Hacker Perspective: socketwrench

One gloomy afternoon in suburban Minnesota, nine-year old me was behind a shed poking through bits of wood, trying to find anything that might contribute to the burning image in my head.

"I'm going to build a robot!" I told myself.  Of course, this was doomed to failure at the time.  I hadn't a clue about control loops, servos, or even basic machining.  I only knew that in a recent episode of Tom and Jerry, there was a robot mouse, and I wanted to build my own.  I drew up designs, made little sketches, and tried to sort out ways to propel the tubular automata.  I had spent previous years paging through the set of encyclopedias we had, and decided to use a small particle accelerator for propulsion.  If only nine-year-old me knew what a gift such a diminutive accelerator would be for particle physicists, to say nothing about the robot mouse!

It wasn't long before the lack of tooling and materials plagued me in each subsequent idea I had.  Later, I was allowed as part of our regular grocery runs to walk down the strip mall to a nearby RadioShack and spend what little money I had.  Here I bought copies of the Engineer's Mini Notebook series, audio tapes, and practice books to get a ham radio license, a multimeter, and even ferric chloride and copper clad, blank PCB boards.

Now that I think about it, it was amazing they let a tween buy any of that, but it was the nineties.

With copies of QST, I managed to convince my dad to take me to a convention hall where I passed the Technician Class exam shortly after they dropped the Morse code requirements.  With a catalog from DigiKey and a need for a science project, I etched my own boards, trying to make a complicated, phase shift receiver.  Like the robot mouse, this too was a colossal failure.  The radio produced no sound, not even static.  No matter what I did, my book knowledge and passion far outstripped my practical experiences and tooling.  Even an experienced electronics hobbyist would have had difficulty building such a radio using little more than a $20 analog multimeter from RadioShack and a $13 soldering iron from Fleet Farm.

Throughout all of this, I had a computer.  Dad felt computers were part of the future, and saw to it that his kids would have access to some sort of machine.  All second, third, or fourth hand.  All working, if well loved.  All terribly outdated and underpowered by the time my child fingers could grasp the keyboard and call it "mine."  I knew BASIC existed - I even wrote a "video game" in it for a school assignment - but I knew nothing of assembly language.  It wasn't until high school when I discovered C++, and everything changed for me.

Inside the computer was the perfect garage.  The tools were all there.  The "material" was all there.  You could endlessly experiment, build, destroy, and build again, never having to give up a few hard-earned dollars.  I fell in love with the simple fact I could build structure, something which felt inexplicably lacking in line-number-oriented BASIC.

At the library, I discovered a copy of Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.  I devoured the book, immediately reread it, and felt something I never felt before in my then young and isolated life.

I felt kindredness.

While reading the exploits of those first hackers, I felt as if I had found a part of myself.  Here were people who didn't just like computers and thought they were neat or interesting, but had a driving passion to delve into them, exploit them, make them do what they want even if not intended by their original system designers.  I, embarrassingly, started to call myself a hacker in that self-assured way only a teen could manage to pull off.

Well familiar with Mac OS 7 at this point, I knew how to bypass the At Ease launcher used by my high school as a security mechanism.  When school IT learned that I knew this, I was occasionally blamed for issues with the school computer systems.  I had only wished for access without bullshit; why would I want to destroy perfectly good systems?  I bypassed the launcher, used the machine as I wanted, rebooted, and returned everything back to the way it was.  Later, of course, school IT purchased more invasive security software which could not be bypassed so easily.  I upped the ante and hacked a system disk on a single floppy using resource fork hacking.  "Fine, I won't even use your OS.  I'll just bring my own!"  Eventually this war for access ended when I picked up a then horribly outdated PowerBook Duo at a swap meet and began using it as my laptop at school.

I watched the movie Hackers on the Sci-Fi Channel.  It was like a clarion call for me.  Instead of the stereo-typical nerd as so often lampooned in cinema, these characters were stylish, unique, and themselves.  Of course, I knew it was a fiction, but it was such a compelling fiction that I simply didn't care.  "Hackers can do good!" I went to a Walmart and bought the soundtrack.  From there, I discovered electronic music.  Orbital.  Underworld.  The Prodigy.  I felt alive.  I felt identity.  I felt as if I found a part of myself to love despite the crushing weight of gender dysphoria I carried since my first memories.

As the early nineties gave way to the dot-com era, that self-assured teen confidence bled away.  With an abundance of practice in disassociation thanks to that gender dysphoria, I disassociated myself from the term.  I no longer called myself a hacker.  After all, I hadn't broken into any systems (my exploits with the school computer system notwithstanding), written any viruses, or defeated Fisher Stevens.  I was just a "techie," or "computer geek," or sometimes a "programmer."  I narrowed and whitewashed the term to suit a society which was actively hostile to The Other.  This continued until college, when I could no longer bear the self denial, the depression, and the sheer unapproachable numbness in which I felt forced to navigate the world.  Depressive spells became frightfully deep.  I constantly thought of suicide while wearing a quiet and unassuming mask in my classes.

No one had any idea.

My tenuous connection to the programmer side of hacker culture was all that I had in that dark period.  I buried myself in the machine, lying to myself that I could write a cinematic role-playing video game as well as any major studio.  I wrote my own 3D engine using nothing more than a copy of Metrowerks CodeWarrior and some thick books from a Barnes & Noble brimming with every trick used before the advent of acceleration hardware.  This too was another robot mouse.  A failure.

I had so distanced myself from "hacker" at this point when I finally learned the other identifying star in my self-identity constellation: "transgender."  Prior to this, I had only known the (arguably outmoded) "transsexual" from a slanted reporting spot from 60 Minutes, and had fully internalized the negative messages that program and society harbored.  Yet, with "transgender," I suddenly felt I was given language for what I am.  It was a revelation as monumental as teenage me discovering C++ after a childhood of BASIC.  I no longer felt so alone, so isolated, so alien behind my own eyes.  "There are others like me."

College graduation came.  I conveniently "forgot" to wear parts of the gendered outfit I no longer wished to wear.  I researched hormone regimens and risked money on illicit HRT.  I self-administered years before this could be called "bio-hacking."  I was careful and methodical.  I came out to my dad.  I changed my name.  I used my self-prescribing to convince an endocrinologist to give me a real prescription.  If I weren't so desperate and yet so certain, I might have considered this social engineering.

My gender was not a robot mouse.

I forget what made me at this point in my life, think once again of being a hacker.  Having been gifted a first-edition copy of Heroes, I reread it.  I was once again awestruck by tales of the first hackers and the TMRC (Tech Model Railroad Club), of fantastic exploits of assembly programming conducted on mini-computers.  It was at this time I began to notice how much broader the Levysonian definition of the term was compared to its popular understanding.  The author alleged that hacker identities exist beyond that of computers or even technical systems.  Anyone can be a hacker.  There are computer hackers, sure, but also music hackers, art hackers, word hackers...  The field you're in matters not, but the attitude, the approach, the dedication to lifelong learning.  Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic contrasted with the Protestant milieu in which I grew up in suburban Minnesota.  I developed a love of subcultures in part due to those books.

When no longer tied to technical applications, you discover that so many more can be hackers if they too felt the pull of the term as I did all those years ago.  Assume everyone you meet is technical, or has knowledge you lack.  Humans excel at creating systems, and where there's a system, there are those who know how to play it expertly.  You may find them at a concert hall, a machinist shop, an art studio, even unexpected places like the Social Security office.  There are so many more hackers out there than those who self-identity with the term.

As I started my career in tech, I felt that now, maybe now, I'd finally feel connection with others through hackerdom, but I found little camaraderie in vocation.  My co-workers were co-workers.  They felt little need to be dedicated to technology or learning outside of work hours.  This is not an indictment; it's a valid and healthy way to approach the divide between work and life.  Yet, I wanted more.

In the evenings, I was finding more.  A very common experience for trans people is isolation.  Isolation wasn't new to me.  I felt isolated in my childhood home.  I felt isolated at work.  I had been isolated in my gender identity - if it weren't for the 2000s era Internet.  For the first time, it felt as if there were ways for our small demographic to find each other in ways that were impossible in all but the largest of cities.  I found friends and loved ones there.

Queer identity evolved in those channels and message boards.  People were looking inside themselves, looking at the systems inside themselves, and finding ways to make those systems work for them.  A joyful part of queer identity is its inherent murkiness.  Queer identities have long been debated in this fashion among those on the borders and outside the cisgender and heterosexual bell curves.  "Who gets to call themselves transgender?" appears again and again as young queers try to find a path for themselves in a society which only values limited forms of individuality.

One might as well say, "Who gets to call themselves a hacker?"

Today, there has been an intoxicating explosion of genders and queer ways-to-be.  A checkerboard matrix of stark lines shatter into prismatic facets dancing within and outside of those confines.  No longer is it static, but it can change, grow, evolve - much like sunlight passing through a crystal window pane.

We were, are, and continue to be, hacking gender.

So, who gets to be a hacker?  Am I a hacker?

Despite all my lofty prognostications above, part of me still resists the idea to apply the label to myself.  I find myself reading for counterexamples, as if identity were a mathematical proof.  When one counterexample is found, the entire proof collapses.  Yet, I know from my experiences as a trans person that it doesn't work that way.  Gender isn't math.  Self-identity isn't math.

And being a hacker shouldn't be math either.

Such means-testing benefits a society which is fanatically conformist; it forever keeps the power of identity in the hands of others, of those who have power over you and can exploit you for their own purposes and gains.  Parents may do this to their queer children to stave off fear or pain, or to preserve the narratives they imagine for their kids.  Societies do this to preserve their power structures, be they secular or religious.

I try to tell myself this, but it all feels like a delicate shell of justification over a tender and helpless creature.  A creature whose eyes have yet to open to behold the first rays of sunlight, whose voice has yet to cry out across the treetops.  I look back at my own history as a self-identified hacker, and see a trail of failed robot mice.

It was at this point the hacker community found me.  "I think you'd fit in around here."  Simple words, yet they felt validating in a way I had only experienced since discovering the term "transgender."  I felt inexperienced.  I felt like a child.  I felt so often like I simply didn't belong or wasn't worth the label.  Yet, I was welcome.  I felt at home.

I still have yet to conduct any pen-tests, or break into any systems like some Hollywood stereotype (Fisher Stevens still eludes me).  I have, however, reverse engineered backdoors and exploits.  I've found ways to build and manipulate complex infrastructure to suit my goals.  I have always been a builder - I learn by trying to do seemingly ostentatious things.  Yes, I could see each robot mouse in my wake as a failure, but isn't it much better to see them as learning experiences?

When I discovered 3D printing, I felt it was a union between my love of computers and my childhood desire for that robotic companion.  At first, I had only built a stock Ender 3 Pro and printed what models I could find online.  Then, slowly, I made my own designs.  I modified my printer.  I learned to replace the mainboard, add mesh leveling, and even replace the hotend entirely.  I then tried to build a VORON0 from parts, using no kit and only the assembly guide and a bill of materials.  It was an amazing moment when that first robot mouse looked up for the first time and greeted me.  I was so surprised by my success that I questioned and minimized it - until I did it again by rebuilding that Ender 3 into a Switchwire using nothing more than a CAD file and guesswork.

Once may be a fluke, but twice is a trend.

Hacker, like "non-binary," is an invitation to define yourself, to create a space of self discovery as well as an attitude and an approach.  To be queer isn't unlike being a hacker; you find the system you're presented with lacking, brutalist, ripe for creative exploration and redefinition.  Gender and sexuality are systems.

And where there are systems, there are hackers.

Do you hear the call?

After successfully building her pair of robot friends (3D printers), socketwench settled in with her collection of terrible movies, no mad scientists in sight!