Hacker Culture
By Douglas Thomas.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 2002.
266 pp., illus. Paper ?
ISBN: 0-8166-3346-0.
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker.
School of Literature, Communication, and
Culture. Georgia Institute of Technology.
Atlanta, GA. 30332-0165.
Email: eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
The concept and
practice of hacking and perhaps the
issue is the distinction between concept
and practice has become one of those
ubiquitous components of cyberculture. Hacking
has surfaced not just as a way to use code,
but as a cultural force as well. Hacking
has become more a style, or a life-style,
or at least an attitude. You can hack your
wetware, hack a social scene, hack a city,
and so on. At some point, the term is going
to become so all-encompassing that, in the
network society, it will become metaphysical,
a synonym for "doing" rather than
"being."
It is this gap between the practice of hacking
and the concept of hacking that Douglas
Thomas book Hacker Culture addresses.
Between the gory details of computer code,
and the abstract, cultural attitude of hacking,
we find government legislation, the economic
interests of the software industry, and
the development of new technologies. It
is particularly this last phenomenon which
is the focus of Thomas book, though
his concentration on the socially-shaping
force of infotech certainly implies the
interests of government and industry.
Thomas book is roughly divided into
three parts. The first part provides an
excellent overview of Thomas theoretical
orientation and the culture of hacking.
It not only mentions key moments in the
timeline of hacking, but also spends some
time meditating on the philosophy of hacking.
The second part undertakes some more detailed
analyses of hacking culture, from hard core
phreaking to the mainstreaming of hacking
in SF film. Finally, the third part considers
the relationships between hacking, the computer
industry, and law, taking a kind of Foucauldian
approach to the construction of the criminal-hacker
figure. The strongest argument in Thomas
book is to show how an ambiguous politics
engages with emerging technologies, to produce
a set of social practices. Thomas shows
how hackers are often positioned between
being an antipathy to the corporatism of
the software industry, and as security experts
and systems administrators for those same
companies. The suggestion put forth is that
hackers are defined by this tension
at once against the privatization of information
and yet a product of the very thing they
oppose.
The one thing I missed from Thomas
otherwise sophisticated handling of the
subject, was an analysis of the concept
and the practice of hacking. Im not
a programmer, but I would still like to
know exactly what different computer hacking
practices involve. It seems, that, if there
is what Thomas calls a "performance
of technology" in hacking, it would
be at this level, in terms of run-time,
time-to-live, or compiling. After all, gaining
access into a secure database is a different
practice than port-scanning, and there are
probably hackers who dont consider
either to be "true" hacking. I
would like to see Thomas carry his analysis
of hacker culture to the material level
of code, run-time, and protocols. There
is, arguably, a lot to be gained by refusing
this gap between concept and practice, and
an analysis of hacking techniques or code
from a cultural standpoint is worth considering.
The advantage of such an analysis would
be to further illustrate something that
is arguably at the root of all hacking approaches:
that the system only fails when it works.
Internet viruses are an example (and Im
borrowing here from Alex Galloways
work on Internet protocols). A virus or
worm can only be successful if the Internet
is functioning optimally. Otherwise, the
virus cannot disseminate itself, and will
ostensibly be cut off from being able to
function as a virus. As Thomas points out,
the main insight of hacking as both
a practice and as concept is that
any system, when working "properly,"
has by definition a series of flaws, fissures,
and loopholes. Hackers are a paradoxical
kind of developer, since they work almost
exclusively at this level, at the points
at which the system shows forth its glitches,
idiosyncrasies, and aberrations.
I would recommend this book alongside one
of the more traditional accounts of hacking,
the kind of names, dates, and events accounts
given by Steven Levy or Bruce Sterling.
Together, they provide a comprehensive overview
of hacking as both practice and concept.
Thomas book is also suitable for an
upper-level undergrad or graduate course
on cyberpunk or cyberculture.