So I usually don’t announce my publications on my blog and for various reasons. The main one is that I am more than a little embarrassed that some of them are behind walled gardens (but being I am a junior prof, I am not in a position to negotiate otherwise). Otherwise, some of my pieces are semi-jargony (in the academic sense) and may not be of interest to readers who I think are more geek than academic. Finally, the process of publishing is so slow, so long, and so painful, I try not to think about it, much less write about it, if I can help it. But I decided to announce this
piece , which is on hackers (surprise surprise) as it might be of interest to some readers and because people can download it for
free here for the rest of the month (but registration is required )
Co-written with Alex
Rex Golub, I am pretty happy to see in print although it is far more academic in its tone, argument, and language than most of everything else I have written. This is in part because the article is more theoretical than ethnographic (hence the journal, Anthropological Theory) and tackles the question of liberalism alongside hacking. It seeks to demonstrate that these can be talked about 1) together and in cultural terms 2) that we we can identify some cohesive elements to hacking and liberalism, in part by placing them in conversation with each other 3) and yet we can also locate plurality and diversity within liberalism and hacking as well. This is a lot to tackle and cover in one piece under 35 pages and I am sure it could have been pulled off better but I think it is is a decent start to thinking about these questions. If you are interested but are allergic to academicalese, sticking to the Introduction, the Hacker Ethical Practice: Three Examples section, and Conclusion, will give you a taste of the arguments while avoiding most of the jargon.
The irony of this article is that even if it hits at some pretty theoretical issues, it was provoked by a mundane conversation and disagreement I had with one hacker,
Karl Fogel, over another hacker, Kevin Mitnick. After returning from the hacker conference, HOPE, I had dinner with Karl and told him about Kevin Mitnick’s keynote speech, which I found particularity enjoyable and entertaining. After calling Mitnick a hacker, Karl responded with the following: Kevin is not hacker. He is a
cracker. Though I think I convinced him that cracker may not be the best word for him (and he convinced me there are differences between hacking, noting perceptively that his primary motivation seemed to be getting access to something he wasn’t allowed to have access to that is, it was more about breaking the rules and the thrill of crossing a social line, than about learning a technical system. ), I decided that I wanted to write a piece that squarely addressed tensions and differences among hackers instead of whitewashing them away as most authors, journalist, and even some hackers do.
Although most of the time, it seems like it is the Karl-type hackers who accuse the Mitnick-type hackers of not being true and authentic, recently I have been in a few situations where the tables were turned. For example, last year I was having coffee with a 2600-type who insisted that hacking on Linux was not hacking at all (not innovative enough, according to his world view). Another example I came across was in a recent Phrack issue where the prophiled hacker,
the Unix Terrorist, takes a swipe at (well honestly at everyone and everythin) but when he is talking trash about who is and who is not a hacker, he singles out F/OSS developers:
Linus Torvalds isn’t a hacker! Richard Stallman isn’t a hacker! Niels Provos
isn’t a hacker! Fat/ugly, maybe! Hackers, no! And what is up with
the use of the term “cracker”? As far as I’m concerned, that term
applies to people that bypass copyright protection mechanisms.
Vladimir Levin? HACKER. phiber optik? HACKER. Kevin Mitnick? OK,
maybe a gay/bad one, but still WAS a “hacker.” Hope that’s clear.
Of course, one can play the game of defining the authentic hacking (and it makes sense for many to do this!) but my interest as an anthropologist has never been to draw a bright and clear boundary between good hackers and bad hackers. or “real and fake hackers,” but instead to describe and grapple with the tension points and internal ambiguities among hackers (my whole
course is designed around this theme, in fact). This is not to say that anything goes in the world of hacking (that is, I don’t consider any computer break in a hack; I often just call it a crime) but if there is a group of people calling themselves hackers and thinking to some degree of the ethical implications of their actions, as an anthropologist, this is enough “social evidence” to start asking some questions about the political and cultural significance of their actions.