Cry Hackerdom!

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.feedmag.com/essay/es405_master.html

TUCKERED OUT after three days of prayer and sermons, attendees at the
National Evangelist Workshop this summer thought they could slip out
of Las Vegas with souls unscathed. In a town known for leading even
the most pious into temptation, these teetotalers had managed to enjoy
nothing but wholesome fun. And they had chosen a gambling-free,
off-the-Strip hotel, the Alexis Park, to ensure that the wicked would
not intrude on their holy powwows.

Sin City, however, has a knack for sordid surprises. One morning this
summer, as they toted their luggage through the lobby, the preachers
discovered that their quiet hotel had been overrun by youths sporting
the reputed accessories of amoral hedonism: black leather pants, goopy
makeup, and hair colors never conceived of by the Creator. At 11 AM
many were already guzzling screwdrivers and cheap draft beers.

THE EVANGELISTS' BANE were the thousands of hackers in town for
DefCon, the annual highlight of the digital underground's social
calendar. This year's convention was a three-day blur of technical
lectures and heavy drinking, punctuated by conspiracy theorizing and
frat-boy pranks (including a pipe-destroying concrete-down-the-toilet
gag that may spell the end of DefCon's run at the Alexis Park). As one
besotted character nicknamed Unstable Boy slurred to me, "This is a
weekend-long party. With a T1 connection. What more could you ask
for?"

DefCon may sound like an icky affair, a geekified version of Daytona
spring break without the alluring jiggle factor. Yet the nihilistic,
evangelist-scaring posturing belies a culture whose optimism borders
on cockeyed -- a culture that, according to programming sage and The
Mythical Man-Month author Frederick Brooks, "attracts those who
believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers." Though many hackers
embrace the trappings of fashionable morbidity -- narcotics
consumption, black-helicopter paranoia, bondage gear -- they also
harbor instincts that can best be described as virtuous, even
spiritual. Hackers generally disavow belief in the Man Upstairs, but
they maintain a peculiarly unwavering faith in their fellow man.
Professed fans of Nietzsche's gloomy indictments, these post-ENIAC
craftsmen actually embrace a radically sunny ethos. Their commitment
to open systems is blissfully free of the cold Darwinist leanings that
mar cyber-libertarian thought -- as The Cathedral and the Bazaar
author Eric S. Raymond has noted, hacker philosophy is based on the
concept of "radical sharing justified by sound market economics, but
not really founded on an economic impulse." The onset of a borderless
digital realm, hackers hold, will elicit admirable reactions from
meatspace users; vested with the power of network guardianship, human
beings will act responsibly, even gallantly.

Analyzing hackerdom's philosophical nuances is a tricky proposition,
not least of all because it is difficult to answer the fundamental
question: "What is a hacker?" It is an epithet applied to a vast array
of geeks, from Linus Torvalds to the snarky kids who deface Web pages
with pro-LSD graffiti. But the elder statesmen of the computer
underground, top-tier programming prophets from Raymond to
spotlight-shy characters like "rain forest puppy" and "Simple Nomad,"
shudder at the term's broadening. To them, hacker is an honorific that
has been corrupted by no-goodniks and mainstreamers. Nothing chafes
them quite like headlines that brand "Love Bug" author Onel de Guzman
a hacker. At his DefCon presentation, "Nightstalker," the
self-designated "official crusty old guy" from the hacker collective
Cult of the Dead Cow, railed against such simpletons: "Anyone can
throw a brick through a church window. But it takes an artist to make
that stained glass."

The underground now recognizes an opportunity to reclaim their
favorite title. As in the Internet's formative years, when
university-based coders first fiddled with network protocols,
technology is being advanced primarily outside the confines of
corporatized testing laboratories. In this nascent post-Napster,
post-Linux world, "true" hackers consider themselves crusaders for
digital libertation who should be embraced, not feared.

TO THOSE UNFAMILIAR with computer lingo, of course, hacker is
synonymous with "criminal," someone who trespasses on private networks
and revels in creating pointless chaos. Ask the man on the street to
define the word and he'll describe kids who swipe credit card numbers,
monkeywrench eBay, and knock NASA satellites out of orbit. Hacker is
almost a slur, akin to "carjacker" or "crackhead."

The media shoulders most of the blame for perpetuating the
hacker-equals-criminal misconception, but the underground is also rife
with wannabes who have poisoned the semantics. Enticed by the outlaw
image-drummed up most recently by the bizarre arrest of alleged Yahoo!
crasher "Mafiaboy"-technical dunces are flocking to the culture. In
Las Vegas, there was an abundance of such wannabes strutting the
halls, masters of the disaffected adolescent sneer but oblivious to
the intricacies of Perl; by my unscientific count, a good quarter of
the attendees were in town solely for the abundant drugs and
fashion-show atmosphere, and their computer lexicons stopped at BASIC.
Alongside the trade-show tables selling genuine hacker paraphenalia --
DoC T-shirts and Blowfish algorithim stickers -- were an equal number
of vendors hawking drum-and-bass 'zines and how-to books on poppy
cultivation. "Everybody should have to pass a programming test before
they can get in," grumbled one veteran hacker, Hubert Chang, as he
surveyed DefCon's Day One crowd. "Of course, that would eliminate
about a third of the people here."

Purists, however, dismiss both thieves and poseurs as undeserving of
the hacker label. True hackers -- those who have defined the culture's
core tenets -- trace their origins back to the model-train enthusiasts
of Eisenhower-era MIT. In his classic 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of
the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy details how these young men
evolved from electric-coil tinkerers into altruistic programmers,
whose chief pleasure is problem solving. Hackers, by Levy's
definition, are simply technology-obsessed folks in love with the
"Eureka!" moment. The hacker ethic, he writes, developed as "a
philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your
hand on machines at any cost-to improve the machines, and to improve
the world." The selflessness of that credo sounds outlandish in this
age of dot-com optionaires, so it's easy to forget that many pillars
of the wired world were perfected by uncompensated hackers. Take, for
example, the classic story of UNIX, still the nerd's operating system
of choice. When Bell Labs released the operating system to educational
institutions in 1976, part of the distribution license mandated that
any additions or changes by users would have to be shared with the
entire UNIX community. Despite the lack of financial incentives,
hundreds of hackers developed UNIX's broad functionality, porting it
to a variety of platforms and enabling it to support network protocols
like UUCP and TCP/IP.

Today's hackers still maintain that Mammon should be excluded from the
creative process as a matter of principle. If one needs proof that
money corrupts technology, they contend, merely examine the bugs that
have riddled such flagship Microsoft products as the IIS server. At
DefCon, the distaste for profiteering was palpable -- thus the
abundance of "Fuck Red Hat" T-shirts, protests against corporate
co-optation of open-source systems. The underground's latest heroes
are the directors of software projects based on 4.4 BSD Lite, the free
operating system pioneered at the University of California at Berkeley
in the late 1970s. The gratis software churned out by projects like
FreeBSD and OpenBSD is inarguably superior to most mainstream Linux
distributions, both in terms of security and portability. Compensation
for these coders is virtually non-existent-OpenBSD founder Theo de
Raadt, who milled about DefCon slapping pro-cryptography stickers on
attendees chests, ekes out a living on T-shirt sales and donations.
(He recently saved up enough to purchase a small house, but his
infrequent social outings still consist primarily of pizza dinners in
downtown Calgary.)

By favoring intrinsic rewards over extrinsic, hackers find themselves
in bizarre philosophical company. Though decidedly antagonistic to
organized religion, these money-eschewing technophiles share spiritual
terrain with the world's most prominent faiths. The terrified
evangelists who fled the Alexis Park would find the hackers' lack of
avarice heartwarming -- the love of money, after all, is one of the
Good Book's biggest no-nos. And Buddhist renouncers, though
potentially put-off by the enthusiasm for blood-drenched games like
Quake, would admire the hacker penchant for spiritual fulfillment
through psychic exploration. Raymond compares this insatiable
intellectual curiousity to that of instinctual artists, hailing the
hacker drive to cherish the "pure artistic satisfaction of designing
beautiful software and making it work. People for whom [that] is not a
significant motivation never become hackers in the first place, just
as people who don't love music never become composers."

ANDREW SULLIVAN has noted that the antiprofit ethos closely parallels
that of another, more contemporary value system: Marxism. In a New
York Times Magazine article this past June, he termed the sentiment
"dot-communism" and pointed to MP3 swapping as proof of communism's
cyberspace rebirth-Marxism 2.0. "By turning physical property into
endlessly duplicable e-property," Sullivan wrote, "the ancient human
problem of 'mine-thine' has been essentially solved."

Indeed, hackers deride the attempts of private interests to fashion
cyberspace into an archipelago of fortified e-commerce islands. Part
of this feeling stems from the hacker faith in what The Economist has
termed "the Internet's founding myth" -- that the Internet was created
outside the scope of government control, and its commodification
amounts to an illegal, immoral capitalist coup. This origin tale
excludes the Pentagon's prominent role in ARPANET, as well as Cisco's
trailblazing development of routers. Hackers, however, conveniently
disregard those "minor" details. To them, the wired world should be an
unruly Eden, free from authoritarian constraints, and they've bought
into a legend that backs their view.

But Sullivan overstates the underground's ideological fervor. Heavily
influenced by the laissez-faire doctrine of libertarianism, hackers
have little taste for imposing a dictatorship of the proletariat -- or
any other cogent political order, for that matter. Instead, hackers
simply accept that the freedom of information is inevitable, and that
debating the merits of such a system would be a titanic
time-waster.Think of that subversive slogan : "Information wants to be
free." The 1s and 0s that inhabit the world's hard drives are yearning
to roam and breed. Information is akin to a feral biological entity
over which no one can claim exclusive dominion.

Media bigwigs mindful of copyright protections may dismiss the
paradigm, but there is ample precedent for the outlook. Humanity has a
poor track record when it comes to corralling knowledge, even in those
rare cases when there is general consensus that such limits are a good
idea. The global community tried hard to stem the proliferation of
nuclear weapons, for example, but North Korea still built the bomb.

Similar regulatory efforts in cyberspace are proving futile. The
Clinton administration relaxed its ban on the export of strong
encryption when it realized that efforts to keep such tools out of
criminal hands were doomed to failure, since other nations were not
bound by the same edict. And the unpoliced nooks and crannies of
cyberspace are the perfect incubators for gestating Freenets, destined
to make file-sharing anonymity a near-inalienable right.

Authorities plead that an unregulated Internet will become a hotbed of
nefarious activity, that everyone from Islamic fundamentalists to
neo-Nazis will somehow manipulate modems to further their
antigovernment crusades. Art Money, chief information officer for the
Department of Defense, used the DefCon podium to drive home that
point: "Our friend Osama Bin Laden doesn't necessarily have to use
physical means to get his way."

HACKERS, however, have a derisive nickname for such assertions --
"FUD," shorthand for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." When Money spoke
of a hypothetical world in which everyone had "unfettered access to
strong encryption," the applause was deafening; when he responded,
"Wait, wait -- I'm not just talking for legal things, but [for]
illegal things, too," real cheers broke out. Hackers contend --
correctly -- that security can be tightened without government
intervention, and that the vast majority of users are online not to
foment jihad, but to increase their knowledge and communicate with
their fellow man.

And that's precisely why hackers, more so than any other community, do
not fear an unruly cyberspace. There is an anarchic streak that runs
throughout the culture, an implicit trust in the individual's capacity
for making moral, nonharmful choices. Regulatory bodies exist to keep
human tendencies in check; hackers, on the other hand, believe that
humans are far from the nasty bastards imagined by antiquated
political philosophers. In cyberspace, that bred-in-the-bone goodness
will emerge; everyone will follow the hacker ethic and produce
knowledge for the sheer joy of accomplishment. Network technology
holds the key to uncovering man's fundamental decency.

Critics scoff at this outlook as woefully myopic. They question how
producers of intellectual property can feed their families in world
where copyright and patent laws mean squat. They lambaste the founding
myth favored by hackers, which conspicuously excludes the vital
contributions of the Pentagon. They fear that privacy will be
destroyed should every hard drive be rendered scannable in a
barrier-free cyberspace.

Yet hackers pish-posh these concerns -- not so much because they have
figured out solutions, but because they have blind faith that the
Internet is predestined to become a perfect beast. They haven't yet
figured out how Napster and Metallica can peacefully coexist, but they
do not fear a future without speed metal. As the Internet follows its
organic path toward full maturation, they argue, all of the little
details that inspire so much present-day hand-wringing will iron
themselves out.

Cyberpunks as the Pollyannas of the twenty-first century? The same
paranoid kids who obsess over Masonic conspiracies and the National
Security Agency? The same geeky outcasts who shimmy robotically to
self-loathing industrial tunes? Hard as it may be to swallow, instead
of "Information wants to be free," the hacker mantra of the moment
could just as easily be "Faith shall be rewarded." The evangelists
would approve.

Brendan I. Koerner is a Markle Fellow at the New America Foundation.



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