Customer Reviews

Hacker Culture

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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~]

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.

While people in previous reviews have complained that a) the prose is dense, and b) it's out of date, I can say as an academic who has waded through most of the academic literature on hackers and hacker culture that Thomas's prose, although indeed academic, is in contrast cystal clear. As well, his take on hackers is, in my opinion, more thorough and balanced than almost any other account I've seen.
What reviewers who want to either "watch the movie" or read an exciting book like "Cyberpunk" instead miss is that Thomas deconstructs both of these phenomena -- hackers in fiction and hackers in bombastic nonfiction, to create a portrayal of hacker culture in the popular media as well as in "real life." His aim is not just to talk about hackers but also the perception of hackers. Yes, it's outdated (although how it could not be is difficult to say), but the truth is that most of the paradigm-setting portrayals of hackers were produced in the mid 1980s - mid 1990s, and as such the movies, fiction, journalism etc. from this time period are still quite relevant. It is not complete -- I fault him for instance for only fully deconstructing a few movies -- but it is by far the most complete in terms of showing both sides (fiction and reality, not hackers and law enforcement) that I have seen.
I would urge people, like the reviewer below, who are interested in hacker culture to visit sites like 2600; I would also urge them to read this book -- please! -- in addition to or instead of books like "Cyberpunk" and "The Cuckoo's Egg."

I found this to be a remarkable work which does a lot of explain who hackers are and where they came from. While it is true that the book deals quite a bit with the 1990s, it does so from an historical perspective. I'm not sure exactly how history can be called "outdated." I think what he was trying to say was that the movie Hackers influenced a generation of hackers, just as WarGames did a generation earlier. At least that was my reading.

This is definately an academic book, written by an academic, published by an academic press, so you have to expect that it will be over some people's heads. It may have been smarter for the author to rely on more examples and stories and to not probe the issues quite so deeply or try to create a theory about who hackers are or what their cultural significance is in such a hostile, anti-intellectual climate. As for me, the book made me think.

Apparently that is too much work for some people. Not a light read, but "by my lights" not many things worth reading are. I mean since when has a favorable comparison to Henry James been considered an insult?

This is a generally terrible discourse on hacker culture. Interpretations are often misguided. Academic discussions are pretty obtuse. For a book that appears to claim that hackers are not criminals, it certainly spends a lot of time talking about how hackers are criminals. The only part of the book that's useful and interesting is the history of hacking. However, these gems are few and far in between and could have been condensed to less than a dozen pages. This leaves over 200 pages of what amounts to a nark trying very hard to not sound like a nark.

... It reads like the worst of academic tomes, using $10 words when a nickel one would have done. And while there are anecdotes and tales that are amusing, the reading was too painful. Perhaps I should have read more Henry James in high school and college, because the writing was just so obfuscating that I gave up somewhere in chapter 2. Glad it was a library book -- I would have bought it if it had been even halfway decent.

It's rare that I give up on a book, especially one in my fild of interest, but this one was a loss by my lights.

When I first read this book, I just feel the content of it isn't as interesting as the brand (maybe I am the one misinterpreted hacker), but when I look into it, I found it is interesting: a lot of abstract concepts have been linked together, in order to break our sound bias. through interpreting the history of hacker culture, Douglas want to figured out the real face behind hacker, and the relationship between technology and society. It's really enjoying reading process when I went through the events which hackers "fight" with traditional orders, and was acknowledged that so many conspiracies behind those historical events, tried to figued out what is the real relationship behind "identity", "code and performance" "surveillance".

However, I had to say it's really make me upset... to knowing these young skilled hacker professionals always been branded as "subculture", "terrorists"...and they seems always been punished by traditional force, and living in the grey-area between virtual and reality.

If the accumulating of disconnected concepts are not really problems, I think Douglas' attitude toward hacker is not really "justify". He repeated that "they are not that evil", "they are just young kids", "they should not been branded as outsider," "subversion of technology", "as a subculture"... I knew he interviewed really a lot of hackers, using 7 years to investigate, listen to their stories, and tried to correct their public image, but is that another bias? It's like standing at the highland of the mainstream culture and then look hackers down, showing a kind of companion and feel sorry for them. What's more, he is also like an old nice grandpa, who is so kindly that pardoning those naughty boy's mistakes, and then speak to his friends: "They are just kids, you don't have to be so harsh to them!" However, it is still "subculture", "subversion", "separated personality"... I don't think hackers are all young kids, those referred in the book are young because they are the first generation people who skilled at computer. As far as I know, at present, there are a lot of people made hacker as their job, they hired by one big company to attack its opponent; or making virus in order to help sell Firewall software...they are all adults, skilled and trained professionals has quite good income. I think to some extent, Douglas cleared one bias, but portrait another one, honestly speaking, this is even worse than the first.

This book is written by an academic who is so far behind the times that he spends a good chunk of the book writing about, "Hackers," the movie from 1995. Huh? The writing does not flow and the information is outdated. If you want to know about hacker culture go to 2600 - dot - org. Good thing I checked it out from the library.