STDIN

So one project I would like to undertake this fall with my hacker class is compile a list of some of the more compelling definitions of hacker, a hack, and hacking. For now, I will post an entry for each reading and then create a master list. It will be fun to see where they converge and diverge and what sort of mosaic they provide at the end of the semester.

One attribute that is often hinged to the meaning of hacking is pleasure, a word that I think everyone knows what it means, but of course, can mean so many things! We are going to address pleasure various times throughout the semester with the help of Mr Nietzsche, who thought of the depths of pleasure, pain, evil, and morality like no other philosopher and with the help of a more current philosopher, Martha Nussbaum in this piece which explores pleasure in Aristotle and Mill.

The following definition found in Steven Levy's classic account of the golden age of hacking, is one that aptly captures the importance of pleasure in hacking:

"and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a 'hack.' " p. 23 Hackers Steven Levy.

And here is a nice example in action

Phreaking – “A slang term coined to describe the activity of a subculture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, like equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. Additionally, it is often associated with computer hacking. This is sometimes called the H/P culture (with H standing for Hacking and P standing for Phreaking).” (Wikipedia)

YIP – “The Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies, was a highly theatrical and anti-authoritarian political party established in the United States in 1967. An offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s, the Yippies presented a more radically youth-oriented and countercultural alternative to those movements. They employed theatrical gestures—such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for President in 1968—to mock the social status quo. They have been described as a highly theatrical youth movement of “symbolic politics.” (Wikipedia)

The following is a summary with dashes of spice from class on 9/10/2008.

In Class Video

The Beginning of class consisted of a delightful video on phreaking and the fallout following Rosenbaum’s Esquire article. It started the handsome and charming Captain Crunch, and featured a special guest appearance from everyone’s favorite techno-teddy bear, Steve Wozniak.

Hacker Crackdown

Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown weaved a narrative that demonstrated the conditions leading to the social behavior of Phreaking. The article outlined the history of the telephone itself and then the growth of the telephone company from public service into a giant, simultaneously loved and loathed networking behemoth. The story itself creates a sort of Petri-dish in which the culture of phreaking was able to grow. “Ma Bell” becomes a giant and awe-inspiring system, created by humans but left to be run by ‘stupid’ machines. The phone company as public service being run for private corporate interest, and a flawed matrix of signals and tones waiting to be exploited. The system is an inviting environment for phreakers to break it down, but in the end of the article it was ultimately the machine that broke itself – challenging public perception of phreakers as the destroyers.

Similarities and differences- Hackers vs Phreakers

Similarities

Hackers and Phreakers share a love of the addictive pleasure of breaking into, changing, fixing, defeating, and debugging the system. While the phreakers unlocked the sounds and tones in the telephone system, the hackers broke locks and stretched the limits of a boxy unimaginative machine. Both cultures provided an oasis for those who found themselves of the margins of society- in class we briefly discussed the appeal of phreaking to the blind, and the occurrence of autism or aspberger’s in the hacking community. Another social appeal of H/P culture was the excitement of finding other people like you, as in “Oh, you stuck your fingers in electrical sockets when you were two to figure out how they work also? Sweet!” Both cultures also shared the budding inclination for social engineering, another way of hacking to get what you want.

Differences

Phreakers, by the nature of their medium, appear to be more socially inclined than the hackers at MIT. The phreakers relished in the thrill of getting recognized with their goofy identities, names, and conferences – an early form of non-local social networking. Phreakers lived in an anarchic and non-institutional framework while hackers had a very meritocratic and organized system. Hackers worked feverishly and individually in the middle of the night somewhere deep in the basement of a building at MIT (okay, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.)

While phreakers had a fan-like love and respect for “Ma Bell,” wanting to work there or at least be part of it, hackers had no love for IBM or the system in place with which they had to work. While phreakers had a vast jungle gym in which to play, hackers had to use the limits of their imagination to work with the clunky first-generation computers. While both phreakers and hackers built and broke-down the systems with which the worked, phreakers were primarily the breakers and reverse-engineers while early hackers focused on building and creating.

The System

Hackers and Phreakers both work within the confines of technological systems. The act of hacking these systems is a politically complex undertaking. Is a hack just a fun activity, or a subversive political act? Is the nature of hacking itself, as a means of subverting the system, inherently political? The complexity of issue can be seen in the phreakers attempts to rationalize their actions by viewing it as a constant test and debugging of the phone systems.

Our discussions about phreaking and hacking have revealed a complex love-hate relationship between H/P culture and the systems they hack. The class handout included a quote from Nietzsche, “The wheel and the brake have differing duties, but also on in common: to hurt one another,” which aptly describes the system-hacker relationship. This tension between breaking the system down in order to fix it up again and take it to new levels began to lead into a discussion about the ethics and aesthetics of hacking.

We also briefly discussed the role media plays in creating the hacker image, which plays into the political position of hacker culture in society, as well as the question of ethics versus aesthetics.

Below are some pieces of hacker pop-culture to check out:

Movie: WarGames (1983).

Movie: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Zine: 2600 The Hacker Quarterly online

Bad Movie: Hackers (1995)

Thanks! Feel free to criticize, correct, jeer, etc...

- Rachel

One of the great ironies to mark hacking is the fact that mainstream public perception of hackers is based on the idea that hacking is totally immoral and yet the actual history of hacking shows that many hackers are in fact quite obsessed with ethical questions and with what Steven Levy defined decades ago as the "hacker ethic."

But what if the question of ethics is simply the wrong question to be asking? This is what Brian Harvey suggests in this old but thought provoking piece, which we read last week, where he argues that:

"Steven Levy, in the book Hackers, talks at length about what he calls the ``hacker ethic.'' This phrase is very misleading. What he has discovered is the Hacker Aesthetic, the standards for art criticism of hacks. For example, when Richard Stallman says that information should be given out freely, his opinion is not based on a notion of property as theft, which (right or wrong) would be an ethical position. His argument is that keeping information secret is inefficient; it leads to unaesthetic duplication of effort. "

I think he raises some important question about what we mean by ethics in the first place as well as about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

An older, Greek, definition of ethics as virtue did not separate aesthetics and ethics so starkly in so far as Greek philosophy emphasized ethics as the virtuous and good life, rooted in the fulfillment of excellence. But even if you separate these two domains, one interesting question remains, when might the aesthetic become the ethical?

One can argue that the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in hacking concerns the broader issue of productive autonomy: the constellation of institutions, social norms, legal devices, and moral codes that hackers have created and draw upon in order to autonomously improve on the work of peers, refine their technical skills, and extend engineering traditions. Their actions, their guidelines, their norms however strike as ethical not for any inherent reason but because they sit in tension with mainstream proprietary models of knowledge in general and software in specific. So if we take a relational instead of ontological view of ethics, we can see how hacker aesthetics commitments are also ethical ones.

I have always wondered in fact whether Levy in Hackers identified the hacker ethic when he did and as he did (he noted that hackers did not themselves talk about ethics; he interpreted their actions as ethical) because this was a moment of crisis—a crisis of social reproduction to be specific—among the MIT hackers.

That is, the early 1980s was just the time when copyrights and patents were creeping into the world of software, when lucrative companies were hiring programmers, when NDAs were becoming more common, when in short, the aesthetics of hacking was forced to move into ethical territory. Stallman reacted to the evisceration of his MIT hacker community with what was clearly an ethical response: he established the idea and institution of Free Software aimed as cultural preservation and political advocacy. Perhaps it was just this crisis, these set of responses, that allowed Levy to identify the ethics of software freedom.

The ENIAC

The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) was the first digital computer. It was unveiled in 1946 after 3 years of development by UPenn and the Army. It was heralded in the press as a “Giant Brain” designed to replace human computers who did ballistics calculations by hand (Wikipedia). Paul Ceruzzi, in “The Unforeseen Revolution” emphasizes how remarkable the computer is because it is a general machine, one that can be programmed and reprogrammed to fit the owners needs. The function of the machine is not implied in the configuration, thus the digital computer became the fist meta-machine.

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

In this 1980 article, Langdon Winner, proposes two answers to that question. The first is that technology is inherently political. The second possible answer is that technology has the affinity for the political. For our purposes in this debate, the central question is: do computers have an affinity towards a certain political organization?

Three Ways to Approach Monday’s Readings

(1) Social context of invention: who, why where & when? What might this tell us about the politics of technology?

The invention of technology is never a linear process. The histories of the MIT hackers and the Homebrew Computer Club clearly demonstrate that road that the evolution of the Personal Computer took was long and winding. The environments that the MIT hackers and the Homebrew Computer Club were in were so different that these contexts could have a lot to do with how politics around their technologies developed. At MIT, there was a particularly communal atmosphere because work was focused on one mainframe computer that was central to their experimentation. The Homebrew Computer Club, on the other hand, had an “individualistic democratic” structure because everyone had to build their own computer. Friedman emphasizes the individual aspect of the Homebrew Computer Club's activities, but perhaps he does so too much. Despite the fact that everyone was working on different computers, the Homebrew Computer Club engaged actively in a collective effort to build the Personal Computer by spending much time sharing knowledge and information.

The Second Issue of Homebrew's Newsletter

(2) New social perceptions of technologies.

With each new technology, it is often hard for society to fully grasp the concept of this new product; it must be defined in terms of its predecessor (the first automobiles were called "horseless carriages"). Prior notions dictate the use and production of many technologies. Old meanings must be deleted and new ones are crafted. Furthermore, new needs must be invented. In 1973, two years before the Altair, Xerox had invented the Alto, which was essentially a Personal Computer, but no one thought of moving it into homes because Xerox saw no need for it. Finally, when PCs were introduced to the home market, salespeople were often the ones who determined what uses it might have in the home. Was it good for doing your taxes, could it manage your kitchen appliances or was it a glorified alarm system?

The Horseless Carriage

The Alto

The Altair

(3) Shifting meaning, contexts of hacking and the birth of controversy.

As communities get larger and larger, it is inevitable that dispute and controversy will arise. Perhaps this is part of the reason there was so little serious drama within the small group of MIT hackers, while the Homebrew Computer Club had to deal with building political issues as it expanded. The question of what purpose computers had in the outside world was present, but it became overshadowed by issues of intellectual property within the hacking community.

Bill Gates wrote an open letter to the “thieves” that had copied BASIC without paying for it, which caused a lot of stir within the hacking community, but also marked the formation of a new market: software became a commodity. As one hacker pointed out, BASIC would have never been so successful if the Homebrew Computer Club hadn’t copied and disseminated it. Perhaps Bill Gates has piracy to thank some of his success and celebrity.

BASIC version 3.0

Aversion to Politics

Despite debates within the hacker community relating to intellectual property, there was little talk of the larger implications of the PC. There were some, such as Fred Moore, who tried to open up and direct such a dialogue, but his efforts were mostly fruitless. Was this because hackers were so deeply involved with exploring and developing computers that it didn't matter were technology was going as long as it was moving? Or were the hackers were simply uninterested?

SPACEWAR!

For a long time, computers were thought to have no business value. They were considered machines that served military and some minimal business functions. Outside of the government, few had use for them. Stewart Brand was instrumental in changing the public perception of computers. By illuminating "low-rent" aspects of computer research, such as Spacewar, Brand was able to show the public that computers could be not only be interactive, but they could be fun.

PLAY SPACEWAR HERE
The "a", "s", "d", "f" keys control one of the spaceships. The "k", "l", ";", "'" keys control the other. The controls are spin one way, spin the other, thrust, and fire.

New Technology, New Politics

Around this time, a couple left-wing political movements popped up: the New Left and the New Communalists. The New Left took a radical approach to politics, including groups like the Yippies, which we talked about last week. The New Communalists believed that technology had the power to enable personal expansion and commune and could ultimately liberate individuals from oppressive hierarchies. Brand's efforts to change the understanding of technology greatly influenced the New Communalists.

Traces of the Hacker Ethic Today: Things to Ponder

Is Bill Gates the ultimate hacker? Does hacking and making a living off it mean he's a sell out?

Does the Hacker Ethic still exist within corporate structures/large organizations?

Does hiring geniuses and letting them roam free in research parks keep the Hacker Ethic live and well?

- Charlotte

I saw this posted on the times today, and am currently listening to it right now.... only the first half is relevent, but maybe y'all might enjoy it..the relevant part starts around the 5 minute mark...

http://podcasts.nytimes.com/podcasts/2008/09/17/18techtalk.mp3

Also, he talks about hacking WEP wireless networks....somehting that you might have in your home apartment. While it sounds really complicated, here is a guide to do just that in 60 seconds:

http://www.shawnhogan.com/2006/08/how-to-crack-128-bit-wireless-networks.html

with that being said, please switch your home wireless to WPA, because most likely it is supported if your router is newer than four years old.

see you in class,

Max

Anonymous being that they are Anonymous is hard to pin down. One might ask whether the folks behind the recent Palin email exposure are the same people behind the recent attacks against Scientology? We can never know and that is not really the most interesting question about Anonymous. They are interesting because of how they marry an audacious aesthetics to their politics (and how they mastered the art of video warfare) and how they have become a free floating form to be adopted by whoever wants to claim them.

Whatever the case, and however silly and childish their antics are or may seem, they are always entertaining and in this case, they also helped bring to the table the problems of relying on third party business for your work email.

And finally, if nothing else, we should appreciate them for they provided great fodder for what I think is a pretty genius onion article.

One cannot address hacker culture and politics without thinking seriously about journalism and journalistic representation. Whether it was Steven Levy for the university hackers or Bruce Sterling for the so-called hacker underground, these journalists gave substance and form and eventually widespread circulation to what existed far below public view.

Another key player in this story of hacker representations in the media was Stewart Brand, the first editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the founders of the WELL. Last week in class, we read one of his early pieces on hackers, a Rolling Stone article, Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. If you have not read it, I recommend it. Like many journalists writing about hackers and computers, the tone and style is a little over the top and dramatic (which is why it is fun to read) and one is transported back to the past when computers were a scarce resource.

His representation of hackers is slightly different than the other authors mentioned above. He did not quite capture the full meat and pulse of hacking in any depth but instead used them as important tokens and examples for reshaping the broader meaning of computing. He turned to hacking as a way to disassociate computers from their close association with military/bureaucratic institutions and endeavors and represent them anew, in a fresh, exciting light: as a tool for individual empowerment (though, as Fred Turner's wonderful book on the topic argues, Brand's vision still incorporated some elements of military thinking, such as cybernetics).

A number of students picked up on the fact that Brand's representation of computing, however influential in terms of building mainstream representations of personal computing, did not completely map onto the hacker experience, especially at the Homebrew Club where there was still a very collective sentiment brewing in the air though of course idioms of personal empowerment and individuality were also visible and strong. This was a time also not only when computer technologies became more accessible, leading to a considerable expansion in the hacker population, but when we start to see some of the first fault lines among hackers (notably over the role of intellectual property law). Growth always entails diversity in other words.

There are two parts of the article that really caught my attention. First, was Brand's very apt characterization of hacker projects into two categories: the low rent and high rent, which he put in the following terms:

A distinction exists between low rent and high rent computer research, between preoccupations of support group-(hackers) and of research group. The distinction blurs often. Les Earnest: "Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between recreation and work, happily. We try to judge people not on how much time they waste but on what they accomplish over fairly long periods of time, like a half year to a year." He adds that Spacewar players "are more from the support groups than the research groups. The research groups tend to get their kicks out of research." Spacewar is low-rent.

And perhaps mos surprising was part the way he foreshadows all sorts of uses for personal computing before the PC was even invented (like file sharing):

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form).

Indeed, so much for the record form...

A Recap On Liberalism

There is both positive freedom and negative freedom. It is the water that fish swim in, but that water is at war with itself, so you could be swimming along not taking any notice and then bam get splashed in the face.

View image

Shamo realizes Liberalism is tough to define

Free speech is the market place for ideas and promotes circulation.

Is computer code covered under free speech?
-it is written, but it is complicated due to the fact that it does have action on the world
Does free speech even exists?
-If it was up to Stanley Fish (no relation to the afore mentioned fish) we would “dump the baby from the bath tub” because there is no such thing.
-you have to look at free speech through various lenses not just the pros and cons.

Phun With Pfaffenberger

Usenet was greeted in response to Arpanet.
“In announcing the software’s availability, Daniel, then a graduate student, described Usenet as a poor man’s ARPAnet, a phrase that, Daniel recalls,
explained exactly what was going on. We (or at least I) had little idea what
was really going on the ARPAnet [the Internet’s predecessor], but we
knew we were excluded. Even if we had been allowed to join, there was no
way of coming up with the money. It was commonly accepted at the time that
to join the ARPAnet took political connections and $100,000. I don’t know if
that assumption was true, but we were so far from having either connections or
money that we didn’t even try. The Poor man’s ARPAneto was our way of
joining the computer science community, and we made a deliberate attempt to
extend it to other not-well-endowed members of the community. (Daniel, 1993)” (368-369)

Creators of Usenet were faced with a dichotomy. While they believed in free expression, but they were using professional equipment, it became a major what to do, what to do? situation. The Backbone Cabal which enforced the “golden rule” those that have the gold make the rules (377), began imposing various means to put a stop to those who were using Usenet with out netiquette. The Backbone soon collapsed with the introduction of alt* newsgroups. It had all started at a barbecue when Brain Reid decided to put his foot down, “John was distressed because they wouldn’t create rec.drugs, and I was distressed because they wanted to force me to adopt the name ª rec.food.recipesº for my recipe newsgroup.”
The administration soon went down.

Scientology and Free Speech

Scientologist used copyrights to squelch free speech

I’m sure this guy thought it was epic lulz when scientologist spammed Usenet

But this raises the question of weather or not people have the right to post sacred texts.

Nietzsche Knowledge
A hacker before hackers they have recently discovered a book of his entitled I’m so smart I invented hacking before computers existed (unfortunately the only copy is owned by the man pictured above).

Always dapper

Nietzsche did possess many characteristics that would make a great hacker. He was boastful as were many of the hackers that Sterling discusses. He sought pleasure and like hackers anything that got in his way was a nuisance. His idea of Will to Power can be applied to the perfection hackers seek and the elite that come from possessing the knowledge needed to be a hacker.
He was obsessed with pain and suffering, and not believing in enlightenment science or Christianity he turned to art to explain why such exists in the world. He created the idea of Apollonian and Dionysian creative impulses, a duality, logic and order against the primal pleasure of delight.
Hackers are also faced with this, there is an extreme order to code, but then there is the excessive drive that many hackers seem to poses along side the extremely logical. One could look at the Underground, and the LoD and compare it to Dionysian but they are fundamental Apollonian.

Elitist Contempt in The Digital Underground

According to Bruce Sterling in the Hacker Crackdown much of the hacker world was ruled by elitist contempt, there were certain things that you should didn’t do because other hackers would look at you as stupid, and much of the thrill for hackers came from boasting and acceptance from peers. You needed to have a trophy, but stolen credit cards were no trophy:

“The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for rodents and losers, but they *did* have rules. *They never crashed anything, and they never took money.* These were rough rules-of-thumb, and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).

If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual funds -- money in the bank, that is -then nobody *really* got hurt, in LoD's opinion. "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered themselves clean.”

Richard posed an interesting question involving the “Is Computer Hacking A Crime?” article, as to computers comparison to religion on page 51
Some points that came up
-In order to have religion you need structure, and there are none
-Perhaps more of a Mystic Religion, when you have reached such a high level you do not need institution
-Computers as Voodoo, Voodoo priest are seen to have special powers, and like hackers legends build up around them.

“What conjoins hackers together?”
When your on the verge of defining it, it slips away.

My daily news feed alerted me of this recent happening.

Robert Soloway, dubbed "King of Spam," reveals his spamming scheme that made him $20,000 a day, a millionaire by 18, and quite an annoying electronic entrepreneur. He faces jail time.

We haven't touched upon spamming, but it's interesting to see those who capitalize on the freedom of the web, and how he spills all--just like hackers tend to do.

Bill O’Reilly’s web site hacked, attackers release personal details of users

In what is slowly turning into a endless loop of hacktivism activities, Bill O’Reilly’s BillOreilly.com has been compromised during the weekend, with personal details including passwords in plain text for 205 of the site’s members already leaking across Internet forums, as a response to his remarks regarding Wikileaks as a “one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites” which recently published private information of Sarah Palin’s private email.

We began our Wednesday, September 24, class discussing how our previous perceptions of hackers are changing as we move further through our readings for the semester. Overwhelmingly, both those in the class who had no previous knowledge of the culture before starting the course and those who had, noted they now have a better understanding of hackers. Previous perceptions were based on dichotomous representations that positioned the hacker as being either a vandalizing criminal or an antisocial nerd obsessed with math and numbers. Through our discussions and course materials, hackers are revealing themselves as a complex and heterogeneous group that changes and evolves with the advancement of new technologies.

In one of our earlier readings for the course, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by journalist Steven Levy, we learned about the “hacker ethic” that originated with the early hacker community of the 50s and 60s who formed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Due to the advancements and availability of technologies, such as, the commodification of the personal computer and the rise of the internet, the nature of hacker activity has since changed. With it, also shifted the philosophies surrounding the ethics of their practices, such as those of the “hacker underground”.

We spent a significant portion of class attempting to understand the “hacker underground”. The term hasn’t yet been clearly defined in our readings. However, a strict and precise definition would pose difficulty, because the computer world, as previously stated, is complex with rapid advancements and with overlapping ideals and philosophies amongst hackers. Some of our comprehension of the term came from our last reading, The Digital Underground by Bruce Sterling. He expressed a shift had occurred from “the original hackers, the ones that basically wanted to help the world through the computer, to the hackers described in this piece, the ones who are known to be thieves and criminals” (Brod, Jenny). The term carries a dark connotation and like other “underground” cultural subgroups in society, it exists hidden and separate from the mainstream culture.

To get a sense of who the members of the Hacker Underground are, we watched the video clip Disinformation on the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Our current readings’, chapter four of, Representing Hacker Culture: Reading Phrack, by the Acedemic, Douglas Thomas and two Phrack Magazine articles from issue 65: The Phrack Profile on the Unix Terrorist and The Underground Myth, functioned as a window to understanding the group. The hacker underground rose along with the introduction of the bulletin board system (BBS). Holding some of the same values that traced back to early hacker ethics, particularly those of access, sharing, and community, BBS was embraced. Groups formed around different boards and hackers utilized the systems to share knowledge and learn from one another. This atmosphere would give rise, in the 80s, to the online publication; Phrack Magazine. On the ezime, articles are posted by hackers providing useful information to other hackers. Douglas describes it as being core to the underground as he writes:

While Phrack does impart information to the hacker underground in its articles and exploits, its more important function has been in creating a culture for the underground and in transmitting news, and lore about the hacks and hackers that define hacker culture. In doing so, Phrack established itself as essential reading for the culture of the underground and as a result had a central and defining role in shaping what the culture would look like for nearly fifteen years (Douglas 2002: 140).

Phrack gave the underground a place to congregate. It also “perpetuated the anarchical opposition to society” (Chang, Tiffany). Douglas describes the underground’s separation from mainstream, “it is a world about secrets that operates in secrets” (Douglas 2002:134). He discuses the paradox of the “culture of secrecy”, the hacker wants all information to be free and accessible, but he will utilize secrecy for his own advantage.

Another element found in our readings of Phrack that we discussed in class was notion of a “the perpetual death of hacking”. In the Unix Terrorist profile it was argued that the underground is dying. As Charlotte Horton noted in her response paper, this has been incorrectly stated in the past, and yet hacking still remains. It is a form of the elitist contempt (being a “hater” like Maxwell Salzberg stated in class) The hacker asserts his power of knowledge over the rest. “What each hacker points to when predicting the end of the ‘scene’ is his fear that he will no longer be part of a secret and sacred elite. Without membership in this elite, a hacker loses the empowerment he hacked so hard to find” (Horton, Charlotte E).

An example of the “elitist contempt is depicted in the SNL skit Nick Burns Your Company’s Computer Guy. The Nick Burns Character asserts his knowledge power over Jamie Fox’s character.

In The Underground Myth the anonymous author listed reasons for why he predicts hacking will die. Some include his belief that the culture will lose hackers to jobs of the security industry, hackers will shy away from hacking for fear of criminalization, and because of changing technologies. Arguments like these have been made throughout the evolution of computers, but yet hacking still remains. It is clear that the hacker will continue to change and evolve with the technologies of the times, always along side of those technologies.

-Adriana