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Reclaiming the hacker culture

I am a crazy tinkerer when it comes to technology. It drives my family to despair sometimes because my various computing devices are in a near perpetual state of almost working perfectly (or brokenness as they might put it). I have always pulled things apart and nearly always been able to put them back together.

When I first started using computers back in the Apple II and Amiga days, my friends would play games but I would execute every system executable to see what would happen. I was a strange child. I would see if I could chain together pieces of binary in shell scripts to see if I could change the way in which the computer worked. I then discovered Unix in my first year of university. My path was set and I was in love. For the record, I’m a VI in the eternal VI versus EMACS war.

Being inquisitive starts early.
Being inquisitive starts early. 

I learnt early on that computers were hard to break but easy to upset.

This spirit of prodding and poking which evidenced itself strongly during the 60s among computer software, electronics and model train enthusiasts became known as “hacking”. Hackers desired to know as much as they could about the systems they used at work or at play and also to share that knowledge and show off their successes and failures. Hacking is as much about the recombining of pieces as it is about the disassembling - a form of electronic and digital alchemy.

The hacking culture was essential for the creation of the giants of technology that we have today. Steve Wozniak’s Apple I was pure hacker genius. Silicon Valley was built around the hacker subculture which dared to “go deep” but with a spirit of independence and adventure.

Similarly, around this time there were other subcultures closely connected to hacking which garnered media and law enforcement scrutiny such as cracking and phreaking.


Cracking is about understanding the boundaries of a system, how it works and what its weaknesses are. The internet provided an endless array of systems that crackers could study and try to break.

Phreaking was primarily concerned with tricking phone systems into making free calls. It was probably true that phreakers knew the telecommunication systems better than the average telco engineer.

In the late 80s and early 90s law enforcement was starting to tackle the rise of computer crime and they, with help of the media, started lumping the three groups under a single heading of "hackers". Today the term is almost always used in the negative sense and the subculture has been forced to adopt new names such as "special user groups" and "makers". 

I don’t think it was coincidental that as the computer manufacturing and personal computing market grew and threw off its hacker roots that they then started to see the hacker subculture as the enemy trying to plumb their secrets. The technology business was growing in importance to US exports and hackers were an annoyingly independent bunch that needed to be made to look questionable in the eyes of the law to keep them in check.

For a short while I tutored at university a subject for business students to learn the basics of application development in order to automate their reporting needs. Computer driven business intelligence was still a very young discipline and most of the time you had to write your own macros and queries. Some students quickly developed the hacker mentality and were regularly exceeding the assignments both in sophistication and imagination, while others displayed a very tentative, almost fearful belief that they would “break” the software as if experimenting with different functions would prove too much for the fragile machine. I could never get to the bottom of the reasons for the second group. No doubt there was some history of some bad software that ate their data and they incorrectly blamed themselves.

I regularly encourage my colleagues to, if time permits, learn a new aspect of their software tools and experiment on sample data to grow in familiarity and expertise. Half the battle is reassuring them that they aren’t going to break their computer. I think I hear the collective groan of application and desktop support teams reaching for something to throw at me. But a  little bit of hacker spirit may help everyone discover some very satisfying tricks and tools that they could use every day.

Whatever the reasons for hesitancy in some, I am grateful to those hackers that share their creations and understandings so willingly. The internet has enabled these communities to reach beyond the limits of geography and create a new kind of hacker space. May the hacker spirit live on.

At the end of the day, a solid local hacker community when mixed with entrepreneurial vision and access to capital could create fertile grounds for our own Silicon Valley. The rate at which we haemorrhage great technical talent is embarrassing in my opinion. If we can promote and celebrate the real hacker spirit then we can better identify and support the local scene's transition into thriving businesses.

Are you a member of a maker/user group/hacker community? What challenges and motivates you to tinker? Can Australia create its own Silicon Valley? 

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