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
