Hacker Culture A to Z

Preface

Hello! I’m Kim Crawley. I’ve worked in the cybersecurity field as a writer for over a decade, and I’ve met many brilliant hackers over the years. Ordinary people think hackers are cybercriminals, as I wrote in an article for 2600 Magazine.¹ But hackers are people who find new and inventive uses of technology. And we owe most of the cool stuff about computer technology to hackers. Hackers have also created the culture of computing—hacker culture.

These days, computers are for everyone, and computer technology is integrated into nearly every facet of our everyday lives. Laypeople sometimes call a PC a computer and call their iPhone their phone, but their iPhone is also a computer. Most of us are on the internet several hours per day, and that’s just a huge collection of networked computers.

In my apartment building, you can’t use the elevators without interacting with a touchscreen. Guess what? That’s a computer too. There are embedded computers in so many places in our retail stores, hospitals, factories, office buildings, and government institutions. If you drive a car, there’s probably an embedded computer in that too.

So, inevitably, a lot of everyday computer usage is done by people who don’t think they’re very technologically skilled. But we wouldn’t have a computer-technology-driven world without hackers. Hackers aren’t cybercriminals; they’re clever people who explore innovative new uses of computer technology. We wouldn’t have what we have today without their curiosity. ...