Book Review: Hacker Culture
Reviewed by Ben Mccorkle
Hacker Culture by Douglas Thomas, University of Minnesota Press
In a lot of ways, Douglas Thomas' Hacker Culture is the book that, were I a bit older and more entrenched in the scene, I wish I had written: smart, fair, with equal and discerning attention paid to historical detail as well as cultural critique.
Thomas' study of the hacker underground does an adept job of moving beyond the often overblown rhetoric characterizing the hacker/rest-of-us divide. Rather than get mired down in the "us vs. them" debate - the paranoid claims of a monolithic system of politico-corporate oppression, or the supreme vilification of the "dark side" hacker as the prototypical cyber criminal of our financial data and even our very identities - he places these iterations within a broader cultural context.
Thomas reads the history of hacker culture as competing relationships to technology (a term he investigates and expands so that it includes far more than just computers and phones). He suggests that we are working through a complex emotional problem as a society - namely, trying to control our anxieties about technologies we don't completely understand.
The hacker, then, stands as an ideal figure upon which to heap that anxiety. As the Information Age threatens to destabilize our traditional concepts of security and secrecy, public and private life, and identity, hackers are often in the vanguard position of this movement because of their dramatic and (possibly malicious) exploits, and therefore make perfect scapegoats.
Popular representations of the hacker in films and in the news in turn are often the subject of ridicule by "real life" hackers because these depictions do more to propagate the cartoonish figure of technological evildoer than paint a realistic portrait of a group whose motivations are far more complex and benign.
Cultural theory aside, Hacker Culture offers a thorough historical overview of nearly five decades of hacker lore. Thomas hits on most of the key moments, figures, and documents of the tradition (Microsoft vs. L0pht and cDc, the MOD/LOD rivalry, the activist uprisings surrounding Kevin Mitnick and Chris Lamprecht, and "The Hacker Manifesto"), but he also extends the history backwards, into the computer labs of MIT, Cornell, and Harvard during the supercomputer projects of the 1950s and 1960s reminding us that hacking has had a much longer symbiotic relationship with the very military, governmental, and academic institutions it confronts today.
Though he occasionally lingers a bit too long on some moments (is it hyperbole to imply that the films WarGames and Hackers had generation-defining impact?), both his narrative and interpretation of these events are ultimately engaging and compelling.
In the end, we are left with an indispensable record of hacking origins, as well as an explanation of the changes in the scope, ethos, and philosophy of the hackers' world.
As a longtime scenester and a frequent correspondent to Wired News on the Mitnick saga, Thomas brings to this project considerable street cred, certainly. But he also offers a unique rhetorical and philosophical perspective that allows for associations between the virtual and actual body of the hacker, various state-sanctioned mechanisms of punishment, the late 20th century's almost ontological dependence upon a cult of secrecy - discourses of power, punishment, and resistance circulate throughout this history (so read up on your Nietzsche and Heidegger, folks).
I, for one, would be interested in following the reaction to this book from members of the hacker community, as this reading attempts to hold a subversive counterculture up to the institutional scrutiny of academic discourse.