Reflection's Edge

Is the Matrix Really Green and Black? A Writer's Intro to Hacker Culture

by Ciro Faienza

There's something to be said for being misunderstood - it gives you staying power. Two decades after hackers first began to gain prominence in the media, news writers are still talking about them as if they've never had press before. The lingo - "hacked in," "virus," "malware" - even now sounds sensationalist on a reporter's lips, no matter how commonplace the story might actually be.

It happens in fiction, too. We've read hackers as villains and as all kinds of antihero (misfit, thief, mug-for-hire), and we're still in love with the imagery - monochrome green screens of jargon and code; fast fingers on keyboards producing equally kinetic results; sunglasses at night. Whether sci-sexy or paranoid, hacker stereotypes and clichés can make for satisfying guilty-pleasure fiction, and if they seem shallow, they do at least point to something more compelling beneath the surface.

The better authors have been clever enough to uncover that something by understanding their subject. "Hackers," they've recognized, is not merely a collective term for people who can break into computers. It's a word for a vibrant community of people with shared social norms, ideologies, and modes of expression both within and independent of their larger cultures - in other words, a subculture. Authors who wish to avoid writing weasely, one-note dei ex machina would do well to take a closer look.

Hackers On-Line and IRL

Generalization can be dangerous business with any group of people, and sometimes it's not even useful. Electronic communication, the primary medium for group exchanges within the hacker community, strips individuals of their physical characteristics. By its nature, hacker culture crosses, often easily, such dated boundaries as geography, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Is any generalization about hackers outside the IRC chatroom possible at all?

Luckily for the taxonomist, somewhat. In order to form such generalizations, however, a definition of "to hack" is needed. Broadly speaking, hacking is inventively manipulating the rules of a system to produce a result not previously laid out by that system. Denotatively, this would qualify both adding nitrous boosters to a car and creative tax filing as righteous hacks, but the hacker community is more specific (indeed, they invented the term). For the purpose of this article, "hacker" identifies a person primarily fascinated with hacking infrastructure technology - telecom networks and the wonderful, wide world of computers.

Hackers are not:


Some hacker subsets are:


Hackers in traditional cultures all seem to fill the role of marginal people, those who for whatever reason fall on the edge of established cultural definitions. In sunny suburbia, that might mean you'd find some hackers wearing dark clothing, but the paradigm shifts suddenly if the traditional culture is fond of low-saturation colors. The marginal people category is not so useful for finding hard and fast rules as it is for identifying what makes a person unique while at home.

Because hackers do not have "home" in common, the opportunities to gather in person are sharply delineated. Once-a-month is a common interval made possible by the locations found in the back of 2600 Magazine, one of the oldest print publications still circulating that caters to the computer underground. 2600's popularity has made it an excellent public forum for the community, and the monthly 2600 "meet" is ubiquitous. In Dallas, they meet at a strip mall pizza place. In Milan, it's outside the MacDonald's in the Piazza Loreto. In Los Angeles, it's Grand Central Station, then a downtown coffee joint famous for its 10-cent cup of joe. Any place open to the public where they can talk shop without harassment, sometimes until dawn. Annual hacker conventions also occur, though these are booked a bit more traditionally at hotels, featuring guest speakers and (for those of you wondering if hackers really listen to techno) the occasional rave.

Cyberanthropologists (and the ever self-aware hacker community) have attempted to find more specific characteristics common to the majority of hackers, with mixed success. Outsiders have focused on "l33t," the infamous chat room argot littered with colorful terms like "hax0r" and "sploit," though the perception of its use is frequently overblown (so much so that hackers are the first to parody it). Even a hacker diet has been identified - one predictably redolent with carbs, stimulants, and nutrition hacks to maintain all-night sessions concentrating in front of a monitor. How universal this diet is remains to be seen, but it does illustrate how hacker cultural traits can cross geographic boundaries. The experiences that truly link hackers, however, are not nearly so trite.

Hacker Ideology

Hackers are smart. They are the smartest people you are likely to see drinking Jolt cola, and the only ones who have ever taken control of entire regional phone systems before dropping out of high school.

Having brains enough to trump the teacher and mystify other kids has long been known to isolate children. This means most hackers have grown up socially independent and resistant to hierarchies not predicated on skill and intelligence alone (though they are often willful participants in those that are). Hackers, despite their egalitarian leanings, are elitists, and that brings with it a strong contempt for ineptitude and ignorance. If at 14 you could have drummed up a stranger's credit report in under a minute for all your friends to see, you might be arrogant, too.

More often than not, however, that contempt and superiority is leveled at systems rather than individuals. From a hacker perspective, the rules that interact to govern our daily lives can present anomalous limitations, nonsense boundaries made maddening by the fact that they are, upon inspection, induced, proscribed - artificial. Is there a sane reason I can't watch my American DVD in a British DVD player? Why must I provide my address just to purchase a few floppy disks at Microcenter? What am I actually paying for in my $30-a-month phone bill? Much of the hacker reputation for criminal behavior has come from attempts (mostly successful) to circumvent these limitations, both for themselves and for others caught in the same system.

But systems of technology advance quickly, often more so than common sense. Hackers lament that the legislation regulating technology's application continues to be written by people who have little understanding of it, and the more lumbering the systems get, the more hackers will chafe against them.

How has the community responded? The 21st-century hacker has seen her mischievousness and damn-the-mannery quicken into a sense of social responsibility, one that promotes consumer control of private property and data, unfettered technological innovation (including public access to that technology), and freedom of information. These ideas link hackers with a libertarian political consciousness, though they span the liberal-conservative spectrum - and true to their nature, hackers have found a way to provide that consciousness with its own unique expression.

The early 1990s gave birth to hacktivism, the idea that hackers could use their skills not for pranks or for curiosity alone, but to voice opinions and affect change in society. In its crudest form, this has meant defacing a KKK website or e-mail bombing an anti-gay activist (with higher-minded hackers crying censorship). But as hacktivism has evolved, it has produced several more robust, concerted efforts at revolution.

For example, on October 21st, 2001, hacktivists across the globe rallied participants in Jam Echelon Day. Never mind that at that time, most people had never heard of the ECHELON network, the joint venture of US, UK, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand intelligence agencies to secretly monitor global communications. Hackers had known for a long while of Echelon's existence, and on that day they exhorted anyone with e-mail capabilities to send out messages loaded with trigger words to bog down the system - "Hi Grandma. China bomb president jihad."

(Your computer is now under surveillance, by the way.)

And it gets better. For several years now, scores of hackers have been engaged in an ongoing international effort to bring down what has come to be known as The Great Firewall of China. Chinese citizens, as you might guess, are mercifully shielded by their government from all of the nefarious bits of information that could stir unrest in the beloved state. Google Tiananmen Square from Beijing, and you'll get a pretty picture pointedly lacking in tanks running over young people. To achieve this magic trick, China manages extensive firewall programs that determine what net traffic may or may not pass into the country. Hacktivists, unbound by treaty or global politics, are freely working to disable those programs.

But what about when they're not saving the world? Isn't the rest of it just, well, breaking and entering?

Legal pundits will almost certainly answer "yes" every time, though the question of whether hackers are causing harm through their exploits is not always clear cut. Here are some hacks that have benefited the average consumer, legal or no:


Hax0r Fiction

You can bet that when hackers uncover useful exceptions to the rules, they stand to make very little money off their inquisitiveness - so why do they bother? In the answer to that question lies the essential disconnect between hacker fiction and hacker reality. Hackers do what they do to satisfy a gaping curiosity. How something works, why it was created, how it can be changed to do new things - all of these questions drive the machine of hacker psychology, so much so that a hacker can almost be defined as someone with a particular mindset rather than a skillset. (Wisely, author Neal Stephenson acknowledges this in his Baroque Cycle. His characters may be 18th-century, but their modern-day counterparts would be keen on a PC. Unfortunately, Stephenson is an exception.)

Much in the same way that some villains seem to lack any sort of reason for their evil disposition, hacker characters crop up with the skills to do the deeds, but none of the traits needed to acquire those skills (a criticism often leveled at Keanu Reeves' Neo). If we talk about cyberpunk, the noir-ish, dystopian nature of the fictional universe tends to call for jaded protagonists whose ambivalence would in reality suppress the hacker spirit. Is this character constantly curious? Is she capable of assimilating radical new ideas? Do absurd limitations provoke an emotional response in her?

Ask these questions, and forget Hackers. Think Ender's Game. The works of Cory Doctorow. Real Genius. Wargames. Hackers want to figure things out. Write a character who cares about that. We may read them as thieves, misfits, and mugs-for-hire, but in truth, if you put hackers, with their fierce independence, classless social values, and talent for bending the rules, into a technocratic dystopia, they are the ones saving the day.

Which is, of course, why we need them.

Links to Further Reading

"The Conscience of a Hacker" by The Mentor (more commonly referred to as "The Hacker's Manifesto")

The CyberAnthropology Page

Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, by Michele Slatalla and Joshua Quittner

At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion, by David H. Freedman and Charles C. Mann


©Ciro Faienza

Ciro Faienza thinks he should be writing about hackers anonymously. When not distracted by his day job, he enjoys being hyphenated as a writer-actor-director of film, author-poet-artist, and 23-year-old Italian-American. He lives in Dallas, Texas.






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