Hacker Culture [Paperback]

Douglas Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2, 2003

Douglas Thomas offers an in-depth history of this important and fascinating subculture, contrasting mainstream images of hackers with a detailed firsthand account of the computer underground. Thomas studies novels and films (Neuromancer, WarGames, Hackers, and The Matrix) and reveals contemporary views of hackers as technological wizards, high-tech pranksters, and virtual criminals. Thomas then examines the court cases of Kevin Mitnick and Chris Lamprecht to determine how hackers are defined as criminals. Thomas finds that popular hacker stereotypes express the public's anxieties about the information age far more than they do the reality of hacking.

Douglas Thomas is associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Silently navigating the virtual corridors of the global telecom networks, peeking into restricted files and generally causing mischief, hackers are the tricksters of the digital age. But although Hollywood and the publishing industry have long been fascinated by these technosneaks, they've nearly always overestimated hackers' malicious intents and technical abilities, argues Thomas, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He attempts to set things right, steering a middle course between the alarmists, who perceive hackers as suburban terrorists of the new century, and the apologists, who want to see them as brave revolutionaries against a corporate/government assault on personal liberties. With a real affinity for his subject, Thomas uses hacker publications like 2600 and Phrack for most of his research, instead of the all-too-common procession of online security experts doing their best Chicken Little impersonations. Thomas avoids another trap of this genre by not letting hackers the publicity-loving, self-aggrandizing ones spout off at length about their skills and achievements. He presents a sober but sympathetic analysis, maintaining that, more often than not, hackers are simply playing around, testing a system's security just to see if it's sound: "[They] see themselves as educators about issues of security, fulfilling the same function as Consumer Reports." Though Thomas may rely too heavily on that old academic touchstone, Foucault, he has produced an intelligent and approachable book on one of the most widely discussed and least understood subcultures in recent decades.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Thomas (Univ. of Southern California; Cybercrime) traces the history and origin of hacker culture within mainstream society, the computer industry, and the media. In the first of the book's three parts, he describes the evolution of the hacker and the emergence of hacker culture, also discussing how films like War Games, Sneakers, The Net, and Hackers helped mythologize the image. Part 2 focuses on how hackers have been represented in the media, both within their own culture and to the outside world. Thomas also discusses publications such as 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which provides insight into the political and social agendas of hacker culture, as well as the publication Phrack, which he contends has its finger on the pulse of hacker culture. In the last part, Thomas provides a judicial discourse on how hackers are defined legally and concludes by examining the cases of two hackers, Kevin Mitnick and Chris Lamprecht, who were prosecuted for their activities. Thomas effectively argues that the popular image of the hacker reflects more the public's anxieties about technology than the reality of hacking. Addressing general audiences in a readable, engaging style, his book would be of interest to students of communication and journalism. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Joe Accardi, William Rainey Harper Coll. Lib., Palatine, IL
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (June 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816633460
• ISBN-13: 978-0816633463
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,279,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Douglas Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

His research focuses on the intersections of technology and culture. It has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center for Communication.

Doug is also the author of the book Hacker Culture and a coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies and Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age. He is the founding editor of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, an international, interdisciplinary journal focused on games research.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A View of the Views of Hackers and Views About Hackers, May 12, 2002

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hacker Culture (Hardcover)

It may be that computer hackers, those who can break into someone else's computer system and take data, or fiddle with it, or just look around, are scary criminals who may collapse our baroque internet architecture. It may be that they are dangerous outlaws who, since they know computers so well, must be put into prison for years away from any keyboard or mouse. It may also be that they simply know people very well, and that stereotypes of hackers in the media (even in journalism) show nothing so much as our worry over the unprecedented new computer tools piped into our homes and offices. This last is the view of Douglas Thomas, who, in _Hacker Culture_ (University of Minnesota Press), has written a history of how hackers came to be, and how they came to be seen as villainous outcasts. It is a surprising look at hackers, but is more about how a society uses computers, and it takes in the entire short history of digital electronics.

One of the surprising parts of this history is just how far antipathy between hackers and Microsoft goes, and it starts right at the beginning with the first personal computer. Bill Gates co-wrote a version of the BASIC programming language that could be run on the Altair, but Altair users had become used to sharing programs, not buying them. Gates thought of his BASIC as a secret that could be licensed or purchased, and hobbyists that shared it (the earliest hackers) were simply thieves. Ill feelings between Gates and hackers have continued for almost three decades now over similar issues. The reputation of hackers, forged in the popular media, is one of this book's strengths. _WarGames_, the 1983 release about the kid who nearly causes nuclear war by hacking into military supercomputers, gave hacker culture a national audience. The 1995 _Hackers_ showed hackers as young Robin Hoods, but had a freakish number of technical errors and it tried to promote erroneous hacker language and clothing styles. The film's website, therefore, became a focus for hacker attacks, with defacement of the photographs and replacement of ad-copy hype with such non-recommendations as "Hackers, the new action adventure movie from those idiots in Hollywood, takes you inside a world where there's no plot or creative thought, there's only boring rehashed ideas."

The scariness of the depictions of hackers in the media has resulted in strange legal decisions. The famous Kevin Mitnick was trumpeted as such an "evil genius" and "cyberterrorist" that he was denied a bail hearing and was kept in jail for over four years awaiting trial, with the government denying his legal team access to evidence to be presented against him. (Some fellow hackers redesigned web sites as political pranks to call attention to his plight.) This sort of basic misunderstanding about what hackers are and what they do is what _Hacker Culture_ seeks to correct. Douglas Thomas, an academic who is able to use ideas from Plato, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, kindly does not use this talent too often, but restricts his entertaining depiction of hacker history to the important battles the information age has spawned concerning basic issues of privacy, property, and secrecy. He shows us that hackers have been at the edge of defining these issues, and in a remarkably well balanced account which refuses black and white labels, he shows that they are not always on the wrong side.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Phreaks and Pr0phessors, May 27, 2005

By 

doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hacker Culture (Paperback)

This is a cultural and political study of hackers as researched by an academic, and as a former academic myself, I can tell you a bit about how this process works. A professor takes a subject of general interest and beats it senseless by applying intellectual theory, and constructs the study for other professors who are more concerned with accepted research methods, rather than knowledgeable general readers who might have an interest in learning more about the subject. Here, Douglas Thomas uncovers a number of fascinating aspects of hacker culture. These include the recent increase in political activism by hackers, their contradictory stances on secrecy and freedom of information, the back-and-forth influence of cyberpunk and science fiction (with some interesting connections to authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling), and especially how popular views on the criminality of hackers is really an outgrowth of society's latent fears of technological domination.

This could have been a truly fascinating book if Thomas hadn't decided to turn on the professorisms and flog this interesting material to death with tired and soggy theory. Thomas frequently namedrops the classic social theoreticians Foucault, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, an exercise that serves little purpose other than impressing Thomas' fellow professors. He also unleashes windy over-analysis of the texts of outdated movies and magazines, as well as the influential Hacker Manifesto. His attempts to build up his annoying concepts of boy culture and the influence of the body on virtual identity mostly fizzle out (run for your life when you see an author whipping out terms like those), and the book often deteriorates into obtuse and fatuous academic language like the over-analytical "freedom and secrecy were decontextualized to the point of solipsism," and pure useless professorial garbage like "the decomposition and recomposition of discourse." At times this book is surprisingly interesting for an academic cultural study, but remember who wrote it and for whom. [~doomsdayer520~]

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hacker History, for the Unenlightened, June 5, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Hacker Culture (Hardcover)

As others have mentioned in their reviews, this book was written by a highly academic author. Thus, the content is geared towards a college educated audience, or at least bright highschool students. As a computer engineering student, I found this book to be intruiging. Several hacking related movies were analyzed, and although slightly dated, these examples further the understanding of hacking history. The anecdotes are often amusing, and the main points of each section are deeply supported with sources and logical reasoning. Thomas's overlying message is that the media cruelly slants the image of the benevolent hacker into one of a violent evil genius. I'd recommend this book to anyone above average computer user level, or those who have an interest in learning about computer history, and hackers in general.