Hacker Perspective: Colin Cogle

The computer sat patiently, waiting for our next move.

My grandfather is in one of my earliest memories.  I don't remember how old we were, but I recall he was still healthy and self-employed.  As for me, if I wasn't going to school yet, the excitement of kindergarten would have been in my near future.  My parents and my dad's parents both lived in Cheshire, an idyllic little town in the middle of Connecticut, which meant that we'd be over there almost every Sunday.  Recently, "Pop" had taught me how to play Klondike solitaire on the kitchen table.  I knew my colors and numbers, was good with patterns, and I picked up the game quickly.  I couldn't shuffle a deck quite like he could, but he'd gladly mix up the Bicycle Playing Cards for me, and we'd play a game.

Before I was born, my grandfather left his job at the local hardware store for self-employment fixing appliances.  The two rough hands of this sage master could turn a wrench or screwdriver and fix almost anything mechanical using his veritable treasure trove of hand tools, along with his drawers, cigar boxes, and metal Maxwell House cans filled with screws and spare parts.  He'd even built the house we were sitting in!  Still, I'd never known him - or my grandmother - to understand or appreciate technology.  Machines and household electricity were up his alley (along with lighters and Louis L'Amour novels), but his wisdom ended at circuit boards.  Long before I knew the word "anachronism," there was one captivating white box in their home office that seemed like one of those.

Perhaps his hands were sore that day, or maybe the kitchen table was still drying after they'd cleaned up the breakfast dishes.  Whatever the reason, he carried over the chair from the other desk.  We sat side by side, close enough to smell his scent, one punctuated by Zest soap and the Lucky Strike cigarettes he was slowly quitting.  My feet dangled above the floor as I watched him use this thing called a computer.  He adjusted his black-rimmed glasses, and with two button presses, the Gateway 2000 box and its screen hummed to life.  The dual floppy disk drives churned in order, hoping to find a diskette, before relenting and letting the hard drive spin.  The white text gave way to colorful logos and drawings, the 386 processor drew a green window on the CRT, and Windows 3.1 dealt us a game of solitaire - three cards at a time, just the way he liked it.  He rested his wrinkled hand atop the soap-bar-shaped mouse and I told him what to do - not that he needed my help, mind you, but my younger self loved to feel like a part of the action.

There was no concept of screen time back then.  Television had been a mainstay for decades, and this monitor looked like a little TV.  They only asked that I not sit so close to it.  There were a few fun and educational games on there, but when I tired of learning times tables, winning and losing card games, mousing around Microsoft Paintbrush, and helping Chip navigate his way through all those mazes, I found a binder in the computer desk's cabinet.  This was something we would call an anachronism these days: a paper manual for MS-DOS 5.00!  In a few tabbed chapters, it tried to explain the operating system from top to bottom.  I'd taught myself how to read, though I'm sure I wouldn't have made sense of that until I was a little older.  The documentation opened my eyes to a whole other world underneath the twin veneers of pixels and glowing text.

Eventually, I wouldn't be satisfied with using the computer once a week.  I knew we needed one at home.  I can't imagine I was that persuasive.  Perhaps my parents realized we should have something for my brother and me to type up our schoolwork, but I'd like to think they decided to nurture my budding interest.  One Christmas morning, there was a new desk at the bottom of the stairs, and it was obvious what "Santa" had brought as they lifted the five-sided gift-wrapped box.  Finally, we had our own Gateway 2000 PC, with a blazing-fast 486DX2, twice the memory of my grandparents' machine, and even a dot-matrix printer underfoot.  It was a toy.  It was a tool.  It was a blank canvas full only of possibility.

Time went on.  We moved.  We got a new computer, and again when my mom went back to college.  I inherited the old family computer, which let me experiment without consequences.  Around that time, we got Internet access at home.  I'd seen a few web pages at school, and brought home downloaded apps from the library (one floppy disk at a time); but now, it was time to drink from the firehose.  The age of innocence gave way to the world at large, and while it was AOL dial-up, it was a start.  Websites, email, chat rooms, AIM... there was so much more to experience.  (And a copy of Doom.  It was the nineties, after all.)

Kids can dream, and I decided I wanted to be Bill Gates.  A short lifetime of learning, cemented by a C++ course in high school, led me to Central Connecticut State University to study computer science.  Upperclassmen in the Computer Club introduced me to Linux and the free software movement.  During school, I took my first IT jobs, fixing professors' computers and managing computer labs, before finding an off-campus job at a local managed service provider.  After graduation, I continued on at MSPs great and awful, ones led by wise leaders and ones dragged down by abusive dictators.  I've learned, laughed, and chased progress over my own comfort; I've connected with customers and teammates all over the world; and, I'd like to think I have many more productive years in front of me.

Through it all, people have had one burning question.  It's not the juvenile half-taunt of "Can you hack the Pentagon?" nor anything my clients put in tickets.  Many ask me, "What's your secret?"

Collegiate degrees, professional certifications, and experience may be important to most careers and callings, but there is one thing that sets people like me apart, and a quality that may nurture a hungry mind - something I call the hacker perspective.

The word itself has been used to describe a swath of people such as Kevin Mitnick, Tamer Şahin, Edward Snowden, George Hotz, Steve Wozniak, and Anonymous, all of whom may or may not fit neatly into the Spy vs. Spy hat coloring scheme.  Despite that, hackers in the news have always gotten headlines and takeaways far more befitting of MAD Magazine.  Kevin Mitnick whistling into a phone to start World War III?  Dan Rather might as well have signed off with "What, me worry?"

A hacker is someone who is presented with a problem that has already been declared to be solved, and searches for a new solution.  A hacker finds new possibilities where others see none, creating new from the old.  A hacker uses novel methods to find weaknesses in everything from arguments to household objects to computer networks; whether or not a hacker uses that newfound knowledge for society's gain or their own is up to the individual.

We are the people who eschew sacred cows; we rarely take something at face value, be it an issue simple or complex, or a thing tangible or not.  We can view something as both its whole and the sum of its parts, whether or not we've gotten bored and taken it apart to see what's inside.  If we're asked to pick heads or tails, we wonder what happens if the coin lands on its edge.  We hear vapid words like "Well, that's the way things are" and "That's just how we do it around here" and shudder, for that is anathema to how we think.

The term "hacker" has a modern connotation with cracking computer networks, but let's set that aside, for the underlying concept doesn't belong solely to the so-called modern man, Dryden's noble savage.  The likes of Satoshi Nakamoto and Jacques de Meulles, Nikola Tesla and Leonardo da Vinci, John Logie Baird and Louis Braille, George Washington Carver and John Deere, and countless men and women, dating all the way back to the first guy who thought to tie his sharpened rock to a stick, have all questioned norms and posited answers.

What can you do to cultivate the hacker perspective in yourself or others?  Whether you're an adult, a child, or an adult raising a child, the answers are the same.

If you want to learn more about a thing, don't just guess - figure it out!  Libraries and the Internet can educate you and help you if you get stuck.  Take measurements.  Have a calculator and use it deliberately.  Don't go too far from a pen and paper (unless you have a really good note-taking app).

If you find something, figure out how it works.  When I was young, Cheshire did a "spring cleanup" where people could dispose of almost anything simply by leaving it on the curb in front of their house.  When I got there before the people who cut cables off of everything, I could treat myself to free computers, screens, furniture, and other technology.  I'd take it home, and figure out if I had a use for some or all of it.  I got a screen.  I found computer parts to add to mine.  I found a complete Power Macintosh 8500 and learned macOS.  I carried this hacker ethos with me, frequently turning clients' e-waste into working computers, spare parts, or beer money.  Whenever I did have to dispose of something, I always would try to reassemble it, even taping down mounting screws in an empty drive bay, in case there is a budding hacker poking around the e-waste.  Pay opportunities forward.

If something breaks, figure out why it doesn't work and see if you can fix it.  Even if you fail, you can learn in the process.  I lost count decades ago of how many computers I've diagnosed and fixed.  I've had my Internet down due to a dead router, heard a faint clicking from its AC adapter, realized that my ham radio's power brick has the same output voltage, and gotten myself back online immediately.  My old water heater would randomly die overnight, so I looked up how an oil burner works, learned how to clean and change a sensor, and while it didn't always get it to re-light, it prevented a couple of service calls.  Broken things are an immediate problem that needs an immediate solution.

If something needs to be done, can you do it yourself?  Perhaps being poor for a while was the mother of this necessity, but I'd always had an interest - likely thanks to my grandfather's influence.  No one person can do it all.  The human race specialized thousands of years ago, and there is no shame in knowing when you're past your limit.  That being said, advance your limits.  Cars are a great learning experience.  They're complicated, with many subsystems, and if you get it all right, you get the satisfaction of driving a machine you tinkered with yourself.  I started off on those repair manuals you can buy at the store, but I will say the Internet has made this significantly easier.  I learned how to change my own oil and do my own brake jobs.  I learned how to change a fuel filter, and promptly learned why they say never to use adjustable wrenches as I kinked a metal fuel line and had to learn how to install a compression fitting.  Though I drive an electric car now - a computer on wheels, much to my delight - the hacker in me will relish the chance to bust out the ratchet set at the first sign of trouble.  I'm jealous of everyone growing up with all these hackerspaces and makerspaces.  It's easier now than ever before!

If something works, can you improve it?  Viewed from the hacker perspective, this is what we, young and old, would consider our playtime.  LEGOs are the quintessential toy for any kid with a creative mind.  I had many sets growing up, ranging from space shuttles to a pizzeria.  Any child would wind up combining them, and that's how the first pizza was delivered to "the moon" (my grandparents' bed upstairs).  When I added computers to my playthings, screwdrivers were always in short supply in our house.  I wanted Internet in my room, but my mom said no to a wireless router for reasons obvious to anyone raising a teenage boy.  We had dial-up downstairs, but thanks to Windows' Internet Connection Sharing and a pair of 802.11b Wi-Fi adapters, I got what I wanted.  Again, this mindset isn't limited just to technology, nor successes.  A few friends taught me how to install a lumpier camshaft, and though we wound up losing a few gallons of coolant on a dark stretch of Interstate 91, that indestructible 3800 Series II got us back with a valuable lesson about gaskets.

But, there are some drawbacks for people like us.  Some may call us thoughtful idealists, saying that our ideas don't translate to the real world.  We may be dreamers, but we must stop ourselves from dreaming long enough to make them come to life, lest we live in our dream worlds forever.  We may become surrounded by people with parochial mindsets who want more conventional goals like money and power, and we must be strong enough to distance ourselves from them before we're exploited and abused.  We may find ourselves in bad situations, and those of us who are natural mediators might stick around for longer than we should, letting our mental health suffer and lead us into the easy trap of drug and alcohol abuse.  The mind is a muscle like any other; you need to warm it up, work it out, and give it some time to rest.  Spend a day at the beach.  Take a hike in the woods.  Climb a mountain.  Sing karaoke.  Love someone.  Raise a family.  Respect your mind.

Finally, the hacker is not unaware of the truly inviolable constraints of the system we live in.  Like everyone, we all must remember our own mortality.  The craftsman can pass down his tools, something I remember when I use my great-grandfather's roofing hammer.  As men and women who deal in knowledge, we have the difficult task of passing down our intangible je ne sais quoi to future generations.  Mariah Watkins, George Washington Carver's first teacher, summed it up well when she told the young Black boy on his first day of formal schooling, "You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people."

Knowledge is no one's to keep.  Learn how to write, speak, or somehow express yourself and your ideas (in a durable medium, as all those Vine stars learned).  In the words of Stewart Brand, information wants to be free; the true hacker realizes that their facts, foibles, and fables need a conduit to escape their mind and live on in someone else's.  Write a book, start a blog or vlog, or just talk to your kids or grandkids and mold their young minds.  Play the cards you hold.  In a way, your deeds, words, mindset, and perspective can live on long after you're gone - cheating death, the ultimate life hack.

Whenever he gets around to it, Colin continues to share his knowledge with his colleagues nationwide; his clients and readers worldwide; and anyone who is willing to listen, learn, and question.