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...