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.
