43). The Protestant ethic goes hand in hand with a strong bureaucratizing of our society, which in turn caused strong regulation, enforced hierarchies, supervision, obedience, impersonality and specialization. This is also known by Weber’s famous adage iron cage. Hackers, according to Himanen, “are trying to crack the lock of the iron cage” (Himanen, 2001:13). Hackers can work as dedicated as monks in a monastery, but what the hacker work ethic differentiates from the Protestant work ethic is that the ultimate pursuit is passion and creating something that is useful for the community. In the absence of centralized authority they do not have to obey anyone, neither are they supervised, nor do they have go through a bureaucratic processes.

As mentioned before, one of the characteristics of the hacker field is the strong focus on its own community, which Dutch hackers sometimes even refer to as the community. Hackers invest in their community by dedicating time, energy and sharing knowledge. By doing so, they dispute the classic liberal idea that individuals are always in search of accumulation of private economical benefits (Hall, 1986:43). In the previous chapter we saw how the sharing and openness principle has played a central role in defining the hacker field since the TMRC hackers at MIT. This principle, however, can only exist in the field “[…] to the extent that players enter into it who believe in and actively pursue the prizes it offers” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:19). Without belief and investment

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in the community, collective knowledge and sharing there is no hacker field as it exists today. But what motivates hackers to share their valuable technological knowledge and skills and energy, in other words, what are the rewards offered by the field? But before I start formulating answers to this question, I will investigate a precondition that makes this sharing possible.

I wonder, for example, whether the free knowledge sharing by hackers depends on individual hacker’s financial situation. If a hacker would be dependent on his or her knowledge for making an income and access to basic needs, in other words, for survival, he or she might not be so keen on sharing their potential income. This is a hypothetical statement, however, because the hackers that I met either have a job, are living with their parents, or are studying and receive grants and loans. Most are not wealthy, but at least not financially dependent on the knowledge they share. In fact, the hackers I met have professional skills that are in potential very valuable in our information society. Being in possession of this prospective capital (in the narrow sense of the word) gives them a secure position: if they really need money, they will not have a hard time finding a way to create income. This position creates a financial freedom that could be a precondition for sharing knowledge ‘freely’ in a capitalist society and puts statements such as those by Himanen in perspective: “For hackers like Torvalds [initiator of Linux, EB], the basic organizational factor in life is not work or money, but passion and the desire to create something socially valuable together” (Himanen, 2001: 53).

Having explored a precondition for sharing and openness, I will now dig deeper into my previous stated question of what the stakes and rewards in the hacker field are, assuming that they are not purely based on financial stimuli. First of all, as Himanen also acknowledged, there is the individual experience for hackers: the joy of the practice of hacking, being curious, inventive, getting your hands on something and accomplishing things. A second reward is recognition and belonging. Being part of a group, with people that understand your ideas, drives and lifestyle, feels comfortable and gives strength. “For these hackers, recognition within a community that shares their passion is more important and more deeply

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satisfying than money� (Himanen, 2001:51). Thirdly, there is status. Every field is structured by power differentials. The more relevant knowledge one has, or is able to show off his hack, or is able to contribute to the community, the higher status one obtains and the better one is able to distinct him or herself from others.

Financial rewards do not seem to be the defining reward in the hacker field. A survey by Jarkko Moilanen, a Finish PhD-student who is writing a dissertation on hackerspaces and hacktivism, seems to support this statement. He conducted a world-wide anonymous survey on the involvement of hackers in hackerspaces. 200 people responded to his e-mail that was sent out on the hackerspaces mailing list in June 2010.

One of his focus areas was motivations for members to attend and invest in a hackerspace. He made eight claims with a five-level Likert-scale, as seen in table 1.

Table 1: Motivation for hackers to be involved with hackerspaces (source: Jarkko Moilanen, 2010).

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Despite my concerns48 with the data, it is striking that only a fraction of the respondents indicate to participate at a hackerspace with a financial motivation, as seen in claim 6. Instead, claims 2, 7 and 8 show that the respondents place more importance on the community aspect and fun as a motivation.

It would be incorrect, however, to oppose the hacker work ethic and earning money to each other. Within the hacker community there exist different views on making money. Some hackers I met share communal ideas with the hippie hackers from the Whole Earth Catalog, while others make good money selling software. However, within the groups that I have researched, making money as the ultimate goal, like in Protestant Ethic, is not an accepted stake. “When money becomes the highest end in itself, passion is no longer an essential criterion for work choices” (Himanen, 2001:57). As we have seen this in the past with Bill Gates, choosing money over the community can mean that you will be excluded from the hacker field. This especially applies when it involves making money with closed products that are copyrighted.

My attempt to create a number motivations for hackers to share and invest in their field does not mean, however, that goals and interests are given or prefixed, and that the hackers would be ‘rationally’ following these ‘norms’. Like in every field, structures are dynamic and influenced by interactions of its actors in the field and from outside forces, characterized by interdependencies, such as state laws, socio-political circumstances and power structures (Emirbayer, 1997:284). A common misunderstanding of Bourdieu’s use of habitus is that it would have a predictable value in it and that it would induce social reproduction. Instead, habitus denotes a 48 Moilanen granted me access to the raw data he gathered, and I found out that almost half (49%) of the respondents labeled him/herself as a founding member, and the rest as a ‘normal member’. This ratio is not an accurate representation of most hackerspaces. Hackers that are actively involved or have helped setting up a hackerspace might have a stronger cause and believe than others. Despite my general concerns for using statistical data in social analysis, I have used this information because I think it does show something in that the results in questions 2, 6, 7 and 8 are quite striking. The data supports my general argument, rather that I draw conclusion solely based upon the data.

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fuzzy logic, accepting no sharp distinctions between internal and external motivations, the conscious and the unconscious (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992:19-20). However, like showed in my account of the history of hacking, there are some observable tendencies in the field of hacking.

Some stakes and aspects that were part of the nomos more than forty years ago still play a central role in structuring the field. It is not a static reproduction of structures, but, as Bourdieu and Wacquant noted: “The habitus is creative, but only within the limits of its structures, which are the embodied sedimentations of the social structures which produced it” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992:19).

Play and boundaries A major motivation to hack is to explore, to find out what is possible and to search and break boundaries. This curiosity drives hackers to build things, tear things apart and to alter things so they function differently.

Out of the box thinking, pushing boundaries, create a challenge and can have a playful element, especially if it concerns challenges without a predetermined goal. Just like the TMRC hackers once stated: “a neat hack is a justification in itself” (Levy, 2001: 33), hackers today are exploring possibilities for the fun of it. Of course, to accomplish something and to make something work gives a great feeling of control and is satisfying.

At Randomdata for instance, hackers have plans to build the ‘Beerduino’, a robot that can store cans of beer, and after giving a command, take it out and open it for you. Although it may not be a life-changing object, for hackers like Zkyp it is about the fun of thinking of how to create it.

One night at Randomdata I offered to restart the project (as people were not working on it for a while) and the hackers in the space got really enthusiastic. A dynamic brainstorm process between the present hackers evolved of what would be needed. Zkyp, for instance, said he could apply some robotics that he learned in school, Deathzor was contemplating about the required opening mechanism, and meanwhile I tried giving some suggestions. Although the Beerduino project was put back in the closet again after this night, it showed me the fun of getting collectively excited, thinking of clever solutions, and putting each others’ knowledge

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together.

The play element also arises when hackers break into networks and systems. It is a challenge, a game to get entrance to places you are not supposed to be. It is a kick, an adrenaline. During eth0 I overheard a couple of hefty stories of hackers breaking in systems when they were younger.

They mostly laugh about the possible risk of getting caught. They believe the Dutch governmental institutions are just not knowledgeable enough to trace them, and cases are hard to make, because it is hard to proof whether it was really you sitting behind that computer. Hackers are well aware of laws, and they are often a topic of regular discussions. However, one hacker states: “there are certain ranges of IP-addresses49 that one should not scan, like the ones of FBI and AIVD (Dutch intelligence agency, EB), otherwise you could be in bigger trouble”. This type of knowledge is necessary for hackers to stay out of real trouble and still have the space to explore the borders of what is legal.

Another hacker at eth0 tells us how he set up his own network of proxies50 at people’s homes by hacking into their wifi-networks and installing software on their computers. He can then use these computers to route his own network-traffic. When he wants to break in somewhere, it is extra hard to trace where the attack comes from. The hacker also acknowledged that he used to be a ‘black-hat hacker’, but that he has a normal job now and does only white-hat hacking. He has his own definition of these concepts. Black-hat hacking for him means breaking laws and misusing your power for your own purpose. He argues that white-hat hacking can also mean that you break in, but then maybe you do not steal anything, or you do it for ‘the greater good’. At eht0 there was an unofficial ‘game’ going on where hackers try to ‘sniff’ each other’s network traffic. Sniffing means that one uses software to scan a network for data and intercept it. Hence, connecting on the network at eth0 was a 49 IP-address stands for Internet Protocol address, a unique numerical code that is assigned to each system connected to a network that uses the internet protocol, like the internet. It is used for identification and location addressing.

50 A proxy is a server that is positioned between the user and a network, and can function as a security barrier, keeping other computers anonymous or bypass security.

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tricky activity if you do not know much about security. I was afraid my login names and passwords to websites would be sniffed, which would end up on the wall of shame on last day of the camp. Fortunately, DrWhax let me use his proxy server, which allowed me to access the internet more securely.

Another great example of how hackers like to play around, but still make a message was after Brenno de Winter showed one more time that the OV-chipkaart was not secure enough. This time he showed on national television how even non-hackers could download software for Windows to upgrade their card balance without paying. Because De Winter and other hackers already notified the card company and the Dutch government three years ago that the system is unsafe, and the project should be stopped, hackers publicly supported him on Twitter. Despite the security weakness, Trans Link Systems, the card manufacturer, kept defending their product. The next day some hackers used a security vulnerability on Trans Link’s website that allowed them to post their own messages on the website, like this one: “Journalists that are looking for more information on Trans Link Systems and/or the OV-chipkaart can contact Brenno de Winter” (my translation).51 This prank is of course quite a humiliation for a company that is supposed to keep things secure. Even though the hack may have been the result of an innocent joke and did not cause any (material) damage to the website, servers or the company, I interpret it as a symbolic act in a power struggle. Hackers like outsmarting others, especially when it comes to companies that are stubborn in the eyes of hackers. By utilizing their specific knowledge and skills they were able to ridicule a company that holds quite some power, being funded and supported by the Dutch government. By not respecting ‘authority’, hackers show a degree of autonomy, control and freedom. The rebellious joke becomes a political act, even as it might have not been a ‘conscious’ decision to make it political.

51 They used a so called html injection or cross-site scripting (XSS), where the address bar of the browser is used to activate something on the website, in this example a script that enables one to let text appear on a website.

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5.3 Dynamics of hackerspaces Hackerspaces are physical places where hacker culture is celebrated.

They provide the tools and knowledge that enable people to make things. They also function as local spaces for like-minded people to some together and socialize. Regardless of being constantly connected to each other online, being able to meet each other at a physical space is highly appreciated amongst hackers. At the hackerspaces, while hackers are having a good time working on their projects or are socializing during a party, their specific culture is being transferred to one another. Each hacker brings their habitus to the dynamic setting of the hackerspace, and simultaneously internalizes and shapes the structural make-up of the space. Their collective embodiment creates a setting with a specific social organization, dynamics, (un)written rules, values and stakes. The traditions of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, the C-Base in Berlin and ASCII in Amsterdam are carried on in hackerspaces like Revspace, Randomdata and PS:One.

Settings that facilitate meeting, making and sharing Randomdata was the third hackerspace I visited. I already met some of its members at the 2600NL meeting, and Eric Michaud from Chicago had notified the space before that I would drop by some day. The hackerspace in Utrecht is not as fortunate as Revspace with its massive amount of square meters, and has to work with one small space. There is one couch, a table, a work bench and some shelves to store hardware and drinks.

There have been some initiatives to start projects, but they seemed to have died slowly. Randomdata has only a handful of active members who come to the space to work on small things, mostly on their laptops, rather than longer-lasting and collaborative projects. The times I visited Randomdata hackers were not really working on projects, and just having conversations and socializing. However, the topics of conversations are mostly hacker-related and often on serious matter, for instance copyright laws, and political issues surrounding Wikileaks.

The material conditions of Revspace allow its members with more space to play than Randomdata. In just ten months time, the members

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managed to create a darkroom for photography, a hardware room for bigger hardware hacking and soldering, another room is dedicated for smaller projects and then they still have a large space for socializing and for organizing events (see figure 14). The presence of facilities and tools offered at Revspace, like soldering stations, an oscilloscope, a network, a (not yet functioning) 3D-printer and in an adjacent building also a laser cutter, and a growing community was probably what attracted more people to the space. In less than a year time, 35-40 people joined and an active community evolved. Just like PS:One, Revspace offers people the possibilities and tools necessary for hackers to explore, tinker, destroy and make.

Figure 14. Floor plan of Revspace. Image courtesy of Revspace.

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It is not just the tools and facilities that draw people to hackerspaces.

The social aspect might be equally, so not more important. There is a strong community feeling at hackerspaces, and with its playful mood, unconstrained atmosphere it feels a little like a living room. People with the same passion come together here and reinforce group solidarity. Like hacker camps and cons, hacker culture is celebrated at hackerspaces, in particular during social events. I have, for example, attended a barbecue that Revspace organized on their roof patio, and hackers from all over the Netherlands and even Belgium attended. Since the hacker field forms a fairly small community most people know each other. While making hamburgers, grilling Japanese satay and drinking beers, hackers socialize, tell stories about what happened to them lately and joke around. The motivations for organizing social events like the barbecue are not much different from those of other groups of like-minded people; it is just fun to see each other face to face, have a laugh and discuss issues that are of mutual interest. But regardless of the informal setting, hackers bring their past experiences embodied in their habitus, and values are exchanged, shaped and re-shaped.

Hackerspaces like Revspace, Randomdata and PS:One bring together people with assorted backgrounds, ages and interests, but with similar mindsets. Not every hacker is a computer hacker. Eli at PS:one for example, described herself as an artist, and makes clothing with embedded LEDlights. One of her projects was a coat with a special flex sensor sewed into the sleeve, and when the arm was bent a pattern of lights is activated on the back of the garment. At Revspace, one hacker likes food-hacking, which is experimenting with cooking using ‘special materials’, for example using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream in 30 seconds. Other hackers at Revspace like making difficult stickers designs and cut out them with a laser cutter. The variety demonstrates how hacking at hackerspaces is not merely computer hacking, and should rather be understood as a mindset, a way to interpret and approach the world.

Hackerspaces function as learning spaces. Even at social gatherings when people have some drinks and talk, information exchange takes

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place, because discussions are always on hacker-related topics, like political situations, laws and technical matter. When hackers work on projects in a hackerspace, they have a large potential knowledge base. For example, one night at Revspace two guys were trying to address a serial port connected to a usb-port using C programming language, but they had some difficulties. Immediately there was someone to help them and even without asking they got advice. The freely shared knowledge and availability of ‘personal trainers’ are a powerful aspect of a hackerspace.

As mentioned before, the system keeps working because everyone is willing to share his or her knowledge. By going to a hackerspace, you silently accept this non-written rule that forms the heart of the nomos of this hacker field.

Hackerspaces seem to fill a gap that public schools leave. Not only is there a general lack of technological oriented courses in schools, but some people, like Ken Robinson, argue that the system used in Western schools does not offer enough flexibility (Robinson, 2010). It is an “educational model that is built on the interests of industrialization” (Robinson, 2010), with standardized learning materials and tests. Hackerspaces offer different modes of learning that involve being creative, searching for own sources, out-of-the-box thinking, decentralization, collaboration and mixing of disciplines. Hacker Nick Farr foresees a major future for this model in our society: “A lot of people look at the public school system, they look at the collapse of financial economies, they look at their society, showing all signs of failure. […] Every time I look at hackerspaces, every time I visit a new hackerspace, every time I go to a congress, I’m filled with nothing but hope for the future; that hackers are taking, or not, not taking over in a violent sense, but picking up where institutions have left off. In terms of education, the public education system has largely failed. Hackers and hackerspaces are picking up that, that ball and running with it, and creating the future of education” (Farr, 2010).

Instead of a top-down approach, learning at hackerspaces seem to follow the rhizometic model that I described in the previous chapter.

There is no formal hierarchy, but rather a horizontal or loose structure where everyone is a potential sender and receiver of information.

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Since there is an absence of a formal knowledge center, a free flow of information is required (Bazzichelli, 2008:148). Another characteristic of hackerspaces is that people with different backgrounds, ages and ‘intelligence levels’ come together, which increases the chance of having multiple perspectives. There is no tracking or segregation, but people are mixed. Hackers can choose the subjects they want to learn more about, with learning material that is mostly highly up-to-date (Himanen, 2001:79). Although the hackerspaces are not an academic setting, the level of both discussions and practices can reach this level, especially when it concerning technology, laws and politics.

Organizational structures and group acceptance in hackerspaces In order to be allowed to make use of a hackerspace and its facilities, most hackerspaces require members to pay a monthly fee for accessing the space, which is necessary for paying for the rent and electricity, and to invest in new tools. Like other organizations, most hackerspaces have a board, with a president, a secretary and a treasurer. At Revspace and PS:One weekly meetings are organized, where the agenda is discussed determined whether set goals are met. Registered members can vote on decisions being made, or who the board members are. The hackerspaces I have attended mostly have an aversion for hierarchies and want to solve everything democratically. However, Koen (GMC) notices that: “[…] some people sometimes look up to the board for decisions.

I usually try to make them understand that they should make the decisions. But it seems to be rigidly engrained in some people that there needs to be a hierarchy. It surprises me every time though. And it’s hard to beat that out of people.”

What GMC points out is that hackerspaces might endorse a flat structure with a minimum of rules, does not automatically mean that everyone will participate equally in creating structure. Without an appointed leadership, conflicts may lie in wait and to avoid this, hackerspaces mostly do have a few rules. For instance, if you have not worked on your project for 28 days at Revspace, it will be removed. And hackers are not supposed to

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perform network attacks from the hackerspace (whether it is for a ‘good cause’ or not), which is for instance subtly stated on Revspace’ website: “We are explorers, not pirates” (Martens, 2009)52. Fish_ told me he installed an Intrusion Protection System to monitor any attempts, though Randomdata has not stated it on its website that attacks are not allowed.

Matt Lehner, a member of Buffalo Lab (in Buffalo, NY, USA) asks for help on the hackerspaces mailing list on how to handle rules: “From a managerial point of view it is important to have a common set of rules and regulations people can abide by. Though, it seems at odds with the openness of the general hackerspace mentality.” He received more than ten responses from all over the world, among which one came from GMC: “I’m struggling with this myself. We happily copied the guidelines from HSBXL for revspace […]. These are guidelines, not rules. They are ignored mostly. I don’t want to enforce the rules (guidelines), because apart from banning people from the space there is not much one can do. And I don’t want to ban people from the place. […] If you are a community-based place, and the community chooses to ignore rules that you set with the community, what can you do? I think it is up to the community itself to correct either the rules or the practice.”

Lehner and GMC and their hackerspaces seem to struggle with the notions of positive and negative freedom and the difficult relationship between individual freedom and equality. The hackerspaces generally want to give hackers as much freedom as possible, similar to a notion of freedom that Berlin has coined positive liberty, which postulates that people should have the possibility of acting in such a way that one can fulfill its own potential and desires (Carter, 2008). Positive liberty places a strong emphasis on the agent, who can control his or her own destiny and ‘true’ interests. But as early liberalists already acknowledged, is that personal interests are inescapably going to conflict with each other, and therefore with equality. Hence, some form of authority was considered necessary. This authority, like in social contract theory, would have to create the circumstances in which individuals can pursue their private interests and provide the individual as much freedom as possible and 52 Revspace copied their guidelines from HSBX, a hackerspace in Brussels, Belgium.

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interfere only where absolutely necessary. This then, is the notion of negative liberty: freedom from constraint.

Unlike 19th century liberalists however, rules in Revspace are not enforced by strict laws. Like GMC, Adam Bachman (Node hackerspace, Baltimore, MD, USA) sees the community as being a regulative, selfcorrecting instrument. He added to the mail conversation: “We’re not specifically anarchists, but we trend towards anti-hierarchy, so if we all agree something shouldn’t be done (it’s common sense) then we don’t do it.” This statement could be interpreted as positive liberty achieved through collectivity: “Perhaps the clearest case is that of Rousseau’s theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one’s community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the ‘general will’ (Carter, 2008).

Matt Joyce (NYC Resistor, New York City, NY, USA) adds some more fuel to the conversation by stating that: “NYCR has no leaders […].

No central committee, politburo, or triumverate of hack. It’s generally not necessary. People tend to be pretty good about stuff. I don’t understand why anyone would want leaders. It’s silly. Personally I find it to be counterproductive.” While a lot of members of hackerspaces probably agree with this idealistic statement, in actuality it might not always be so easy, as Nate Bezanson from i3Detroit (Detroit, MI, USA) points out.

He argues that you have to deal with other institutions if you want to be a public, registered hackerspace. In order to get a lease, he writes, you must have someone sign it. In order to be registered as a non-profit organization, you will need at least a board and bylaws. This will in turn create some form authority within the community, and one might run into the similar problems to those that GMC experienced.

There are no formal selection criteria for members to join Randomdata or Revspace. In theory, any person that sticks to the few rules (or guidelines) of the hackerspace and pays his monthly fee is allowed to be a member. Like many hackerspaces, they want to be open and diverse. However, being formally admitted to a hackerspace does not automatically mean that someone is accepted, recognized or welcomed.

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A part of acceptation and status one obtains in these groups seems to be on the basis of merit, like the TMRC hackers at MIT in the 1960s, although less elitist. The position one takes in on the social ladder of the hackerspaces is based on one’s technological skills and knowledge and what one does with it, and more specifically, how the community benefits from it. If you do not have much to give and are mainly able to receive, you do not match the sharing element found in the nomos of this hacker field, and might therefore not gain as much status within the group. I doubt, however, that hackers will actually say something about somebody’s lack of knowledge or skills, let alone that someone will be formally excluded from a hackerspace on this basis.

I do not want to portray the internal dynamics in the hacker communities as being hard, rational and solely based on merit. Because within these hacker communities I experienced a lot of willingness to amongst hackers to explain and teach people skills and knowledge, even if you do not immediately have something to give in return. But this willingness does depend on the eagerness one demonstrates to learn and do things, in other words if someone shows some hacker potential.

DrWhax once told me: “Everyone is free to join a hackerspaces, but many people ask me, ‘why should I join a hackerspace if I’m not so technical?’ A shame, because I see a hackerspace as an alternative space where people can do all sorts of things”. He describes what I experienced, especially in the beginning of my research: the high level of computer knowledge of the hackers was quite intimidating to me. I was not able to match their high standards and dedication to computers. Despite any good intentions by hackers and the openness of hackerspaces, I did not feel like a fish in the water, and at times even an outsider.

Although hackerspaces tend to be diverse in its practices, most of them still fail in attracting women to their hideouts. PS:One is proud to have 30 percent of their members to be female, two of which are also active board members.53 The night that I visited a quarter of the present members were female. At both Revspace and Randomdata, I have not

53 At the time of visiting (March 2010).

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observed females, except during workshops and socials. The general absence of women at hackerspaces might have to do with the presence a dominant masculine tech culture that does not attract, or is difficult to enter for women. During eth0 women were the subject of discussion, and I overheard a couple of condescending remarks: “Women, they have to stay away from my computer. Women, oh my, they will just push any button. […] My girlfriend, she doesn’t even understand that I need to run some scripts when starting my computer”. In spite of these kinds of remarks most hackers I talked to would like to see more females in hackerspaces. But to attract more women a little less stereotyped image might be required.

5.4 Hacker’s struggles of freedom and attempts to gain autonomy In the previous chapter we saw how the hacker field has strong roots in political activism based upon libertarian concepts such as freedom of speech and freedom of association. People like Brand and Felsenstein fought for transparent governance, democracy and decentralization.

They had a vision that technology could have a role in this process by bringing uncensored information to the people for example. Ideals on freedom have not disappeared and still structure hacker practices today.

While their causes might not differ much from those of other activist groups, with their technological background, hackers do tend to have alternative types of activism when compared to ‘conventional’ political activism. Hackers also organize themselves differently as there is often an absence of formal hierarchies or leaders. And despite that hacker groups are dispersed over the globe and loosely affiliated, joined battles still occur by using the internet. I want to emphasize however, that not every hacker is, or wants to be an activist. But there are hackers and hacker groups have proven to be watchdogs for the general public, with the intent to protect civil liberties.

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Control and autonomy in technology “Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!” Levy wrote in 1984, expressing the ethics that the TMRC were living by (Levy, 2001:40). Throughout hacker history there seems to be a general fascination for understanding how a piece of technology works. Hacker Thursley of Randomdata expressed it at follows, when I asked him what DIY meant for him: “Destroy It Yourself, having fun taking things apart, look how things work and with a little luck put it back together.” I think this fascination has to do with the urge hackers have to be in control of technology. By taking things apart, and fully understand the inner workings of an object, they are able to control it and perhaps make it function in a different, unexpected way. An example is when Microsoft introduced the Kinect54 hardware for their Xbox video game console. The website Adafruit Industries released a contest for who would be the first to hack the device. Within a day of the release of the Kinect, people managed to address it using Linux instead of the Xbox. By distributing this hack people were enabled to use the Kinect for all sort of things, for instance on robots, that could then interpret space in 3D.55 In the case of the Kinect, people had to hack the technology in order to use it for other purposes. It was not an open piece of technology56.

The same counts for most commercial software and operating systems like Windows, because the companies that make the software are afraid that it will lose its commercial value. In the eyes of most hackers I met, software has to be free; “free as in free speech, not free beer”, to paraphrase Richard Stallman (quoted in Wynants, 2005:44). What this means is in the eyes of hackers, is that software does not necessarily have to be ‘free of 54 Kinect is a piece of technology that records human movement using a camera, which enables their game console (the Xbox) to interpret the movements. By using the Kinect, people can control video games by making gestures in front of their screen.

55 See for instance this movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8KVOe_y08 56 Microsoft later responded that they did not disapprove hacking their device, and they even endorsed it. See for instance http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_320023455-52.html

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charge’ (gratis), but should always be without restrictions (libre). When I asked hackers why this is, they answered in a different direction than what I expected. Deathzor said for instance that that: “I have a right to know what my pc is doing” and DrWhax told me: “I want to be able to check what runs on my machine and debug where needed, paranoid me (smiling)”. Both of them gave answers that expressed a sense of control over technology. Instead of having companies (like Microsoft or Apple) decide what happens to your computer, they prefer to have the power to control what is happening, even into the deepest layers of their computers, as is possible with Linux.

Another example of a battle around user autonomy is Apple’s iPhone. We saw in the previous chapter that Steve Wozniak’s Apple computer was a success partly due to its open architecture: other parties could develop additions and software for it and it quickly became a diverse computer. But the company changed its attitude towards openness since then. The iPhone comes with a preinstalled operating system (iOs) that offers functionalities Apple allows it to do. In the so called App Store. users can download additional software, but these applications are screened by Apple to determine whether they do not break Apple’s rules.

But some people wanted to have features on the iPhone that Apple did not offer, for instance Flash57. To much dismay of Apple, hackers broke the security of iOs (so called jailbreaking) and they were able to run software that is not screened by Apple, and use other carriers then the ones Apple has a contract with. In an attempt to regain control, Apple tried to criminalize jailbreaking, claiming that copyrights were violated58.

They were overruled by the US Library of Congress after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (founded by John Perry Barlow from the Whole Earth Catalog, amongst others) requested to allow jailbreaking (Kravets, 2010). As with every iOs update jailbreaks are reversed by Apple, hackers now made it into a contest to see who is fastest with jailbreaking it.

57 Flash is a multimedia platform used for animations and interaction with users, used for instance on many websites.

58 See for instance: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/06/ applejailbreakresponse-1.pdf

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A shared theme in the examples of the Kinect, open source software and the iPhone is the level of user autonomy versus the amount of control companies have over the technology. While the majority of consumers may not care about the openness of the products they buy, most hackers feel like they do not really own a product if they cannot access it to the root. Hacking your way through the security so that you do have this access level is an expression of positive freedom: the user, not anybody else, should be in control. Sharing a hack to the world like an iPhone jailbreak, is not only to gain peer recognition, but also makes a political statement. To put it in a dichotomy: it is a contest between ‘the industry’ with ‘their closed, self-protecting policies’ versus ‘the hackers’ and their ethics of openness and transparency.

Another, but different example of the control topic is Gonggrijp’s battle against using voting computers in the Netherlands. He argues that voting computers lack transparency, miss the ability to recount and are more vulnerable to leaking of personal information (Gonggrijp, 2010a). Together with other computer experts, Gonggrijp revealed the vulnerabilities of the systems and the way they were treated. They showed for instance that the machines were stored unguarded, that they were able to access them and alter the software by simply replacing a chip (Gonggrijp and others, 2006). Gonggrijp’s team’s purpose was to show that computers might not always be the best option, because fraud is hard to trace; it was not clear who could be in control of the machines. In this case such vulnerabilities might lead to endangering the democratic process.

Gonggrijp, and other hackers functioned as watchdogs, which ultimately led to a case in court in which the judge decided that the used voting computers should have never been used. In 2008, the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs decided to use paper and pencils instead of computers for voting. Gonggrijp’s mission to stop using voting computers is closely related to another stake found in the hacker field: the ambition to have open and transparent authorities, which I will discuss in the last section of this chapter.

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Freedom of communication, a battle for privacy Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the internet was seen by many as the technology that would have the potential to bring democracy liberate people. Its decentralized structure that was not controlled by large corporations (yet), and the open access and distribution of uncensored information gave numerous people hope. While there are enough case studies demonstrating clever uses of the infrastructure of the internet that have made contributions to openness and transparency, we can currently acknowledge that this very same technology is ironically, almost cynically, also used in the exact opposite way: for surveillance and control. In the ‘era of cheap sensors,’ there is an almost ubiquitous presence of technologies that can potentially track you and your activities such as GPS-devices, cell phones, on-demand television, CCTV, electronic payments, and public transport cards (Zittrain, 2008:109-111, 205). Given the fact that it is hard to examine whether one is being tracked, one could easily have dystopian visions on spying governments like depicted in Orwell’s 1984.59 Whether this is a legitimate fear or not, it is a hot topic among hackers all over the world, who already mistrusted authority before ubiquitous surveillance technologies were around. For hackers there are at least two main things at stake here. The first one is that their beloved freedom on the internet is getting more and more restricted and controlled by governments. The second one, which is closely related, is that privacies are being violated. I have noticed during normal conversations with hackers that privacy is a heavily discussed topic. Every action of which hackers think it could infringe people’s privacy is observed, discussed and occasionally battled against.

The current tendency towards restriction on the internet by governmental decision has several sources. The Dutch government, for example, is under pressure by the European Union, to make a law that obliges ISPs to install an internet traffic filter that is supposed to trace 59 A much used example of a ‘Big Brother society’ is China, where the government has far-reaching rights and technologies to spy on its citizens, and control which information they can and cannot access for political reasons. Furthermore, the government can use obtained data on its citizens for punishment.

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child pornography. Websites suspected of hosting child pornography are then blocked and cannot be accessed by Dutch people (Van Daalen, 2011).

Aside from the disputed effectiveness of such a filter,60 it raises the question whether governments should have the power to censor information.61 It goes against the idea of net neutrality, which is not a clearly defined concept (yet), but in its core proposes that users of the internet should have no restrictions accessing the internet and that ISPs should handle information that they transfer as neutral (Berners-Lee, 2006).

Another infringement on net neutrality is waiting in ambush.

A powerful lobby group surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is attempting to convince countries to adopt a legal framework that would establish (international) standards on enforcement of intellectual property violations. ACTA is powerful because it supported by a very wealthy entertainment industry of which Disney and Warner Bros. are a part (Vermeer, 2011).62 In an attempt to stop piracy, ACTA proposes that ISPs have to deny internet access to people who have been caught downloading copyrighted material for three times. In France, such a law is already adopted.

The hacker field does not possess as much economical capital as the entertainment industry, and is not able to lobby in a similar manner.

Hackers, however, do get involved in the debate in other ways. One tactic hackers use to resist is by creating awareness and educate people. The formation of ACTA takes place behind closed doors and the contents were secret for a long time. In May 2010 I attended a workshop at Revspace on ACTA to make people aware of the consequences that this international agreement could have on people’s freedom. Based on a leaked secret ACTA document, former lawyer Ot van Daalen of Bits of Freedom (BoF) explained a handful sections in a 3 hour session. By using accessible 60 See for instance http://sargasso.nl/archief/2010/04/29/interviewkinderpornofilter-laat-maker-buiten-schot/ (Dutch) 61 Debate in this specific case is difficult, however, as opponents of the filter can easily be accused being supporters of child pornography.

62 The dubious politics of the copyright industry deserves a lot more attention than I can provide here. Admirable work on this topic has been written by Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig, Chris Kelty, Cory Doctorow, among others.

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language he made the complex documents comprehensible to people without a law background.

BoF is a Dutch non-profit organization committed to safeguarding people’s digital civil rights and creating public awareness especially concerning government activity. Due to insufficient funding halfway the 2000s, BoF was forced to stop their activities. In 2009 a couple of people decided to burst new life into the organization, and at the hacker camp HAR they announced they had started again. Although the organization is not a “hacker organization”, its goals share the same liberal principles found in the hacker field, like freedom of information, privacy and free communication. In a short interview I had with founder Ot van Daalen he mentioned that hackers are: “more aware of the freedoms people are slowly giving away to governments and corporations (my translation)”, and he thinks this is why hackers show more activism than the general public. That BoF is closely connected to the hacker field is illustrated by their presence at most bigger hacker events, and that they sometime use the Dutch hacker community’s knowledge and skills on certain subjects.

BoF is slowly getting known to the general public by being present in television programs.

The second issue I addressed is the increasing amount of private information on people that is stored in databases and that people can be monitored by omnipresent surveillance technologies. The Dutch government enforces telecommunication providers to store information on when, where, for how long and with who people had contact with (Wikipedia, 2010c). This is just one example of how a government stores data on its citizens. The paradox is that a decline of privacy by constant surveillance is often justified by a discourse of ‘freedom’, especially since the September 11 attacks. Berlin already noted that claims of freedom could actually become claims of control and discipline (Berlin, 2002:275).

For most hackers the idea of governments and commercial businesses storing all sorts of private data and having the means of monitoring communication is a horrific picture. In addition to being very aware of technical capabilities of surveillance, they display at least two

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types of activism to contest it. The first one I already discussed above, which is creating awareness and educate people, like BoF does. The second one is that hackers develop and use technologies that make monitoring more difficult. The hacker group Slug combined the two kinds of activism at a cryptography workshop for beginners that I attended in September 2010.

The workshop took place in an immense, old, and dilapidated squat that used to function as tram depot in Amsterdam-West. Inside the building a 1950s DAF public bus was parked that functioned as the lecture room for that night. After a general introduction on the reasons to keep your data and communication safe, the audience (about 15 people) was introduced to PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)63. We were asked to bring our laptops and on each machine we installed the necessary software to send and receive encrypted messages. We then exchanged our personal PGPkeys with each other, so that we were able to decrypt the messages that we sent to each other. Just like a face-to-face conversation, encryption gives people the possibility to have a private computer-mediated conversation.

Hughes expressed in 1993 in his Cyberpunk Manifesto as follows: “Privacy in an open society […] requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it to be heard only by those for whom I intend it” (Hughes, 2001:82).

It is not that hackers just oppose the act of monitoring and infringing people’s privacy, it is also about the actual storage of data. In the Netherlands fingerprints are stored when a new passport was introduced in which fingerprints are embedded. Other recent ideas are storing every citizen’s DNA profile in a database for possible research on criminal offences, and storing people’s medical history into a central database.

Despite any good intentions by the initiator, we have to acknowledge like Zittrain does that these kinds of government databases “[…] remain of particular concern, because of the unique strength and power of the state to amass information and use it for life-altering purposes” (Zittrain, 2008: 63 Introduced in 1991, PGP was the first high quality encryption method that was made available to the general public. For its general functioning, see for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

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201). Can we trust our government to keep this very personal information safe? DrWhax, like most hackers, does not think so.

DrWhax, is concerned with the security of many websites and systems used by Dutch governmental institutions. He started a website to collect vulnerabilities on government websites, to make the responsible authorities aware and pressure them to do something about it. Some time ago he noticed, that a governmental website had vulnerabilities, but even weeks after notifying the authorities he could still exploit the security gap. Like many hackers in the hacker field, DrWhax is committed to keep people’s information private. Neglecting vulnerabilities is therefore seen as an irresponsible act, and he tries to put more pressure on it by publishing the vulnerabilities (Van Bergen, 2010).

Open and transparent governing: mistrust of authority and the struggle of Wikileaks and Anonymous At the heart of the nomos of the hacker field lays a strong belief in individual autonomy that causes, what Levy already noted it among 1950s hackers, a general mistrust of authority. Similar to the contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, most hackers I met do not necessarily disapprove the idea of state authority, as long as the state creates and defends the circumstances in which individuals van pursue their freedom, and only interfere where it is absolutely necessary. This strong believe fuels activism among hackers against authorities that abuse their power position and infringe people’s individual autonomy and freedom. Wikileaks, a much discussed whistleblower organization, shares these freedom values of the hacker field. Their mission of revealing state secrets and exploitations of power positions coincides with hacker activism. In fact, Wikileaks has many relationships with the hacker field. Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ leader, was himself known as hacker, and another founder, Daniel Domscheit-Berge is a hacker from CCC Berlin.

Not only are the mission and foundation of Wikileaks closely related to the hacker field, their existence became relevant to my thesis when activism in support of the organization became somehow related to Revspace. At the end of 2010, Wikileaks released classified information

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from over two hundred US embassies, which caused quite a diplomatic stir and led companies like Mastercard and Paypal to block Wikileaks’ funds. After a revenge action for this blockage a 16-year old Dutch boy was arrested, who happened to have visited Revspace. Revspace, in turn, was afraid for bad publicity and organized an event to show what ‘real hackers’ are. It would take at least a whole other thesis to cover the opinions on, motivations of, and consequences of Wikileaks, and hence I cannot discuss all the details. I will however, cover some of the founding principles of the organization to understand how it is connected to the hacker field, including the Dutch hacker field.

Before becoming the leader of the Wikileaks, Julian Assange was part of a hacker group in his home country Australia and went under the nickname Mendax. He was known as a highly skilled and respected hacker and pleaded guilty to twenty different network hacks, among which one at the US Military Coordination Centre (Domscheit-Berg, 2011:25). He was not charged, however, because he had not damaged anything. Later he started one of the first ISPs in Australia and created a platform for likeminded people. In 2006 he started Wikileaks with a couple of other people to provide people with a service to blow the whistle on “abuse of power” (Lindquist&Huor, 2010). The team consisted of hackers and mathematicians living all over the world, who communicated via restricted mailing list. They thought that making a worldwide platform to mass-publicize classified information would be the most effective political weapon. Between 2006 and 2008 they released documents on a number of events or organizations, such as Guantanamo Bay Prison, the church of Scientology, and an oil spill in Peru (Lindquist&Huor, 2010; Domscheit-Berg, 2011:10-11).

In 2009 Wikileaks received information that Icelandic banks were lying about the actual causes of the collapse of the banking system, which they also published. While Icelandic media were forced by a judge not to report about it, they referred to Wikileaks’ website. In a television show, Assange and German hacker Daniel Domscheit-Berg proposed that Iceland should introduce a new business model that should “become

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a vanguard of publishing freedom” (Lindquist&Huor, 2010). Assange, together with Icelandic information activists, parliamentarians and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp wrote a proposal that would give journalists farreaching protection. They combined many laws from other countries into one bill, and it was adopted unanimously by Iceland’s parliament. Iceland was supposed to become the safe-haven for investigative journalists. The bill allows people from all over the world to host information on servers in Iceland that is then protected by Icelandic law.

In April 2010, Wikileaks released a video on the Iraq War that gave the organization the most attention and press coverage until then.

A release of 92,000 documents of the US war in Afghanistan and a later release of 400,000 documents on the war in Iraq led to strong criticism from the Pentagon and US government, arguing that this release could mean the death of many innocent citizens. Criticism on Wikileaks increased after the release of 220 out of 250,000 diplomatic cables originating from 274 US embassies in November 2010. While the documents did not seem to reveal world-breaking information, the release caused major media attention and heated debates on both sides of the spectrum. Discussions on government transparency, privacy, tyranny and freedom of information dominated the news for weeks. During these weeks a couple events occurred that were relevant to my thesis because the Dutch hacker scene got indirectly involved.

A couple of hours after Wikileaks twittered it would release diplomatic documents their website was under siege of a denial of service attack , organized by what some thought were ‘patriotic hackers’, but this was never confirmed or denied. Wikileaks was able to send the first 250 files to four major newspapers while their website was mostly unavailable. The US government had by then already warned foreign governments of the leakage and that it could contain some embarrassing information on their leaders, trying to prevent a diplomatic scandal. Wikileaks moved their website to the webhosting facilities of Amazon.com, but two days later this company decided to stop hosting it, under pressure of a US senator.

Another web hosting company denied Wikileaks a day later. Then

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something fascinating happened: hundreds of sympathizing groups, websites and individuals started hosting mirrors of Wikileaks’ website.

Within one day over 200 parties were hosting the cables Wikileaks released, among which 2600nl, the group of hackers I was having monthly dinners with. In the next five days, over 1500 mirrors were set up worldwide. Were opponents of Wikileaks previously able to successfully stop people from having access to their website, it was impossible to stop all these mirrors.

It showed the power of the distributed and decentralized network in a way that Community Memory’s members would admire. It is virtually impossible to control this distribution of information, and keep it a secret.

A couple of days after the release, a US senator declared Assange a terrorist, and other voices were heard in the media that Wikileaks should be declared a terrorist organization. By using the powerful terrorism discourse that has been used in the past decade to justify attacks on several countries, the first step was made to impose repressive actions against Wikileaks or Assange. Later suggestions were made on US national television that Assange should be liquidated. Soon after these events Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, and a Swiss bank froze Wikileaks’ funds on the ground that Wikileaks violated their user policies. These measures led to major discussions, for instance on whether the US government pressured the companies into doing this, and whether freedom of speech was under attack. While many had problems categorizing Wikileaks into either good or bad, it seemed that the aforementioned organizations and the US government had already made up their mind. A group of Wikileaks supporters, however, could not appreciate their choice. This resulted in another, highly discussed event: the ‘revenge’ action by an internet ‘collective’ that goes under the name Anonymous.

Anonymous is not a clearly bound group, as it has for instance no designated leaders or members, but is rather a collection of individuals that operate online and share an idea of information freedom. It operates on internet forums, mailing lists, IRC, social media and other platforms. On these platforms Anonymous announced retaliation in collectively created pamphlets on the websites of Mastercard, Paypal, Visa and Amazon using DDoS-attacks via simple to use software. It is difficult to analyze, however,

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whether the attackers are really concerned with Wikileaks or whether people might just join the attacks for the ‘fun of attacking’, as Coleman (2010c) shows in an article in The Atlantic. Whatever the motivation of the collective attacks were, Anonymous was able to disable access to the websites of above mentioned companies (except for Amazon) for at least a couple of hours. They made the headlines of most media, which seems to be one of the main reasons for Anonymous in the first place: to create awareness with the general public (Anonymous, 2010).

While this ‘revenge’ action is interesting because of the motivations, its decentralized organizational system and the consequences it had, it got even more interesting for me when a 16 year old Dutch teenager, who operates under the name Jeroenz0r, was caught by the Dutch police for being part of the Anonymous revenge action on Mastercard. In the Dutch media he was described as a hacker, which is another example of the absence in the general media of the capability to adequately categorize different forms of online transgression. Revspace, in a press statement, described Jeroenzor as a scriptkiddie, presupposing that he was just one of the nodes joining in on the DDoS-attack by Anonymous, something that requires fairly little computer knowledge (Revspace, 2010). Later, it became known that Jeroenz0r might actually have had a more coordinating role in the attack (De Haes, 2010). Whether he knew what the consequences could be getting caught for his participation is unknown, but he did not attempt to cover his tracks as he announced his actions on a website.

Following the news coverage that a ‘hacker’ ‘hacked’ the Mastercard website, many hackers tried to explain that these DDoSattacks are not hacking, for instance on Twitter: “Hey journalists: Denial of Service attacks are not a ‘hack’ or due to ‘hackers’. It’s just a flood of traffic”, twittered @markjaquith for example. Bits of Freedom also disapproved of the DDoS action judged by their Twitter statement: “DDoSattacks are an illegal way to show discontent and have an opposite effect” (author’s translation), which was then confirmed by hackers on Twitter by retweeting it.

A day later an article by research journalist, activist and hacker

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Brenno de Winter in online magazine Webwereld, states that Jeroenz0r was seen a couple of times at Revspace in Den Haag and in their IRC channel. In his article, previously mentioned hacker Koen Martens (GMC) disapproves of Jeroenz0r’s actions and states that DDoS-attacks have nothing to do with hacking. He nevertheless welcomes the boy to come back to the space and show him their ethics of hacking, so he can develop himself in a positive way. (De Winter, 2010a). The next day GMC sends out an e-mail to the international hackerspaces discussion list with a translation of the article and states: “We see this as an opportunity to bring a positive story about hackers, and plan on organizing a workshop/ discussion around ‘ethical hacking’. We will invite press there. We expect to announce all this on monday.” Within 24 hours about 25 e-mails were sent back-and-forth by hackers all over the world on what happened, what ethical borders are, what the attack means, what Wikileaks represents, etc. The first response is by hacker Yves Quemener, who is semi-serious, semi-trolling and I will quote at length, because it is a striking example for the different viewpoints found in the hacker field: You mention DDoS in the present case but from what I understood, I thought that these attacks were carried more by a big number of people voluntarily giving their bandwidth through applications like L.O.I.C rather than through an illegal botnet. Wasn’t that the case?

WARNING : possibly trollish material ahead. But it has been long since the last one on this list, hasn’t it?

If so, I have a very hard time calling the “Avenge Assange” operation unethical. I know that DoS are usually consider [sic] like a lowly technical act, like some act of random and stupid vandalism.

However, consider a physical world protest: it blocks streets, it causes problems, sometimes injuries, it is not a democratic process.

However, if tomorrow there was a protest blocking the streets of your city to support Assange would you consider it unethical?

Consider also what mastercard, paypal and amazon did to Wikileaks: it is a plain “denial of service” in its first meaning. They denied their services in the hope of censuring wikileaks out of the net. I understand that responding with DoS attacks is not the ideal way

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of making ourselves heard, but I unfortunately see no better one, especially when you see the media coverage that was given to these.

And in that specific case, I find it very hard to call them unfair.

Technically not-impressive ? Indeed. Not hackerish ? Arguably not (though the fact that it might be legal to do that the way they do in some countries is worth some cred). Unethical ? I disagree completely.

In this comment on ethics in hacking, Quemener compares the online DDoS-attack (or, as he argues, L.O.I.C) with a physical protest, which is probably more accepted if done peacefully and when a majority thinks it is justified. He also notes that he sees no other way of making your point, against big fields of power like ‘the media’ and corporations like Mastercard, a DDoS-attack might be the best way to show your discontent. With fairly little technological knowledge people are able to voice their discontent, and get media attention.

In response to the media attention that a 16-year old ‘hacker’ was caught for ‘hacking’ the Mastercard website, Revspace members thought it useful organizing a debate on ethical hacking. It was open to everyone, and especially press and hackers were invited to join. About a hundred people showed up at the hackerspace to discuss what ethical hacking comprises, however, the debaters were unable to establish clear boundaries. Fish_ opened the discussion stating that breaking the rules or laws could be considered ethical. He used an example of his grandfather who burned Dutch municipality registers during the WOII, to prevent the rulers at that time from discovering on which addresses Jewish people lived.

Today, probably not a lot of people will judge this as a criminal act, but much rather as positive act of civil disobedience. As with any act of civil disobedience, it involves breaking the rules and is done for political reasons, in an often non-violent manner. Hackers often appeal on civil disobedience when attempting to justify certain hacks, or leaking of information like those of Wikileaks. “As citizens we are entitled to know for which reasons our country goes to war” (De Winter 2010d, translation EB) said De Winter at the same debate, arguing that leaking of state secrets is justified.

De Winter used the debate as an opportunity to spread his activist message and let the hacker community act as a tight community, with a

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clear message. His quest is separable in roughly two parts. The first part is that he argues for open and transparent governing, and only classify information as ‘classified’ or ‘secret’ when it is really necessary. The second is that governments (the Dutch government in particular) should keep less track of its citizens in databases and secure the databases that are necessary to have (De Winter, 2010d). De Winter once more shows how closely related activism, journalism and hacking often are. He sees a major role for hackers and technology minded people in his proposed change of the current secretive government system. “There is a battle going on, a fundamental battle between governments and technicians” […] “We [the hackers at the debate, EB] are Wikileaks” […] “We know what governments do” (De Winter 2010d, translation EB). De Winter asks hackers to show that the Dutch government is not capable of keeping databases secure, not even the ones with sensitive data on citizens. “But stick to the hacker’s mantra”, he states (De Winter 2010d). Although he does not clearly define what this means, he refers to a sense of ethical hacking found in the hacker field that I researched. It sets certain limits, and asks for making responsible hacks. You can break into a government system, as long as you notify them about the lack of security, and do not cause any damage to the system.

A couple of weeks later I attended a meeting that also discussed activism surrounding Wikileaks, but this time it was specifically on Anonymous. It was organized in a dark squatters’ café in Amsterdam and beside ‘general squatters’, a group of ‘hacker squatters’ of Slug were present. Between all the hackers I know from Randomdata and Revspace there were just two hackers from Revspace present. After a general introduction by a Rotterdam based sociologist on Anonymous’ workings and social organization, a young hacker demonstrated the easiness of being part of a DDoS-attack. The discussions afterwards displayed a noteworthy opposition of viewpoints on ethics between the two present hacker groups. On the one side there were the Revspace hackers who reasoned that these attacks were not only useless, but could also antagonize large corporations and governments, which they in turn could use for demonizing hackers. On the other hand were the Slug hackers,

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who clearly did not agree on this statement. One of their members, an experienced Spanish hacker activist, argued that DDoSing websites is an effective way of showing your discontent, because he thinks that making a website unavailable causes both financial and reputational damage.

Although the two hacker groups share similar goals like openness, transparency and distribution of power, they clearly disagree on how to achieve this, which is reflected in their ethical beliefs. Slug’s hackers seem to prefer stronger activism to overthrow authority, and stand in a tradition of activist hacker culture that started in the Silicon Valley with Lee Felsenstein’s Community Memory group. Hackers at Revspace (and also Randomdata) are generally less politically motivated, and seem still to believe in using diplomatic ways of activism. They condemn using (digital) violence like the DDoS attacks: “I compare a denial of service attack to slapping someone in the face when you run out of arguments to prove someone wrong”, GMC said in a press statement, indicating that he wants to solve issues in public debates. Despite the different viewpoints within the hacker field on what is ethical activism, it is obvious that there is a common ideological framework determined by a shared past and embedded in a shared nomos. Secrecy by governments is rejected, openness and transparency is an important endeavor, and individual freedom is highly important, especially in relation to state power.

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6. General conclusions and reflections Throughout this thesis I have attempted to provide readers an understanding of a group of people that refer to themselves as hackers.

Using a relational sociological framework allowed me to analyze how their particular lifestyle and beliefs are connected to internal dynamics found in their groups and how the hacker field that they collectively embody is related to the world external to their own. My object of research was the Dutch hacker community that organizes itself online, but also very profoundly in local spaces in hackerspaces and at events. Within their field immanent rules, values and stakes structure their thoughts and practices. These structuring elements are a temporal outcome of a complex historical interplay between internal and external forces of which I have analyzed a limited number. With a heightened awareness of the roots of the current Dutch hacker field, I have done ethnographical fieldwork for a period of ten months in this field. By subjecting my own body into their circle of response, I experienced the acceptation process in this field and was able to analyze the particular investment that acceptation entails.

Throughout their relative short history, hackers have developed a particular expression of freedom that partially explains the ways in which the hacker field is structured and some of their practices. This particular view on freedom is closely related to classic liberal and expresses a strong preference for individual freedom, equal access to resources, and a powerful rejection of authority. A small group of techno-enthusiasts at MIT in the 1960s, who called themselves hackers, was the first hacker group to express these notions. For these hackers, it was a necessary position-taking in their struggle to get access to MIT’s multi-million dollar computers. Stephen Levy conceptualized their attitude and way of life as the hacker ethic. In Silicon Valley during the 1970s, this hacker ethic blended with protest movements, hippie culture and utopian ideology.

Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and Lee Felsenstein’s Community Memory, for example, had ideals to create computers and networks that would be accessible to many people and in turn initiate free speech, openness, transparency and democracy.

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Since then, these expressions of freedom have grown into distinctive aspects of what Pierre Bourdieu has called nomos, the written and unwritten rules of a field, which are embodied by the collective habitus of the actors in the field. In the 1980s hacker movements like the Chaos Computer Club and Hack-Tic in Europe came into being, and they displayed remarkable similarities with the nomos of their American counterparts. Even today, at hackerspaces like Revspace and Randomdata, I was able to identify that similar notions of freedom still structure the field despite major societal changes and technological innovations of the past fifty years. Almost every time I was around hackers there were discussions going on that were somehow related to freedom and autonomy. It also motivates them to be engaged and support their cause in (international) struggles like the one surrounding Wikileaks.

Another principle that lies at the heart of the nomos, and has been around since day one in the hacker field is sharing. The scarcity of computers and even scarcer knowledge on computers in the 1960’s and 1970s created a situation in which sharing each other’s discoveries and improvements made a lot of sense. It was just more efficient to share knowledge so people did not need to reinvent the same wheel, but instead were able to build on each other’s knowledge. This premise worked well until the amateur world of hackers was separated by a sudden commercial interest. In contrast to what the industry argued, consumers were eager to get computers in their house. With the prospect of making a lot of money and restraining information from competition, companies copyrighted and closed their products. Hackers that chose to the capitalist option were selling out according to hackers that kept sharing. A striking contrast between the two ideologies is exemplified by the two talented hackers Bill Gates and Richard Stallman. Gates became the richest man in the world with selling closed software, and Stallman started an open source movement with GNU (on which Linux is based), and has a moderate income.

Sharing knowledge and information is not just an aspect of the hacker field because it also forms an important stake and structures the internal dynamics. Sharing is part of the game, and is one of the things by

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which hackers can receive peer recognition. In Bourdieudian terminology one could say that their knowledge serves as cultural capital, which in turn determines status positions within their field. Sharing (valuable) knowledge by hackers is part of the illusio, the investment in their field, which they do because of the doxa, their belief in the game. A precondition for sharing on this level is most likely the fact that most hackers are not financially dependent on the valuable knowledge and skills they possess.

Many choose to invest in their collective, rather than just their individual financial situation because they prefer to have the benefits (fun, social aspects, belonging) of their community rather than money. By doing so, they provide an alternative to what is thought to be the driving force behind our dominant capitalist model and heart of the Protestant Ethic: earning more and more money.

Acceptance in hacker groups is based on what hackers do, produce and share. The acceptance of fourteen year old David Silver in the TMRC hacker group was an example of how merit is more important than other factors. Point four in Levy’s hacker ethic “Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position�

(Levy, 2001: 41) still applies today. The merit aspect is another similarity with classic liberal ideology in which a system based on merit is aspired in contrast to the arbitrary power differentiation of the feudal system.

Hackers, however, use a qualification system that does not necessarily comply with that of greater society. School diplomas or a high income, for example, will not automatically give a hacker a good reputation. With my moderate technological knowledge and circumstantial incapability to invest in the field I was unable to obtain a high status.

Besides sharing similar interests in technology, hackers share a particular lifestyle that has formed over the years. Listening to electronic music, wearing black clothing with hacking related prints, eating fastfood, addressing each other by nicknames, having stickers on laptops and drinking Club Mate are all shared symbols that serve to create a particular group identity. This not only functions as a way to make a distinction from other fields and general society, but by adopting this lifestyle and being part of the group also gives a great sense of belonging.

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Hackerspaces, cons and camps are the places for hackers to celebrate the culture that they collectively embody in their habitus. At these gatherings hackers have a lot of fun with hacking, socializing, partying and engaging in rituals such as 24 hour hacking. By bringing their hacker habitus to these places hackers reaffirm their culture and create continuity. Younger hackers are exposed to the culture and lifestyle and if they want to be part of the field they will have to according to the rules of the game, and develop their own hacker habitus.

Another prevailing element in the hacker field is being playfully mischievous, acting on the border of legality and also being subversive or rebellious. TMRC hackers, for instance, lock-picked in order to get access to computer manuals they were not allowed to see. Some hackers today break into computer systems as challenge, or because they want to expose security vulnerabilities of government websites. This type of behavior can partially be explained in relation to the hacker’s general repudiation of authority, which itself emanates from the strongly present idea of individual freedom in the field. This also becomes apparent in the organizational structure of hackerspaces like Revspace, where the setup is made in such a way that it involves as little rules as possible so hackers can make decision without having to ask the board. They definitely do not want a bureaucratic structure that could obstruct the rhythm of their work flow.

Hackerspaces facilitate the hacker work ethic and bring hackers with different backgrounds and ages together. That a local congregation can be a powerful thing was already proven in the 1970s at the Homebrew Computer Club. Apple might have started from a garage, but it was the HCC where Wozniak gathered and shared information on his first computer with other hackers. Hackerspaces in Europe evolved out of fun hackers had at camps and cons, a tradition that started in the Netherlands and Germany. At Randomdata, Revspace and PS:One I have observed the enjoyment that hackers have while working on their projects, and meeting people with similar interests. The spaces function as learning spaces, because hackers share their knowledge and are willing to teach their skills to others. Specialized tools such as 3D-printers, laser cutters

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and soldering stations give members the opportunity to make things.

Hackerspaces also function as culture transferring apparatus since new hackers are exposed to the particular lifestyle and culture that other hackers carry in their habitus.

The formation and current composition of the greater international hacker field and smaller local hacker fields like the Dutch one are not merely the result of internal concerns. One of the things that Elias has placed a lot of emphasis is the semi-autonomous character of fields (or figurations as he called them). The founding fathers of the hacker field would probably not even been hacking early computers if allied forces in the WWII did not need computers to decrypt encoded Nazi messages.

Similarly, investments by the US Army during the Cold War laid the foundations of the internet, which has had a major influence on the hacker field. But also a movie like Wargames, which not only inspired many kids to get a computer and explore networks, but is also account for changing public perceptions on what hackers can and do. Ever since sensational stories on ‘electronic vandals’ who can cause ‘major disruptions in our societies’ were reported by mass media in the 1980s, hackers were almost guilty until proven innocent. The strong discourse of fear was fueled by the fact that the world of computers and networks was an unknown territory for the general public, including law enforcers and state officials.

We can hence conclude that the formation of the hacker field is the result of many interdependencies with other fields and circumstances.

The relative autonomous character of the field works in both ways. Hackers and the hacker field as a whole influence wider culture and society. Levy’s subtitle of his book Hackers states ‘Heroes of the computer revolution’, as he believes that hackers at MIT and in Silicon Valley have made major contributions to the omnipresence of computers in our present-day society. Utopian visions found in the hacker group surrounding the Whole Earth Catalog fueled the creation of a worldwide network such as the internet. Over the past thirty years the roles that hackers can play in our society seem to have diversified. Not only are hackers creative innovators, they also function as watchdogs of liberal principles in our information society. They challenge infringements on

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privacy and attempt to create public awareness when principles of net neutrality are being damaged. Closed technology that, in hacker’s eyes, should be open is hacked and made available to others.

Hackers, furthermore, express a strong sense of autonomy that they try to obtain in multiple ways. A lot of hackers use open source software, which gives the option to monitor the code and control what happens to their computer. Another example is that hackers make their own products. By Doing It Yourself (DIY), hackers are not bound to restrictions from manufacturers and create individual freedom. A final expression of control is the hacker’s heightened sense of privacy and their pursuit to be in control of one’s own data, instead of governments and corporations storing it in potentially insecure databases.

Looking back on the final result of this thesis project I can conclude that it has become a story with many themes and connections, in both my analysis of the history and the present-day Dutch hacker field. The danger of having so many connections is that the main story line may become obfuscated. On the other hand, I have tried to give the reader a peak into a world that is unknown to many, and one of my objectives was to show the richness and complexities that determine the field. Reflecting on my field work, I wish that I would have been able to spend more time at hackerspaces, cons, and camps to be dedicate myself to the field and enjoy the fun of hacking. This is why I hope to stay involved with the hacker field, learn more things, and maybe apply hacker principles in greater society.

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Appendix 1. An Open Letter to Hobbyists

By William Henry Gates III February 3, 1976 An Open Letter to Hobbyists To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these â&#x20AC;&#x153;usersâ&#x20AC;? never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you do not do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS does not make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in

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hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, are not they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.

Bill Gates General Partner, Micro-Soft

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Appendix 2. The Hacker’s Manifesto File: archives/7/p7_0x03_Hacker’s Manifesto_by_The Mentor. txt ==Phrack Inc.== Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The following was written shortly after my arrest... \/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/ by +++The Mentor+++ Written on January 8, 1986 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers.

“Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”...

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?

Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world...

Mine is a world that begins with school... I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head...”

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Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I’m a smart ass.. Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-today incompetencies is sought... a board is found. “This is it... this is where I belong...” I know everyone here... even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike...

You bet your ass we’re all alike... we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirtcheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all... after all, we’re

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all alike. +++The Mentor+++ __________________________________________________________ _________________

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