HACKING AWAY AT THE COUNTERCULTURE
by
ANDREW ROSS
Princeton University
Copyright (c) 1990 by Andrew Ross, all rights reserved.
_Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990).
[1] Ever since the viral attack engineered in November
of 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris on
the national network system Internet, which includes
the Pentagon's ARPAnet data exchange network, the
nation's high-tech ideologues and spin doctors have
been locked in debate, trying to make ethical and
economic sense of the event. The virus rapidly
infected an estimated six thousand computers around the
country, creating a scare that crowned an open season
of viral hysteria in the media, in the course of which,
according to the Computer Virus Industry Association in
Santa Clara, the number of known viruses jumped from
seven to thirty during 1988, and from three thousand
infections in the first two months of that year to
thirty thousand in the last two months. While it
caused little in the way of data damage (some richly
inflated initial estimates reckoned up to $100m in
down time), the ramifications of the Internet virus
have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but
transformed everyday "computer culture."
[2] Following the lead of DARPA's (Defence Advance
Research Projects Agency) Computer Emergency Response
Team at Carnegie-Mellon University, anti-virus response
centers were hastily put in place by government and
defence agencies at the National Science Foundation,
the Energy Department, NASA, and other sites. Plans
were made to introduce a bill in Congress (the
Computer Virus Eradication Act, to replace the 1986
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which pertained solely to
government information), that would call for prison
sentences of up to ten years for the "crime" of
sophisticated hacking, and numerous government agencies
have been involved in a proprietary fight over the
creation of a proposed Center for Virus Control,
modelled, of course, on Atlanta's Centers for Disease
Control, notorious for its failures to respond
adequately to the AIDS crisis.
[3] In fact, media commentary on the virus scare has
run not so much tongue-in-cheek as hand-in-glove with
the rhetoric of AIDS hysteria--the common use of terms
like killer virus and epidemic; the focus on hi-risk
personal contact (virus infection, for the most part,
is spread on personal computers, not mainframes); the
obsession with defense, security, and immunity; and the
climate of suspicion generated around communitarian
acts of sharing. The underlying moral imperative being
this: You can't trust your best friend's software any
more than you can trust his or her bodily fluids--safe
software or no software at all! Or, as Dennis Miller
put it on _Saturday Night Live_, "Remember, when you
connect with another computer, you're connecting to
every computer that computer has ever connected to."
This playful conceit struck a chord in the popular
consciousness, even as it was perpetuated in such sober
quarters as the Association for Computing Machinery,
the president of which, in a controversial editorial
titled "A Hygiene Lesson," drew comparisons not only
with sexually transmitted diseases, but also with a
cholera epidemic, and urged attention to "personal
systems hygiene."^1^ In fact, some computer scientists
who studied the symptomatic path of Morris's virus
across Internet have pointed to its uneven effects upon
different computer types and operating systems, and
concluded that "there is a direct analogy with
biological genetic diversity to be made."^2^ The
epidemiology of biological virus, and especially AIDS,
research is being closely studied to help implement
computer security plans, and, in these circles, the new
witty discourse is laced with references to antigens,
white blood cells, vaccinations, metabolic free
radicals, and the like.
[4] The form and content of more lurid articles like
_Time_'s infamous (September 1988) story, "Invasion of
the Data Snatchers," fully displayed the continuity of
the media scare with those historical fears about
bodily invasion, individual and national, that are
often considered endemic to the paranoid style of
American political culture.^3^ Indeed, the rhetoric of
computer culture, in common with the medical discourse
of AIDS research, has fallen in line with the paranoid,
strategic style of Defence Department rhetoric. Each
language-repertoire is obsessed with hostile threats to
bodily and technological immune systems; every event is
a ballistic manoeuver in the game of microbiological
war, where the governing metaphors are indiscriminately
drawn from cellular genetics and cybernetics alike. As
a counterpoint to the tongue-in-cheek AI tradition of
seeing humans as "information-exchanging environments,"
the imagined life of computers has taken on an
organicist shape, now that they too are subject to
cybernetic "sickness" or disease. So, too, the
development of interrelated systems, such as Internet
itself, has further added to the structural picture of
an interdependent organism, whose component members,
however autonomous, are all nonetheless affected by the
"health" of each individual constituent. The growing
interest among scientists in developing computer
programs that will simulate the genetic behavior of
living organisms (in which binary numbers act like
genes) points to a future where the border between
organic and artificial life is less and less distinct.
[5] In keeping with the increasing use of biologically
derived language to describe mutations in systems
theory, conscious attempts to link the AIDS crisis with
the information security crisis have pointed out that
both kinds of virus, biological and electronic, take
over the host cell/program and clone their carrier
genetic codes by instructing the hosts to make replicas
of the viruses. Neither kind of virus, however, can
replicate themselves independently; they are pieces of
code that attach themselves to other cells/programs--
just as biological viruses need a host cell, computer
viruses require a host program to activate them. The
Internet virus was not, in fact, a virus, but a worm, a
program that can run independently and therefore
_appears_ to have a life of its own. The worm
replicates a full version of itself in programs and
systems as it moves from one to another, masquerading
as a legitimate user by guessing the user passwords of
locked accounts. Because of this autonomous existence,
the worm can be seen to behave as if it were an
organism with some kind of purpose or teleology, and
yet it has none. Its only "purpose" is to reproduce
and infect. If the worm has no inbuilt antireplication
code, or if the code is faulty, as was the case with
the Internet worm, it will make already-infected
computers repeatedly accept further replicas of itself,
until their memories are clogged. A much quieter worm
than that engineered by Morris would have moved more
slowly, as one supposes a "worm" should, protecting
itself from detection by ever more subtle camouflage,
and propagating its cumulative effect of operative
systems inertia over a much longer period of time.
[6] In offering such descriptions, however, we must be
wary of attributing a teleology/intentionality to worms
and viruses which can be ascribed only, and, in most
instances, speculatively, to their authors. There is
no reason why a cybernetic "worm" might be expected to
behave in any fundamental way like a biological worm.
So, too, the assumed intentionality of its author
distinguishes the human-made cybernetic virus from the
case of the biological virus, the effects of which are
fated to be received and discussed in a language
saturated with human-made structures and narratives of
meaning and teleological purpose. Writing about the
folkloric theologies of significance and explanatory
justice (usually involving retribution) that have
sprung up around the AIDS crisis, Judith Williamson has
pointed to the radical implications of this collision
between an intentionless virus and a meaning-filled
culture:
Nothing could be more meaningless than a
virus. It has no point, no purpose, no plan;
it is part of no scheme, carries no inherent
significance. And yet nothing is harder for
us to confront than the complete absence of
meaning. By its very definition,
meaninglessness cannot be articulated within
our social language, which is a system _of_
meaning: impossible to include, as an
absence, it is also impossible to exclude--
for meaninglessness isn't just the opposite
of meaning, it is the end of meaning, and
threatens the fragile structures by which we
make sense of the world.^4^
[7] No such judgment about meaninglessness applies to
the computer security crisis. In contrast to HIV's
lack of meaning or intentionality, the meaning of
cybernetic viruses is always already replete with
social significance. This meaning is related, first of
all, to the author's local intention or motivation,
whether psychic or fully social, whether wrought out
of a mood of vengeance, a show of bravado or technical
expertise, a commitment to a political act, or in
anticipation of the profits that often accrue from the
victims' need to buy an antidote from the author.
Beyond these local intentions, however, which are
usually obscure or, as in the Morris case, quite
inscrutable, there is an entire set of social and
historical narratives that surround and are part of the
"meaning" of the virus: the coded anarchist history of
the youth hacker subculture; the militaristic
environments of search-and-destroy warfare (a virus has
two components--a carrier and a "warhead"), which,
because of the historical development of computer
technology, constitute the family values of information
techno-culture; the experimental research environments
in which creative designers are encouraged to work; and
the conflictual history of pure and applied ethics in
the science and technology communities, to name just a
few. A similar list could be drawn up to explain the
widespread and varied _response_ to computer viruses,
from the amused concern of the cognoscenti to the
hysteria of the casual user, and from the research
community and the manufacturing industry to the morally
aroused legislature and the mediated culture at large.
Every one of these explanations and narratives is the
result of social and cultural processes and values;
consequently, there is very little about the virus
itself that is "meaningless." Viruses can no more be
seen as an objective, or necessary, result of the
"objective" development of technological systems than
technology in general can be seen as an objective,
determining agent of social change.
[8] For the sake of polemical economy, I would note
that the cumulative effect of all the viral hysteria
has been twofold. Firstly, it has resulted in a
windfall for software producers, now that users' blithe
disregard for makers' copyright privileges has eroded
in the face of the security panic. Used to fighting
halfhearted rearguard actions against widespread piracy
practices, or reluctantly acceding to buyers' desire
for software unencumbered by top-heavy security
features, software vendors are now profiting from the
new public distrust of program copies. So, too, the
explosion in security consciousness has hyperstimulated
the already fast-growing sectors of the security system
industry and the data encryption industry. In line
with the new imperative for everything from
"vaccinated" workstations to "sterilized" networks, it
has created a brand new market of viral vaccine vendors
who will sell you the virus (a one-time only
immunization shot) along with its antidote--with names
like Flu Shot +, ViruSafe, Vaccinate, Disk Defender,
Certus, Viral Alarm, Antidote, Virus Buster,
Gatekeeper, Ongard, and Interferon. Few of the
antidotes are very reliable, however, especially since
they pose an irresistible intellectual challenge to
hackers who can easily rewrite them in the form of ever
more powerful viruses. Moreover, most corporate
managers of computer systems and networks know that by
far the great majority of their intentional security
losses are a result of insider sabotage and
monkeywrenching.
[9] In short, the effects of the viruses have been to
profitably clamp down on copyright delinquency, and to
generate the need for entirely new industrial
production of viral suppressors to contain the fallout.
In this respect, it is easy to see that the appearance
of viruses could hardly, in the long run, have
benefited industry producers more. In the same vein,
the networks that have been hardest hit by the security
squeeze are not restricted-access military or corporate
systems but networks like Internet, set up on trust to
facilitate the open academic exchange of data,
information and research, and watched over by its
sponsor, DARPA. It has not escaped the notice of
conspiracy theorists that the military intelligence
community, obsessed with "electronic warfare," actually
stood to learn a lot from the Internet virus; the virus
effectively "pulsed the system," exposing the
sociological behaviour of the system in a crisis
situation.^5^
The second effect of the virus crisis has been
more overtly ideological. Virus-conscious fear and
loathing have clearly fed into the paranoid climate of
privatization that increasingly defines social
identities in the new post-Fordist order. The result--
a psycho-social closing of the ranks around fortified
private spheres--runs directly counter to the ethic
that we might think of as residing at the architectural
heart of information technology. In its basic assembly
structure, information technology is a technology of
processing, copying, replication, and simulation, and
therefore does not recognize the concept of private
information property. What is now under threat is the
rationality of a shareware culture, ushered in as the
achievement of the hacker counterculture that pioneered
the personal computer revolution in the early seventies
against the grain of corporate planning.
[10] There is another story to tell, however, about the
emergence of the virus scare as a profitable
ideological moment, and it is the story of how teenage
hacking has come to be increasingly defined as a
potential threat to normative educational ethics and
national security alike. The story of the creation of
this "social menace" is central to the ongoing attempts
to rewrite property law in order to contain the effects
of the new information technologies that, because of
their blindness to the copyrighting of intellectual
property, have transformed the way in which modern
power is exercised and maintained. Consequently, a
deviant social class or group has been defined and
categorised as "enemies of the state" in order to help
rationalize a general law-and-order clampdown on free
and open information exchange. Teenage hackers' homes
are now habitually raided by sheriffs and FBI agents
using strong-arm tactics, and jail sentences are
becoming a common punishment. Operation Sundevil, a
nationwide Secret Service operation in the spring of
1990, involving hundreds of agents in fourteen cities,
is the most recently publicized of the hacker raids
that have produced several arrests and seizures of
thousands of disks and address lists in the last two
years.^6^
[11] In one of the many harshly punitive prosecutions
against hackers in recent years, a judge went so far as
to describe "bulletin boards" as "hi-tech street
gangs." The editors of _2600_, the magazine that
publishes information about system entry and
exploration that is indispensable to the hacking
community, have pointed out that any single invasive
act, such as that of trespass, that involves the use of
computers is considered today to be infinitely more
criminal than a similar act undertaken without
computers.^7^ To use computers to execute pranks,
raids, frauds or thefts is to incur automatically the
full repressive wrath of judges urged on by the moral
panic created around hacking feats over the last two
decades. Indeed, there is a strong body of pressure
groups pushing for new criminal legislation that will
define "crimes with computers" as a special category of
crime, deserving "extraordinary" sentences and punitive
measures. Over that same space of time, the term
_hacker_ has lost its semantic link with the
journalistic _hack,_ suggesting a professional toiler
who uses unorthodox methods. So, too, its increasingly
criminal connotation today has displaced the more
innocuous, amateur mischief-maker-cum-media-star role
reserved for hackers until a few years ago.
[12] In response to the gathering vigor of this "war on
hackers," the most common defences of hacking can be
presented on a spectrum that runs from the appeasement
or accommodation of corporate interests to drawing up
blueprints for cultural revolution. (a) Hacking
performs a benign industrial service of uncovering
security deficiencies and design flaws. (b) Hacking,
as an experimental, free-form research activity, has
been responsible for many of the most progressive
developments in software development. (c) Hacking,
when not purely recreational, is an elite educational
practice that reflects the ways in which the
development of high technology has outpaced orthodox
forms of institutional education. (d) Hacking is an
important form of watchdog counterresponse to the use
of surveillance technology and data gathering by the
state, and to the increasingly monolithic
communications power of giant corporations. (e)
Hacking, as guerrilla know-how, is essential to the
task of maintaining fronts of cultural resistance and
stocks of oppositional knowledge as a hedge against a
technofascist future. With all of these and other
arguments in mind, it is easy to see how the social and
cultural _management_ of hacker activities has become a
complex process that involves state policy and
legislation at the highest levels. In this respect,
the virus scare has become an especially convenient
vehicle for obtaining public and popular consent for
new legislative measures and new powers of
investigation for the FBI.^8^
[13] Consequently, certain celebrity hackers have been
quick to play down the zeal with which they pursued
their earlier hacking feats, while reinforcing the
_deviant_ category of "technological hooliganism"
reserved by moralizing pundits for "dark-side" hacking.
Hugo Cornwall, British author of the bestselling
_Hacker's Handbook_, presents a Little England view of
the hacker as a harmless fresh-air enthusiast who
"visits advanced computers as a polite country rambler
might walk across picturesque fields." The owners of
these properties are like "farmers who don't mind
careful ramblers." Cornwall notes that "lovers of
fresh-air walks obey the Country Code, involving such
items as closing gates behind one and avoiding damage
to crops and livestock" and suggests that a similar
code ought to "guide your rambles into other people's
computers; the safest thing to do is simply browse,
enjoy and learn." By contrast, any rambler who
"ventured across a field guarded by barbed wire and
dotted with notices warning about the Official Secrets
Act would deserve most that happened thereafter."^9^
Cornwall's quaint perspective on hacking has a certain
"native charm," but some might think that this
beguiling picture of patchwork-quilt fields and benign
gentleman farmers glosses over the long bloody history
of power exercised through feudal and postfeudal land
economy in England, while it is barely suggestive of
the new fiefdoms, transnational estates, dependencies,
and principalities carved out of today's global
information order by vast corporations capable of
bypassing the laws and territorial borders of sovereign
nation-states. In general, this analogy with
"trespass" laws, which compares hacking to breaking and
entering other people's homes restricts the debate to
questions about privacy, property, possessive
individualism, and, at best, the excesses of state
surveillance, while it closes off any examination of
the activities of the corporate owners and
institutional sponsors of information technology (the
almost exclusive "target" of most hackers).^10^
[14] Cornwall himself has joined the lucrative ranks of
ex-hackers who either work for computer security firms
or write books about security for the eyes of worried
corporate managers.^11^ A different, though related,
genre is that of the penitent hacker's "confession,"
produced for an audience thrilled by tales of high-
stakes adventure at the keyboard, but written in the
form of a computer security handbook. The best example
of the "I Was a Teenage Hacker" genre is Bill (aka "The
Cracker") Landreth's _Out of the Inner Circle_: The
True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking
the Nation's Most Secure Computer Systems_, a book
about "people who can't `just say no' to computers."
In full complicity with the deviant picture of the
hacker as "public enemy," Landreth recirculates every
official and media cliche about subversive
conspiratorial elites by recounting the putative
exploits of a high-level hackers' guild called the
Inner Circle. The author himself is presented in the
book as a former keyboard junkie who now praises the
law for having made a good moral example of him:
If you are wondering what I am like, I can
tell you the same things I told the judge in
federal court: Although it may not seem like
it, I am pretty much a normal American
teenager. I don't drink, smoke or take
drugs. I don't steal, assault people, or
vandalize property. The only way in which I
am really different from most people is in my
fascination with the ways and means of
learning about computers that don't belong to
me.^12^
Sentenced in 1984 to three years probation, during
which time he was obliged to finish his high school
education and go to college, Landreth concludes: "I
think the sentence is very fair, and I already know
what my major will be...." As an aberrant sequel to
the book's contrite conclusion, however, Landreth
vanished in 1986, violating his probation, only to face
later a stiff five-year jail sentence--a sorry victim,
no doubt, of the recent crackdown.
_Cyber-Counterculture_?
[15] At the core of Steven Levy's bestseller _Hackers_
(1984) is the argument that the hacker ethic, first
articulated in the 1950s among the famous MIT students
who developed multiple-access user systems, is
libertarian and crypto-anarchist in its right-to know
principles and its advocacy of decentralized
technology. This hacker ethic, which has remained the
preserve of a youth culture for the most part, asserts
the basic right of users to free access to all
information. It is a principled attempt, in other
words, to challenge the tendency to use technology to
form information elites. Consequently, hacker
activities were presented in the eighties as a romantic
countercultural tendency, celebrated by critical
journalists like John Markoff of the _New York Times_,
by Stewart Brand of _Whole Earth Catalog_ fame, and by
New Age gurus like Timothy Leary in the flamboyant
_Reality Hackers_. Fuelled by sensational stories
about phone phreaks like Joe Egressia (the blind eight-
year old who discovered the tone signal of phone
company by whistling) and Cap'n Crunch, groups like the
Milwaukee 414s, the Los Angeles ARPAnet hackers, the
SPAN Data Travellers, the Chaos Computer Club of
Hamburg, the British Prestel hackers, _2600_'s BBS,
"The Private Sector," and others, the dominant media
representation of the hacker came to be that of the
"rebel with a modem," to use Markoff's term, at least
until the more recent "war on hackers" began to shape
media coverage.
[16] On the one hand, this popular folk hero persona
offered the romantic high profile of a maverick though
nerdy cowboy whose fearless raids upon an impersonal
"system" were perceived as a welcome tonic in the gray
age of technocratic routine. On the other hand, he was
something of a juvenile technodelinquent who hadn't yet
learned the difference between right and wrong---a
wayward figure whose technical brilliance and
proficiency differentiated him nonetheless from, say,
the maladjusted working-class J.D. street-corner boy of
the 1950s (hacker mythology, for the most part, has
been almost exclusively white, masculine, and middle-
class). One result of this media profile was a
persistent infantilization of the hacker ethic--a way
of trivializing its embryonic politics, however finally
complicit with dominant technocratic imperatives or
with entrepreneurial-libertarian ideology one perceives
these politics to be. The second result was to
reinforce, in the initial absence of coercive jail
sentences, the high educational stakes of training the
new technocratic elites to be responsible in their use
of technology. Never, the given wisdom goes, has a
creative elite of the future been so in need of the
virtues of a liberal education steeped in Western
ethics!
[17] The full force of this lesson in computer ethics
can be found laid out in the official Cornell
University report on the Robert Morris affair. Members
of the university commission set up to investigate the
affair make it quite clear in their report that they
recognize the student's academic brilliance. His
hacking, moreover, is described, as a "juvenile act"
that had no "malicious intent" but that amounted, like
plagiarism, the traditional academic heresy, to a
dishonest transgression of other users' rights. (In
recent years, the privacy movement within the
information community--a movement mounted by liberals
to protect civil rights against state gathering of
information--has actually been taken up and used as a
means of criminalizing hacker activities.) As for the
consequences of this juvenile act, the report proposes
an analogy that, in comparison with Cornwall's _mature_
English country rambler, is thoroughly American,
suburban, middle-class and _juvenile_. Unleashing the
Internet worm was like "the driving of a golf-cart on a
rainy day through most houses in the neighborhood. The
driver may have navigated carefully and broken no
china, but it should have been obvious to the driver
that the mud on the tires would soil the carpets and
that the owners would later have to clean up the
mess."^13^
[18] In what stands out as a stiff reprimand for his
alma mater, the report regrets that Morris was educated
in an "ambivalent atmosphere" where he "received no
clear guidance" about ethics from "his peers or
mentors" (he went to Harvard!). But it reserves its
loftiest academic contempt for the press, whose
heroization of hackers has been so irresponsible, in
the commission's opinion, as to cause even further
damage to the standards of the computing profession;
media exaggerations of the courage and technical
sophistication of hackers "obscures the far more
accomplished work of students who complete their
graduate studies without public fanfare," and "who
subject their work to the close scrutiny and evaluation
of their peers, and not to the interpretations of the
popular press."^14^ In other words, this was an inside
affair, to be assessed and judged by fellow
professionals within an institution that reinforces its
authority by means of internally self-regulating codes
of professionalist ethics, but rarely addresses its
ethical relationship to society as a whole (acceptance
of defence grants, and the like). Generally speaking,
the report affirms the genteel liberal ideal that
professionals should not need laws, rules, procedural
guidelines, or fixed guarantees of safe and responsible
conduct. Apprentice professionals ought to have
acquired a good conscience by osmosis from a liberal
education rather than from some specially prescribed
course in ethics and technology.
[19] The widespread attention commanded by the Cornell
report (attention from the Association of Computing
Machinery, among others) demonstrates the industry's
interest in how the academy invokes liberal ethics in
order to assist in the managing of the organization of
the new specialized knowledge about information
technology. Despite or, perhaps, because of the
report's steadfast pledge to the virtues and ideals of
a liberal education, it bears all the marks of a
legitimation crisis inside (and outside) the academy
surrounding the new and all-important category of
computer professionalism. The increasingly specialized
design knowledge demanded of computer professionals
means that codes that go beyond the old professionalist
separation of mental and practical skills are needed to
manage the division that a hacker's functional talents
call into question, between a purely mental pursuit and
the pragmatic sphere of implementing knowledge in the
real world. "Hacking" must then be designated as a
strictly _amateur_ practice; the tension, in hacking,
between _interestedness_ and _disinterestedness_ is
different from, and deficient in relation to, the
proper balance demanded by professionalism.
Alternately, hacking can be seen as the amateur flip
side of the professional ideal--a disinterested love in
the service of interested parties and institutions. In
either case, it serves as an example of professionalism
gone wrong, but not very wrong.
[20] In common with the two responses to the virus
scare described earlier--the profitable reaction of the
computer industry and the self-empowering response of
the legislature-- the Cornell report shows how the
academy uses a case like the Morris affair to
strengthen its own sense of moral and cultural
authority in the sphere of professionalism,
particularly through its scornful indifference to and
aloofness from the codes and judgements exercised by
the media--its diabolic competitor in the field of
knowledge. Indeed, for all the trumpeting about
excesses of power and disrespect for the law of the
land, the revival of ethics, in the business and
science disciplines in the Ivy League and on Capitol
Hill (both awash with ethical fervor in the post-Boesky
and post-Reagan years), is little more than a weak
liberal response to working flaws or adaptational
lapses in the social logic of technocracy.
[21] To complete the scenario of morality play example-
making, however, we must also consider that Morris's
father was chief scientist of the National Computer
Security Center, the National Security Agency's public
effort at safeguarding computer security. A brilliant
programmer and codebreaker in his own right, he had
testified in Washington in 1983 about the need to
deglamorise teenage hacking, comparing it to "stealing
a car for the purpose of joyriding." In a further
Oedipal irony, Morris Sr. may have been one of the
inventors, while at Bell Labs in the 1950s, of a
computer game involving self-perpetuating programs that
were a prototype of today's worms and viruses. Called
Darwin, its principles were incorporated, in the
eighties, into a popular hacker game called Core War,
in which autonomous "killer" programs fought each other
to the death.^15^
[22] With the appearance, in the Morris affair, of a
patricidal object who is also the Pentagon's guardian
angel, we now have many of the classic components of
countercultural cross-generational conflict. What I
want to consider, however, is how and where this
scenario differs from the definitive contours of such
conflicts that we recognize as having been established
in the sixties; how the Cornell hacker Morris's
relation to, say, campus "occupations" today is
different from that evoked by the famous image of armed
black students emerging from a sit-in on the Cornell
campus; how the relation to technological ethics
differs from Andrew Kopkind's famous statement
"Morality begins at the end of a gun barrel" which
accompanied the publication of the do-it-yourself
Molotov cocktail design on the cover of a 1968 issue of
the _New York Review of Books_; or how hackers' prized
potential access to the networks of military systems
warfare differs from the prodigious Yippie feat of
levitating the Pentagon building. It may be that, like
the J.D. rebel without a cause of the fifties, the
disaffiliated student dropout of the sixties, and the
negationist punk of the seventies, the hacker of the
eighties has come to serve as a visible public example
of moral maladjustment, a hegemonic test case for
redefining the dominant ethics in an advanced
technocratic society. (Hence the need for each of
these deviant figures to come in different versions--
lumpen, radical chic, and Hollywood-style.)
[23] What concerns me here, however, are the different
conditions that exist today for recognizing
countercultural expression and activism. Twenty years
later, the technology of hacking and viral guerrilla
warfare occupies a similar place in countercultural
fantasy as the Molotov Cocktail design once did. While
I don't, for one minute, mean to insist on such
comparisons, which aren't particularly sound anyway, I
think they conveniently mark a shift in the relation of
countercultural activity to technology, a shift in
which a software-based technoculture, organized around
outlawed libertarian principles about free access to
information and communication, has come to replace a
dissenting culture organized around the demonizing of
abject hardware structures. Much, though not all, of
the sixties counterculture was formed around what I
have elsewhere called the _technology of folklore_--an
expressive congeries of preindustrialist, agrarianist,
Orientalist, antitechnological ideas, values, and
social structures. By contrast, the cybernetic
countercultures of the nineties are already being
formed around the _folklore of technology_--mythical
feats of survivalism and resistance in a data-rich
world of virtual environments and posthuman bodies--
which is where many of the SF-and technology-conscious
youth cultures have been assembling in recent
years.^16^
[24] There is no doubt that this scenario makes
countercultural activity more difficult to recognize
and therefore to define as politically significant. It
was much easier, in the sixties, to _identify_ the
salient features and symbolic power of a romantic
preindustrialist cultural politics in an advanced
technological society, especially when the destructive
evidence of America's supertechnological invasion of
Vietnam was being daily paraded in front of the public
eye. However, in a society whose technopolitical
infrastructure depends increasingly upon greater
surveillance, cybernetic activism necessarily relies on
a much more covert politics of identity, since access
to closed systems requires discretion and
dissimulation. Access to digital systems still
requires only the authentication of a signature or
pseudonym, not the identification of a real
surveillable person, so there exists a crucial
operative gap between authentication and
identification. (As security systems move toward
authenticating access through biological signatures--
the biometric recording and measurement of physical
characteristics such as palm or retinal prints, or vein
patterns on the backs of hands--the hacker's staple
method of systems entry through purloined passwords
will be further challenged.) By the same token,
cybernetic identity is never used up, it can be
recreated, reassigned, and reconstructed with any
number of different names and under different user
accounts. Most hacks, or technocrimes, go unnoticed or
unreported for fear of publicising the vulnerability of
corporate security systems, especially when the hacks
are performed by disgruntled employees taking their
vengeance on management. So, too, authoritative
identification of any individual hacker, whenever it
occurs, is often the result of accidental leads rather
than systematic detection. For example, Captain
Midnight, the video pirate who commandeered a satellite
a few years ago to interrupt broadcast TV viewing, was
traced only because a member of the public reported a
suspicious conversation heard over a crossed telephone
line.
[25] Eschewing its core constituency among white males
of the pre-professional-managerial class, the hacker
community may be expanding its parameters outward.
Hacking, for example, has become a feature of the young
adult mystery-and-suspense novel genre for girls.^17^
The elitist class profile of the hacker prodigy as that
of an undersocialized college nerd has become
democratized and customized in recent years; it is no
longer exclusively associated with institutionally
acquired college expertise, and increasingly it dresses
streetwise. In a recent article which documents the
spread of the computer underground from college whiz
kids to a broader youth subculture termed "cyberpunks,"
after the movement among SF novelists, the original
hacker phone phreak Cap'n Crunch is described as
lamenting the fact that the cyberculture is no longer
an "elite" one, and that hacker-valid information is
much easier to obtain these days.^18^
[26] For the most part, however, the self-defined
hacker underground, like many other
protocountercultural tendencies, has been restricted to
a privileged social milieu, further magnetised by the
self-understanding of its members that they are the
apprentice architects of a future dominated by
knowledge, expertise, and "smartness," whether human or
digital. Consequently, it is clear that the hacker
cyberculture is not a dropout culture; its
disaffiliation from a domestic parent culture is often
manifest in activities that answer, directly or
indirectly, to the legitimate needs of industrial R&D.
For example, this hacker culture celebrates high
productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy,
and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance
(and endorphin highs)--all qualities that are valorised
by the entrepreneurial codes of silicon futurism. In a
critique of the myth of the hacker-as-rebel, Dennis
Hayes debunks the political romance woven around the
teenage hacker:
They are typically white, upper-middle-class
adolescents who have taken over the home
computer (bought, subsidized, or tolerated
by parents in the hope of cultivating
computer literacy). Few are politically
motivated although many express contempt for
the "bureaucracies" that hamper their
electronic journeys. Nearly all demand
unfettered access to intricate and intriguing
computer networks. In this, teenage hackers
resemble an alienated shopping culture
deprived of purchasing opportunities more
than a terrorist network.^19^
[27] While welcoming the sobriety of Hayes's critique,
I am less willing to accept its assumptions about the
political implications of hacker activities. Studies
of youth subcultures (including those of a privileged
middle-class formation) have taught us that the
political meaning of certain forms of cultural
"resistance" is notoriously difficult to read. These
meanings are either highly coded or expressed
indirectly through media--private peer languages,
customized consumer styles, unorthodox leisure
patterns, categories of insider knowledge and
behavior--that have no fixed or inherent political
significance. If cultural studies of this sort have
proved anything, it is that the often symbolic, not
wholly articulate, expressivity of a youth culture can
seldom be translated directly into an articulate
political philosophy. The significance of these
cultures lies in their embryonic or _protopolitical_
languages and technologies of opposition to dominant or
parent systems of rules. If hackers lack a "cause,"
then they are certainly not the first youth culture to
be characterized in this dismissive way. In
particular, the left has suffered from the lack of a
cultural politics capable of recognizing the power of
cultural expressions that do not wear a mature
political commitment on their sleeves.
So, too, the escalation of activism-in-the-
professions in the last two decades has shown that it
is a mistake to condemn the hacker impulse on account
of its class constituency alone. To cede the "ability
to know" on the grounds that elite groups will enjoy
unjustly privileged access to technocratic knowledge is
to cede too much of the future. Is it of no political
significance at all that hackers' primary fantasies
often involve the official computer systems of the
police, armed forces, and defence and intelligence
agencies? And that the rationale for their fantasies
is unfailingly presented in the form of a defence of
civil liberties against the threat of centralized
intelligence and military activities? Or is all of
this merely a symptom of an apprentice elite's
fledgling will to masculine power? The activities of
the Chinese student elite in the pro-democracy movement
have shown that unforeseen shifts in the political
climate can produce startling new configurations of
power and resistance. After Tiananmen Square, Party
leaders found it imprudent to purge those high-tech
engineer and computer cadres who alone could guarantee
the future of any planned modernization program. On
the other hand, the authorities rested uneasy knowing
that each cadre (among the most activist groups in the
student movement) is a potential hacker who can have
the run of the communications house if and when he or
she wants.
[28] On the other hand, I do agree with Hayes's
perception that the media have pursued their romance
with the hacker at the cost of underreporting the much
greater challenge posed to corporate employers by their
employees. It is in the arena of conflicts between
workers and management that most high-tech "sabotage"
takes place. In the mainstream everyday life of office
workers, mostly female, there is a widespread culture
of unorganized sabotage that accounts for infinitely
more computer downtime and information loss every year
than is caused by destructive, "dark-side" hacking by
celebrity cybernetic intruders. The sabotage, time
theft, and strategic monkeywrenching deployed by office
workers in their engineered electromagnetic attacks on
data storage and operating systems might range from the
planting of time or logic bombs to the discrete use of
electromagnetic Tesla coils or simple bodily friction:
"Good old static electricity discharged from the
fingertips probably accounts for close to half the
disks and computers wiped out or down every year."^20^
More skilled operators, intent on evening a score with
management, often utilize sophisticated hacking
techniques. In many cases, a coherent networking
culture exists among female console operators, where,
among other things, tips about strategies for slowing
down the temporality of the work regime are circulated.
While these threats from below are fully recognized in
their boardrooms, corporations dependent upon digital
business machines are obviously unwilling to advertize
how acutely vulnerable they actually are to this kind
of sabotage. It is easy to imagine how organised
computer activism could hold such companies for ransom.
As Hayes points out, however, it is more difficult to
mobilize any kind of labor movement organized upon such
premises:
Many are prepared to publicly oppose the
countless dark legacies of the computer age:
"electronic sweatshops," Military technology,
employee surveillance, genotoxic water, and
ozone depletion. Among those currently
leading the opposition, however, it is
apparently deemed "irresponsible" to recommend
an active computerized resistance as a source
of worker's power because it is perceived as
a medium of employee crime and "terrorism."
^21^
_Processed World_, the "magazine with a bad attitude"
with which Hayes has been associated, is at the
forefront of debating and circulating these questions
among office workers, regularly tapping into the
resentments borne out in on-the-job resistance.
[29] While only a small number of computer users would
recognize and include themselves under the label of
"hacker," there are good reasons for extending the
restricted definition of _hacking_ down and across the
caste system of systems analysts, designers,
programmers, and operators to include all high-tech
workers, no matter how inexpert, who can interrupt,
upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured
communications that dictates their positions in the
social networks of exchange and determines the
temporality of their work schedules. To put it in
these terms, however, is not to offer any universal
definition of hacker agency. There are many social
agents, for example, in job locations that are
dependent upon the hope of technological _reskilling_,
for whom sabotage or disruption of communicative
rationality is of little use; for such people,
definitions of hacking that are reconstructive, rather
than deconstructive, are more appropriate. A good
example is the crucial role of worker technoliteracy in
the struggle of labor against automation and
deskilling. When worker education classes in computer
programming were discontinued by management at the Ford
Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, union (UAW) members
began to publish a newsletter called the _Amateur
Computerist_ to fill the gap.^22^ Among the columnists
and correspondents in the magazine have been veterans
of the Flint sit-down strikes who see a clear
historical continuity between the problem of labor
organization in the thirties and the problem of
automation and deskilling today. Workers' computer
literacy is seen as essential not only to the
demystification of the computer and the reskilling of
workers, but also to labor's capacity to intervene in
decisions about new technologies that might result in
shorter hours and thus in "work efficiency" rather than
worker efficiency.
[30] The three social locations I have mentioned above
all express different class relations to technology:
the location of an apprentice technical elite,
conventionally associated with the term "hacking"; the
location of the female high-tech office worker,
involved in "sabotage"; and the location of the shop-
floor worker, whose future depends on technological
reskilling. All therefore exhibit different ways of
_claiming back_ time dictated and appropriated by
technological processes, and of establishing some form
of independent control over the work relation so
determined by the new technologies. All, then, fall
under a broad understanding of the politics involved in
any extended description of hacker activities.
[This file is continued in ROSS-2 990]
[Andrew Ross, "Hacking Away at the Counter-culture,"
part 2, continued from ROSS-1 990. Distributed by
_Postmodern Culture_ in vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990);
copyright (c) 1990 by Andrew Ross, all rights reserved]
_The Culture and Technology Question_
[31] Faced with these proliferating practices in the
workplace, on the teenage cult fringe, and increasingly
in mainstream entertainment, where, over the last five
years, the cyberpunk sensibility in popular fiction,
film, and television has caught the romance of the
popular taste for the outlaw technology of
human/machine interfaces, we are obliged, I think, to
ask old kinds of questions about the new silicon order
which the evangelists of information technology have
been deliriously proclaiming for more than twenty
years. The postindustrialists' picture of a world of
freedom and abundance projects a sunny millenarian
future devoid of work drudgery and ecological
degradation. This sunny social order, cybernetically
wired up, is presented as an advanced evolutionary
phase of society in accord with Enlightenment ideals of
progress and rationality. By contrast, critics of this
idealism see only a frightening advance in the
technologies of social control, whose owners and
sponsors are efficiently shaping a society, as Kevin
Robins and Frank Webster put it, of "slaves without
Athens" that is actually the inverse of the "Athens
without slaves" promised by the silicon
positivists.^23^
[32] It is clear that one of the political features of
the new post-Fordist order--economically marked by
short-run production, diverse taste markets, flexible
specialization, and product differentiation--is that
the New Right has managed to appropriate not only the
utopian language and values of the alternative
technology movements but also the marxist discourse of
the "withering away of the state" and the more
compassionate vision of local, decentralized
communications first espoused by the libertarian left.
It must be recognized that these are very popular
themes and visions, (advanced most famously by Alvin
Toffler and the neoliberal Atari Democrats, though also
by leftist thinkers such as Andre Gortz, Rudolf Bahro,
and Alain Touraine)--much more popular, for example,
than the tradition of centralized technocratic planning
espoused by the left under the Fordist model of mass
production and consumption.^24^ Against the
postindustrialists' millenarian picture of a
postscarcity harmony, in which citizens enjoy
decentralized, access to free-flowing information, it
is necessary, however, to emphasise how and where
actually existing cybernetic capitalism presents a
gross caricature of such a postscarcity society.
[33] One of the stories told by the critical left about
new cultural technologies is that of monolithic,
panoptical social control, effortlessly achieved
through a smooth, endlessly interlocking system of
networks of surveillance. In this narrative,
information technology is seen as the most despotic
mode of domination yet, generating not just a
revolution in capitalist production but also a
revolution in living--"social Taylorism"--that touches
all cultural and social spheres in the home and in the
workplace.^25^ Through routine gathering of
information about transactions, consumer preferences,
and creditworthiness, a harvest of information about
any individual's whereabouts and movements, tastes,
desires, contacts, friends, associates, and patterns of
work and recreation becomes available in the form of
dossiers sold on the tradable information market, or is
endlessly convertible into other forms of intelligence
through computer matching. Advanced pattern
recognition technologies facilitate the process of
surveillance, while data encryption protects it from
public accountability.^26^
[34] While the debate about privacy has triggered
public consciousness about these excesses, the liberal
discourse about ethics and damage control in which that
debate has been conducted falls short of the more
comprehensive analysis of social control and social
management offered by left political economists.
According to one marxist analysis, information is seen
as a new kind of commodity resource which marks a break
with past modes of production and that is becoming the
essential site of capital accumulation in the world
economy. What happens, then, in the process by which
information, gathered up by data scavenging in the
transactional sphere, is systematically converted into
intelligence? A surplus value is created for use
elsewhere. This surplus information value is more than
is needed for public surveillance; it is often
information, or intelligence, culled from consumer
polling or statistical analysis of transactional
behavior, that has no immediate use in the process of
routine public surveillance. Indeed, it is this
surplus, bureaucratic capital that is used for the
purpose of forecasting social futures, and consequently
applied to the task of managing the behavior of mass or
aggregate units within those social futures. This
surplus intelligence becomes the basis of a whole new
industry of futures research which relies upon computer
technology to simulate and forecast the shape,
activity, and behavior of complex social systems. The
result is a possible system of social management that
far transcends the questions about surveillance that
have been at the discursive center of the privacy
debate.^27^
[35] To further challenge the idealists' vision of
postindustrial light and magic, we need only look
inside the semiconductor workplace itself, which is
home to the most toxic chemicals known to man (and
woman, especially since women of color often make up
the majority of the microelectronics labor force), and
where worker illness is measured not in quantities of
blood spilled on the shop floor but in the less visible
forms of chromosome damage, shrunken testicles,
miscarriages, premature deliveries, and severe birth
defects. In addition to the extraordinarily high
stress patterns of VDT operators, semiconductor workers
exhibit an occupational illness rate that even by the
late seventies was three times higher than that of
manufacturing workers, at least until the federal rules
for recognizing and defining levels of injury were
changed under the Reagan administration. Protection
gear is designed to protect the product and the clean
room from the workers, and not vice versa. Recently,
immunological health problems have begun to appear that
can be described only as a kind of chemically induced
AIDS, rendering the T-cells dysfunctional rather than
depleting them like virally induced AIDS.^28^ In
corporate offices, the use of keystroke software to
monitor and pace office workers has become a routine
part of job performance evaluation programs. Some 70
percent of corporations use electronic surveillance or
other forms of quantitative monitoring on their
workers. Every bodily movement can be checked and
measured, especially trips to the toilet. Federal
deregulation has meant that the limits of employee work
space have shrunk, in some government offices, below
that required by law for a two-hundred pound laboratory
pig.^29^ Critics of the labor process seem to have
sound reasons to believe that rationalization and
quantification are at last entering their most
primitive phase.
[36] These, then, are some of the features of the
critical left position--or what is sometimes referred
to as the "paranoid" position--on information
technology, which imagines or constructs a totalizing,
monolithic picture of systematic domination. While
this story is often characterized as conspiracy theory,
its targets--technorationality, bureaucratic
capitalism--are usually too abstract to fit the picture
of a social order planned and shaped by a small,
conspiring group of centralized power elites.
Although I believe that this story, when told inside
and outside the classroom, for example, is an
indispensable form of "consciousness-raising," it is
not always the best story to tell.
[37] While I am not comfortable with the "paranoid"
labelling, I would argue that such narratives do little
to discourage paranoia. The critical habit of finding
unrelieved domination everywhere has certain
consequences, one of which is to create a siege
mentality, reinforcing the inertia, helplessness, and
despair that such critiques set out to oppose in the
first place. What follows is a politics that can speak
only from a victim's position. And when knowledge
about surveillance is presented as systematic and
infallible, self-censoring is sure to follow. In the
psychosocial climate of fear and phobia aroused by the
virus scare, there is a responsibility not to be
alarmist or to be scared, especially when, as I have
argued, such moments are profitably seized upon by the
sponsors of control technology. In short, the picture
of a seamlessly panoptical network of surveillance may
be the result of a rather undemocratic, not to mention
unsocialistic, way of thinking, predicated upon the
recognition of people solely as victims. It is
redolent of the old sociological models of mass society
and mass culture, which cast the majority of society as
passive and lobotomized in the face of the cultural
patterns of modernization. To emphasize, as Robins and
Webster and others have done, the power of the new
technologies to despotically transform the "rhythm,
texture, and experience" of everyday life, and meet
with no resistance in doing so, is not only to cleave,
finally, to an epistemology of technological
determinism, but also to dismiss the capacity of people
to make their own uses of new technologies.^30^
[38] The seamless "interlocking" of public and private
networks of information and intelligence is not as
smooth and even as the critical school of hard
domination would suggest. In any case, compulsive
gathering of information is no _guarantee_ that any
interpretive sense will be made of the files or
dossiers, while some would argue that the increasingly
covert nature of surveillance is a sign that the
"campaign" for social control is not going well. One
of the most pervasive popular arguments against the
panoptical intentions of the masters of technology is
that their systems do not work. Every successful hack
or computer crime in some way reinforces the popular
perception that information systems are not infallible.
And the announcements of military-industrial
spokespersons that the fully automated battlefield is
on its way run up against an accumulated stock of
popular skepticism about the operative capacity of
weapons systems. These misgivings are born of decades
of distrust for the plans and intentions of the
military-industrial complex, and were quite evident in
the widespread cynicism about the Strategic Defense
Initiative. Just to take one empirical example of
unreliability, the military communications system
worked so poorly and so farcically during the U.S.
invasion of Grenada that commanders had to call each
other on pay phones: ever since then, the command-and-
control code of Arpanet technocrats has been C5--
Command, Control, Communication, Computers, and
Confusion.^31^ It could be said, of course, that the
invasion of Grenada did, after all, succeed, but the
more complex and inefficiency-prone such high-tech
invasions become (Vietnam is still the best example),
the less likely they are to be undertaken with any
guarantee of success.
[39] I am not suggesting that alternatives can be
forged simply by encouraging disbelief in the
infallibility of existing technologies (pointing to
examples of the appropriation of technologies for
radical uses, of course, always provides more visibly
satisfying evidence of empowerment), but
technoskepticism, while not a _sufficient_ condition of
social change, is a _necessary_ condition. Stocks of
popular technoskepticism are crucial to the task of
eroding the legitimacy of those cultural values that
prepare the way for new technological developments:
values and principles such as the inevitability of
material progress, the "emancipatory" domination of
nature, the innovative autonomy of machines, the
efficiency codes of pragmatism, and the linear
juggernaut of liberal Enlightenment rationality--all
increasingly under close critical scrutiny as a wave of
environmental consciousness sweeps through the
electorates of the West. Technologies do not shape or
determine such values. These values already exist
before the technologies, and the fact that they have
become deeply embodied in the structure of popular
needs and desires then provides the green light for the
acceptance of certain kinds of technology. The
principal rationale for introducing new technologies is
that they answer to already existing intentions and
demands that may be perceived as "subjective" but that
are never actually within the control of any single set
of conspiring individuals. As Marike Finlay has
argued, just as technology is only possible in given
discursive situations, one of which being the desire of
people to have it for reasons of empowerment, so
capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of
the power that is often autonomously attributed to the
owners and sponsors of technology.^32^
[40] In fact, there is no frame of technological
inevitability that has not already interacted with
popular needs and desires, no introduction of new
machineries of control that has not already been
negotiated to some degree in the arena of popular
consent. Thus the power to design architecture that
incorporates different values must arise from the
popular perception that existing technologies are not
the only ones, nor are they the best when it comes to
individual and collective empowerment. It was this
kind of perception--formed around the distrust of big,
impersonal, "closed" hardware systems, and the desire
for small, decentralized, interactive machines to
facilitate interpersonal communication--that "built"
the PC out of hacking expertise in the early seventies.
These were as much the partial "intentions" behind the
development of microcomputing technology as deskilling,
monitoring, and information gathering are the
intentions behind the corporate use of that technology
today. The growth of public data networks, bulletin
board systems, alternative information and media links,
and the increasing cheapness of desktop publishing,
satellite equipment, and international data bases are
as much the result of local political "intentions" as
the fortified net of globally linked, restricted-access
information systems is the intentional fantasy of those
who seek to profit from centralised control. The
picture that emerges from this mapping of intentions is
not an inevitably technofascist one, but rather the
uneven result of cultural struggles over values and
meanings.
[41] It is in this respect--in the struggle over values
and meanings--that the work of cultural criticism takes
on its special significance as a full participant in
the debate about technology. In fact, cultural
criticism is already fully implicated in that debate,
if only because the culture and education industries
are rapidly becoming integrated within the vast
information service conglomerates. The media we study,
the media we publish in, and the media we teach within
are increasingly part of the same tradable information
sector. So, too, our common intellectual discourse has
been significantly affected by the recent debates about
postmodernism (or culture in a postindustrial world) in
which the euphoric, addictive thrill of the
technological sublime has figured quite prominently.
The high-speed technological fascination that is
characteristic of the postmodern condition can be read,
on the one hand, as a celebratory capitulation on the
part of intellectuals to the new information
technocultures. On the other hand, this celebratory
strain attests to the persuasive affect associated with
the new cultural technologies, to their capacity (more
powerful than that of their sponsors and promoters) to
generate pleasure and gratification and to win the
struggle for intellectual as well as popular consent.
[42] Another reason for the involvement of cultural
critics in the technology debates has to do with our
special critical knowledge of the way in which cultural
meanings are produced--our knowledge about the politics
of consumption and what is often called the politics of
representation. This is the knowledge which
demonstrates that there are limits to the capacity of
productive forces to shape and determine consciousness.
It is a knowledge that insists on the ideological or
interpretive dimension of technology as a culture which
can and must be used and consumed in a variety of ways
that are not reducible to the intentions of any single
source or producer, and whose meanings cannot simply be
read off as evidence of faultless social reproduction.
It is a knowledge, in short, which refuses to add to
the "hard domination" picture of disenfranchised
individuals watched over by some by some scheming
panoptical intelligence. Far from being understood
solely as the concrete hardware of electronically
sophisticated objects, technology must be seen as a
lived, interpretive practice for people in their
everyday lives. To redefine the shape and form of that
practice is to help create the need for new kinds of
hardware and software.
[43] One of the latter aims of this essay has been to
describe and suggest a wider set of activities and
social locations than is normally associated with the
practice of hacking. If there is a challenge here for
cultural critics, then it might be presented as the
challenge to make our knowledge about technoculture
into something like a hacker's knowledge, capable of
penetrating existing systems of rationality that might
otherwise be seen as infallible; a hacker's knowledge,
capable of reskilling, and therefore of rewriting the
cultural programs and reprogramming the social values
that make room for new technologies; a hacker's
knowledge, capable also of generating new popular
romances around the alternative uses of human
ingenuity. If we are to take up that challenge, we
cannot afford to give up what technoliteracy we have
acquired in deference to the vulgar faith that tells us
it is always acquired in complicity, and is thus
contaminated by the poison of instrumental rationality,
or because we hear, often from the same quarters, that
acquired technological competence simply glorifies the
inhuman work ethic. Technoliteracy, for us, is the
challenge to make a historical opportunity out of a
historical necessity.
_______________________________________________________
NOTES
1. Bryan Kocher, "A Hygiene Lesson,"
_Communications of the ACM_, 32.1 (January 1989): 3.
2. Jon A. Rochlis and Mark W. Eichen, "With
Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's
Perspective," _Communications of the ACM_, 32.6 (June
1989): 697.
3. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, "Invasion of the Body
Snatchers," _Time_ (26 September 1988); 62-67.
4. Judith Williamson, "Every Virus Tells a Story:
The Meaning of HIV and AIDS," _Taking Liberties: AIDS
and Cultural Politics_, ed. Erica Carter and Simon
Watney (London: Serpent's Tail/ICA, 1989): 69.
5. "Pulsing the system" is a well-known
intelligence process in which, for example, planes
deliberately fly over enemy radar installations in
order to determine what frequencies they use and how
they are arranged. It has been suggested that Morris
Sr. and Morris Jr. worked in collusion as part of an
NSA operation to pulse the Internet system, and to
generate public support for a legal clampdown on
hacking. See Allan Lundell, _Virus! The Secret World
of Computer Invaders That Breed and Destroy_ (Chicago:
Contemporary Books, 1989), 12-18. As is the case with
all such conspiracy theories, no actual conspiracy need
have existed for the consequences--in this case, the
benefits for the intelligence community--to have been
more or less the same.
6. For details of these raids, see _2600: The
Hacker's Quarterly_, 7.1 (Spring 1990): 7.
7. "Hackers in Jail," _2600: The Hacker's
Quarterly_, 6.1 (Spring 1989); 22-23. The recent
Secret Service action that shut down _Phrack_, an
electronic newsletter operating out of St. Louis,
confirms _2600_'s thesis: a nonelectronic publication
would not be censored in the same way.
8. This is not to say that the new laws cannot
themselves be used to protect hacker institutions,
however. _2600_ has advised operators of bulletin
boards to declare them private property, thereby
guaranteeing protection under the Electronic Privacy
Act against unauthorized entry by the FBI.
9. Hugo Cornwall, _The Hacker's Handbook_ 3rd ed.
(London: Century, 1988) 181, 2-6. In Britain, for the
most part, hacking is still looked upon as a matter for
the civil, rather than the criminal, courts.
10. Discussions about civil liberties and property
rights, for example, tend to preoccupy most of the
participants in the electronic forum published as "Is
Computer Hacking a Crime?" in _Harper's_, 280.1678
(March 1990): 45-57.
11. See Hugo Cornwall, _Data Theft_ (London:
Heinemann, 1987).
12. Bill Landreth, _Out of the Inner Circle: The
True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking
the Nation's Most Secure Computer Systems_ (Redmond,
Wash.: Tempus, Microsoft, 1989), 10.
13. _The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost of
Cornell University on an Investigation Conducted by the
Commission of Preliminary Enquiry_ (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University, 1989).
14. _The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost_,
8.
15. A. K. Dewdney, the "computer recreations"
columnist at _Scientific American_, was the first to
publicize the details of this game of battle programs
in an article in the May 1984 issue of the magazine.
In a follow-up article in March 1985, "A Core War
Bestiary of Viruses, Worms, and Other Threats to
Computer Memories," Dewdney described the wide range of
"software creatures" which readers' responses had
brought to light. A third column, in March 1989, was
written, in an exculpatory mode, to refute any
connection between his original advertisement of the
Core War program and the spate of recent viruses.
16. Andrew Ross, _No Respect: Intellectuals and
Popular Culture_ (New York: Routledge, 1989), 212.
Some would argue, however, that the ideas and values of
the sixties counterculture were only fully culminated
in groups like the People's Computer Company, which ran
Community Memory in Berkeley, or the Homebrew Computer
Club, which pioneered personal microcomputing. So,
too, the Yippies had seen the need to form YIPL, the
Youth International Party Line, devoted to "anarcho-
technological" projects, which put out a newsletter
called TAP (alternately the Technological American
Party and the Technological Assistance Program). In
its depoliticised form, which eschewed the kind of
destructive "dark-side" hacking advocated in its
earlier incarnation, _TAP_ was eventually the
progenitor of _2600_. A significant turning point, for
example, was _TAP_'s decision not to publish plans for
the hydrogen bomb (which the _Progressive_ did)--bombs
would destroy the phone system, which the _TAP_ phone
phreaks had an enthusiastic interest in maintaining.
17. See Alice Bach's _Phreakers_ series, in which
two teenage girls enjoy adventures through the use of
computer technology. _The Bully of Library Place_,
_Parrot Woman_, _Double Bucky Shanghai_, and _Ragwars_
(all published by Dell, 1987-88).
18. John Markoff, "Cyberpunks Seek Thrills in
Computerized Mischief," _New York Times_, November 26,
1988.
19. Dennis Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain: The
Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era_ (Boston, South End
Press, 1989), 93.
One striking historical precedent for the hacking
subculture, suggested to me by Carolyn Marvin, was the
widespread activity of amateur or "ham" wireless
operators in the first two decades of the century.
Initially lionized in the press as boy-inventor heroes
for their technical ingenuity and daring adventures
with the ether, this white middle-class subculture was
increasingly demonized by the U.S. Navy (whose signals
the amateurs prankishly interfered with), which was
crusading for complete military control of the airwaves
in the name of national security. The amateurs lobbied
with democratic rhetoric for the public's right to
access the airwaves, and although partially successful
in their case against the Navy, lost out ultimately to
big commercial interests when Congress approved the
creation of a broadcasting monopoly after World War I
in the form of RCA. See Susan J. Douglas, _Inventing
American Broadcasting 1899-1922_ (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987), 187-291.
20. "Sabotage," _Processed World_, 11 (Summer
1984), 37-38.
21. Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain_, 99.
22. _The Amateur Computerist_, available from R.
Hauben, PO Box, 4344, Dearborn, MI 48126.
23. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, "Athens
Without Slaves...Or Slaves Without Athens? The
Neurosis of Technology," _Science as Culture_, 3
(1988): 7-53.
24. See Boris Frankel, _The Post-Industrial
Utopians_ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
25. See, for example, the collection of essays
edited by Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, _The Political
Economy of Information_ (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988), and Dan Schiller, _The
Information Commodity_ (Oxford UP, forthcoming).
26. Tom Athanasiou and Staff, "Encryption and the
Dossier Society," _Processed World_, 16 (1986): 12-17.
27. Kevin Wilson, _Technologies of Control: The
New Interactive Media for the Home_ (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 121-25.
28. Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain_, 63-80.
29. "Our Friend the VDT," _Processed World_, 22
(Summer 1988): 24-25.
30. See Kevin Robins and Frank Webster,
"Cybernetic Capitalism," in Mosco and Wasko, 44-75.
31. Barbara Garson, _The Electronic Sweatshop_
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 244-45.
32. See Marike Finlay's Foucauldian analysis,
_Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Technology_
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). A more
conventional culturalist argument can be found in
Stephen Hill, _The Tragedy of Technology_ (London:
Pluto Press, 1988).