Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 8. H

Hacker

When you opened this book, was your first thought, “I wonder what the ‘hacker’ entry says?” If so, kudos to you.¹

Hacker is a word with a lot of baggage. Laypeople think hackers are the bad guys doing bad things to computers, often reading the word as a synonym for cyberattacker, cybercriminal, or threat actor. I blame the mainstream media for that misconception, given how often we see headlines like “Hackers break into Sony’s private network” or “Hackers send ransomware to cookie factory.” The organization Hacking Is Not a Crime promotes positive uses of the word hacker, while discouraging people from using it to mean cyberattacker.

But hackers are actually people who find innovative new uses of technology. Hacking can be reverse-engineering software and then inserting your own code. It can be combining a Raspberry Pi with your own custom software and robotics to make a sassy robot rodent that distracts your cat. Some of the earliest hackers were members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club in the 1960s, who found clever new ways to use their school’s PDP-1 and TX-0 computers.² My earliest “hack,” when I was about nine, was making my dad’s Windows 3.1 OEM PC usable faster from boot by removing several lines in autoexec.bat using Notepad.

This book is dedicated to hacker culture: that is, notable hackers, their computers, and the phenomena, concepts, art, media, programs, organizations, political movements, and so on that surround them.

See also “Hacking Is Not ...