Console Cowboys: The Complex Evolution of Representations of Hackers in Media

“Console Cowboys”
The Complex Evolution of
Representations of Hackers in Media
Obi Obermeyer
5/12/2011
“Console Cowboys”: The Complex Evolution of Representations of
Hackers in Media1
Introduction
Computers are a ubiquitous part of the daily American experience. Many of us surf, send,
search, link, and print every day. As terms like “personal computer” and “Internet” have become a part
of the American vernacular terms like “hacker” and “virus” have become part of America’s shared fears.
Rising out of relative obscurity like the computers upon which they practiced their craft, hackers have
occupied a larger and larger portion of the popular mindshare as computers have entered the
workplace, home, and finally our pockets. In 1960, the Sabre network was the only commercially used
computer network and ARPAnet, the predecessor to the modern Internet was yet to be realized.2 The
first entry for “hacker” in the Oxford English Dictionary with an origin in the United States is “a person
with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself.”3 Over the next quarter of a
century that definition would change to “a person who uses his skill with computers to try to gain
unauthorized access to computer files or networks.”4 This latest definition is the one that been
popularized by news media and films. Hackers in these media are male computer criminals. While the
male characterization is largely true any amount of research into the subject of hackers shows that
computer criminals are only one small part of a rich hacker culture and history.5
The first definition of “hacker” in fact from the late 1950s when a young group of technology
enthusiastic students organized around a model railroad club at M.I.T. began “hacking” at computers at
1
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. (Ace Books, New York) 1984
2
Sabre Travel Network, “Sabre History”, Sabre Travel Network,
http://www.sabretravelnetwork.com/home/about/history/ (accessed May, 10, 2011)
Hafner, Kate & Lyons, Matthew. Where the Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. (Touchstone), 1996
3
Oxford English Dictionary, “hacker,n.” OED, http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/83045 (Accessed
May 9, 2011)
4
ibid
5
Douglas Thomas, 63
Obermeyer, 1
the facility, not in a malicious and trespassing manner but rather a clever and paradigm breaking way.6
To them hacking was not defined as gaining unauthorized access to computers but rather as thoughtful
and creative manipulation of computers and their code. Many of these young men were later a part of
the group that helped companies like Apple and Microsoft get their start. When the newspapers began
using the term “hacker” to describe young men committing the digital equivalent of trespassing (or
worse breaking and entering) in the early 1980s the original hackers, sometimes called “white-hats” (a
term for legal/ethical hackers) could do nothing but lay down the label they had used for themselves for
the last two decades.7 Some of them tried to popularize the term “cracker” for their younger and more
criminal counterparts, but to no avail.8 Hackers, good or bad are still often both labeled with the term
hacker.
Beyond newspaper reporting that has characterized hackers as criminals there exists a wealth of
other popular media in which hackers have a role. There are numerous films and novels in which
hackers have played major, minor, protagonist, and antagonist roles. Many films have very narrow
interpretations of hackers that often echo the cybercriminal tilt of popular newspaper articles. Other
films like Hackers and War Games inspired entire generations of hackers.9 Snow Crash and Neuromancer
are just two examples of the “cyberpunk” literary genre that have gone through numerous printings and
have explored the intersection between humans and technology and whose volumes have given us
words such as “cyberspace” that have entered the popular lexicon.10 This fact alone reflects the reality
that the relationship between technology, hackers, and their representations is far more complex than
might be commonly assumed.
6
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. (O’Reilly Media), 10
7
Poulsen, Kevin Lee. Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground. (Crown
Publishers, New York), 35
8
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary.
(O’Reilly Media), 196
9
Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture. (University of Minnesota Press) 2002
10
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. (Ace Books, New York) 1984, 4
Obermeyer, 2
Hackers are an enigmatic group with a winding and convoluted history that has been reported
on but rarely analyzed in any great detail. Books like Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution, John Markoff and Kate Hafner’s Cyberpunk, and Matthew Lyon and Kate Hafner’s Where the
Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet all tell one part of the hacker story but do not interpret
or analyze the events in any great historical detail.11 The assortment of popular media representations
and the lack of any significant amount of historical analysis beg not only for research focused on the
history of hackers but also analysis of the popular media representations of hackers and their history.
Essentially, “Who are the hackers, how have their representations in media evolved, and how has the
public perception been affected by their representations in newspapers, film, and literature?”
Hackers, it turns out, reflect a counter-culture formed in opposition to the corporate and
government values surrounding technology that has evolved over time. Representations of hackers in
the press and popular culture are largely ignorant of their history and culture, and instead focus on the
technological and criminal aspects of hackers. Newspaper representations of hackers have been greatly
influenced by the film representation of hackers and unfortunately become focused solely on the
criminal and technological aspects of hackers. Because of their wide readership and frequent publication
newspapers have held an inordinate amount of influence on the public’s perception of hackers. Film
representations in contrast, while copious, are released at no particular frequency and almost always
couch the representation of hackers into a pre-existing genre like heist or science fiction films. This has
meant that while there are films that have influenced the public’s perception of hackers, films have
generally held less sway over that perception because of the placement of hackers into pre-existing
genres . Literature representations of hackers in science fiction have also held little influence over the
11
Levy, Steven. Hackers
Markoff, John & Hafner, Kate. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. (Simon & Schuster),
1991
Hafner, Kate & Lyons, Matthew. Where the Wizards Stay Up Late (Touchstone)
Obermeyer, 3
public’s perception of hackers because of its representations of hackers and technology in a frequently
dystopian way. The fantastic settings of science fiction literature also make it less likely for their
audience to associate hackers in the novels of science fiction with the hackers of the real world.
Consequently, because of the various ways in which the media, film, and literature have failed to
represent hacker history and culture the public is also largely ignorant of that history and culture,
resulting in a lack of awareness of the complex and often positive ways hackers have influenced the
development of new technologies.
Methods & Sources
The first steps to answering these questions are to explore the historiography of hackers and
establish a working timeline of their history upon which to locate the various representations of hackers
in popular media. This process was a largely obvious one consisting of scouring the stacks, googling, and
a lot of World Cat, LexisNexis, and ProQuest searches. This revealed one major difficulty in trying to
build a set of secondary sources. That is, the line between hacking and hackers is very thin. Often these
searches would yield works that were meant to inform the reader how to hack or how to protect oneself
from being hacked, or even more likely, would tell the story of one specific instance of hacking. Books
like The Art of Intrusion or Hacking: The Art of Exploitation are designed to show examples of hacking
and to teach the reader how to duplicate them, being always preceded by a message warning the reader
that breaking into someone’s computer is against the law.12 This complicated the search for useful,
historical works. One book however went beyond all the “how-to” manuals and was instrumental in
establishing a history of hackers. Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution13 tells the
story of the hackers from their beginnings at M.I.T. up through the early 1980s when the book was first
12
Mitnick, Kevin. The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders, and Decievers.
(Wiley Publishing) 2005
Erickson, Jon. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. (William Pollock) 2008
13
Obermeyer, 4
published. That Levy covers hackers until 1983 is evidence that Levy is not a historian per se, but rather
a reporter who was reporting with more perspective than a typical daily article.
This kind of semi-historical book, one with all the narrative and none (or very little) of the
interpretation or analysis is common in the bevy of books on hackers. Yet, for all the lack of
interpretation or analysis they are still extremely helpful in establishing themes, providing dates, and
yielding more sources. The other books mentioned previously, Cyberpunk and Where the Wizards Stay
Up Late: The Origins of the Internet also follow this same pattern. Across all of these semi-historical and
journalistic works it is commonplace for the context to be placed in the lives of people involved rather
than one that places the events of hacker history in a sufficient historical context. It should come as no
surprise then that the authors of these books are not historians, but reporters for the New York Times.14
It’s interesting that some of the creators of newspaper representations, a part of the primary sources for
this project, should also be largely involved with providing the most useful secondary sources. Fire in the
Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer15 the book upon which the popular TV movie Pirates of
Silicon Valley16 is based was also written by reporters. Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, the authors,
were reporters at the popular industry magazine Infoworld when the PC revolution was taking place.17
So was John Markoff, who provided the foreword for the book and who provided his own reporting on
the PC revolution in his book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the
Personal Computer Industry.18 Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc. also provides his observations on
14
New York Times, “Katie Hafner.” The New York Times.
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/h/katie_hafner/index.html (Accessed April 27,
2011)
New York Times, “John Markoff.” The New York Times.
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_markoff/index.html (Accessed April 27,
2011)
15
Freiberger, Paul & Swaine, Michael. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. (McGraw-Hill), 2000
16
Pirates of Silicon Valley. Directed by Martyn Burke. 1999
17
Freiberger, Paul & Swaine, Michael. Fire in the Valley, xi
18
Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
(Viking Penguin) 2005
Obermeyer, 5
hackers and the computer industry in his book iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon19. This book provides a
slight differentiation from the pattern of reporters reporting over time in that Wozniak witnessed these
events first hand. Yet it falls in line with the other sources in that it does not interpret or analyze any of
that relayed history. These books, whether written by reporters or by participants in the history
themselves, and which are useful in presenting a narrative of history cannot be called works of history.
Thus these books cannot constitute the historiography of hackers as they are not of a completely
historical nature.
The most relevant existing historiography consists of works in subject matter are works that are
concerned with the history of technology. Works like Paul E. Ceruzzi’s A History of Modern Computing
takes a much more traditional historical approach by placing the development of the computer in the
context of code-breaking in WWII and the Cold War and by asking a research question: Why do we
inherently understand that computers are a different class of useful machines than washing machines?20
He presents a number of possibilities for why this may be so in his thesis but concludes in the end that
he does not have an answer to his question. Other histories of computing are like many of the books
available on hacking in that they pay much more attention to the math and technology aspects of the
history than they do the relevant social, political, or cultural context. An example of this is Georges
Ifrah’s The Universal History of Computing which covers number systems dating from the beginning of
civilization to the invention of the pocket calculator in the 1960s.21 As a testament to the mathematical
nature of Ifrah’s book he includes pages upon pages of diagrams showcasing historical number
systems.22
19
Smith, Gina & Wozniak, Steve. iWoz- Computer Geek to Cult: How I Invented the Personal computer, co-Founded
Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. (W.W. Norton & Company). 2006
20
Ceruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. Cambrige, Massachusetts ( The MIT Press) 2003. 12
21
Ifrah, Georges. The Universal History of Computing: From the Abacus to the Quantum Computer. (Wiley
Publishing). 2001 297
22
ibid, 26-63
Obermeyer, 6
This is not to say that Ceruzzi’s book is the only one which takes the form of a traditional
historical monograph, but it is a prime example of the historiography that exists for hackers. It is more
often the technology that hackers helped produce then it is the hackers themselves that have had their
history told, analyzed, and interpreted. Hackers have had their stories told by reporters who have long
been watching the computer industry and the exploits of hackers and they have often told their stories
themselves, but the stories of the people behind hacking rather than the technology, have rarely been
analyzed or interpreted in a historical fashion or understood in their larger historical context. This
shallow historiography has had two effects. One, it has made this study very difficult, and two, even if a
member of the public wished to educate themselves on the history or culture of hackers they would
likely believe they had found an authoritative or responsible history when really, they had only received
a piece of a very complex and little researched or organized puzzle. This tradition of semi-historical
“histories” has contributed to the public’s ignorance of hacker history and culture.
The second step in finding patterns between hacker’s history and their representations in the
media was to identify a collection of primary sources from newspaper, film, and literature. With national
total newspaper circulation at 58,882,000 total newspapers in 1960 and 45,653,000 total newspapers in
2009 it would be impossible to sift through every daily newspaper in search of articles pertaining to
hackers.23 Instead The New York Times, with the third largest readership in the nation, was used as a
source for examples of representations of hackers in the news media. With the set of articles narrowed
the process of finding articles about hackers was straightforward. A number of database searches by
year and subject matter yielded enough articles from which to draw conclusions about representations
of hackers in the news.
23
Newspaper Association of America. “Trends and Numbers: Total Paid Circulation.”
http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Total-Paid-Circulation.aspx (Accessed April 26, 2011)
Obermeyer, 7
Selecting a set of films to analyze proved to be more complicated. To start the collection a quick
Google search was used to find lists of “the best hacker movies”.24 The various lists yielded had a
number of films in common, usually containing Tron (1982), War Games (1983), The Matrix (1999),
Hackers(1995), Pirates of Silicon Valley(1999), ), Takedown(2000),and Antitrust (2001). At first glance, an
article published in the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions titled,
Forty Years of Movie Hacking: Considering the Potential Implications of the Popular Media
Representation of Computer Hackers from 1968 to 2008 seems to be attempting to answer the same
questions that this project has set out to regarding hacker representations in film.25 In fact the author,
Damian Gordon, is more interested in the possible educational aspects of hacking in films than their
historical significance. The article does however provide a list of 50 films with hackers, a short plot
summary and argument for inclusion on the list, and most importantly a very interesting way of
organizing all of the films. At the end of the article Gordon provides a table consisting of every hacker
film on the list, the year of its release, the genre, the names of all hackers in the film, and their
occupation. The most significant insight for this project was the organization of hacker films into
previously existing genres of film.
Lastly, a set of novels which include hackers had to be selected. A popular genre of science
fiction called “Cyberpunk” often represents hackers. The tone of Cyberpunk literature is often described
as being “high-tech, and low-life”. 26 Because of the amount of time that consuming and analyzing a
novel can take the size of the set had to be relatively small. Google again provided quick results when
the search phrase “most influential cyberpunk books” was entered, yielding an Amazon guide titled So
24
Google. “Best Hacker Movies.” http://www.google.com/search?q=best+hacker+movies&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-
8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a (Accessed March 20, 2011)
25
Gordon, Damian. Forty Years of Movie Hacking: Considering the Potential Implications of the Popular Media
Representation of Computer Hackers from 1968 to 2008. (ITST) 2010
26
Google. “high tech low life” http://www.google.com/search?q=high+tech+low+life&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-
Obermeyer, 8
You’d like to…Read the Best Cyberpunk Books.27 If publishers released sales numbers for books then a
more complete and accurate finding of the most popular books could be produced. The books listed on
the guide do however echo those that I had informally determined to be the most influential. The three
books include Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson, Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson, and Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) by Phillip K. Dick (the book that inspired the cult classic film
Bladerunner).28
The process of selecting primary and secondary sources from which to work was complicated
throughout by the presence of books, films, and articles that are all closely related to hacking but do not
necessarily constitute a representation of it. For example, while the film Bladerunner and the novel Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are both considered cyberpunk and offer an interesting representation
of the potential and risk of technology neither are greatly concerned with hackers themselves, and thus
cannot be included in the analysis of representations of hackers in literature. The fluctuating definition
of who are hackers and what they do is reflected in the nebulous nature of media that has represented
them on the screen and on the page.
The frequent release of films that represent hackers complicates the decision of when to draw a
line in the canon of hacker films. The fact that films representing hackers are so frequently released
gives credence to the importance of a study of this nature. In his article, Forty Years of Movie Hacking:
Considering the Potential Implications of the Popular Media Representation of Computer Hackers from
1968 to 2008, Damian Gordon identified 50 separate films released between 1968 and 2008 that can be
27
Google. “Most Influential Cyberpunk Books” http://www.google.com/search?q=high+tech+low+life&ie=utf-
8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=firefox-
a&hs=OZ8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&source=hp&q=most+influential+cyberpunk+books&aq=0p&aqi=p-
p1g4&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=38378e84586d88e6 (Accessed April 3, 2011)
Amazon. “Read the Best Cyberpunk books”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/2K4TDLFCNB217 (Accessed April 3, 2011)
28
IMDB, “Blade Runner – Trivia.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/trivia (Accessed April 10, 2011)
Obermeyer, 9
considered as “hacker films”.29 Since then many more films and books have been released that could be
included in the hacker canon including the films The Social Network and Tron: Legacy, the former
showing its significance with its Academy Award nominations and the latter by the fact that it is a sequel
to one of the earliest hacker films.30 Novels like Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and its sequel Freedom also
contribute to the annals of hacker literature.31 Other books, like Kevin Lee Poulsen’s Kingpin and Joseph
Menn’s Fatal System Error take a long investigative look into the current state of the hacker and
cybercriminal underground and fit exactly into the tradition laid down by John Markoff and Katie Hafner
in their books– all narrative, no analysis.32 It is the responsibility of the historian not to analyze the
events of life too quickly yet one cannot help but be tempted to do so when more newspaper articles,
films, and books that represent hackers are released at such a constant pace. If these new
representations cannot be included in the analysis of this project they can at least be pointed to as
evidence of the relevance and importance of a work on this subject.
Computers before Hackers
As already noted one limitation of the semi-historical and journalistic secondary sources like
Cyberpunk, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and What the Dormouse Said, is that they
provide insufficient historical context. Levy, for instance, places the story in the biographical context of
the hacker’s lives and openly says that his book “is in no way a formal history of the computer era, or of
the particular arenas” on which he focuses.33 Of course hackers didn’t just manifest in the halls of M.I.T.
Hackers like anything else were the result of the social, cultural, and political context of the time. IN the
29
Gordon, Damian. Forty Years of Movie Hacking
30
IMDB. “The Social Network.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/ (Accessed March 20, 2011)
IMDB. “Tron: Legacy.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/ (Accessed March 20, 2011)
31
Suarez, Daniel. Daemon. (Dutton). 2009
Suarez, Daniel. Freedom. (Dutton), 2010
32
Poulsen, Kevin Lee. Kingpin
32
Menn, Joseph. Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet.
(PublicAffairs Books), 2010.
33
Levy, Steven. Hackers, preface
Obermeyer, 10
absence of an existing historiography of hackers, the following section provides a necessary foundation
for understanding the history of hackers by analyzing the history of computers before hackers and the
political scene which gave rise to them.
In the 1950s computers were so large that they required rooms of space and often a full time
staff to make sure the machines didn’t overheat.34 Even if the physical limitations of computers were not
a factor the idea of putting a computer in a household was ridiculous. Who would need a computer? The
paradigm for the use of computers in the 1950s and earlier was drastically different from the
interactivity of the machines we use today. Instead all data was “batched processed” by punching holes
in cards, placing the cards in the machine, and receiving the results, freshly punched, onto yet more
cards. It could often take days to get the results of a program.35 While this way of entering data into a
computer was not what defined the nature of batch processing computers it was certainly a symptom of
the contemporary paradigm for computing. IBM, probably the most recognizable brand from this era,
perfectly describes the target market and use of computers in the 1950s in its name: International
Business Machines.36 IBM was such a large part of the market for commercial computing machines that
emerged out of WWII that in comparison to its competitors it was called “Snow White (IBM) and the
Seven Dwarfs *their competitors+”.37 “IBM was the land of blue pinstripe suits” and relied more on a
conservative approach of “proven concepts and careful, aggressive marketing” than they did innovation
for commercial success.38 Computers were viewed as the most recent development in the heritage of
industrial age machines. They merely accelerated the slow manual process of calculation. In essence
computers were the cotton gin or printing press of data.
34
Levy, Steven. Hackers, 4
35
Hafner, Kate & Lyons, Matthew. Where the Wizards Stay Up Late
36
IBM. “About IBM.” http://www.ibm.com/ibm/us/en/ (Accessed April 25, 2011)
37
Freiberger, Paul & Swaine, Michael. Fire in the Valley, valley 9
38
Ibid
Obermeyer, 11
Few could afford the astronomical financial or spatial cost of these mammoth calculators. For
all the manufacturers of computers there were really only two customers: the banks, to help eliminate
the 3 hours each afternoon that banks would close to manually process checks and the military for use
in rocketry and missile defense systems.39 The latter of the two had funded a number of computers in
the past; the Navy had supported the code-cracking Mark I during World War II, the famous ENIAC
(Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator) had been funded by the Army, and a missile defense
computer named Whirlwind had been co-funded by the Navy and Air Force.40 Where today we have
phones that weigh a matter of ounces, cost a few hundred dollars and are used for communication and
entertainment the ENIAC cost $6,000,000 (adjusted for inflation), weighed 27 tons, and had a processing
speed of 100 kHz, and was used to calculate artillery firing tables.41 Computer research was to benefit
further from military funding. In 1957 when the Soviets successfully launched the Sputnik satellite it
shocked the public that the enemy had advanced so far technologically. Suddenly the post-war optimism
was gone. As Kate Hafner and Matthew Lyon put it in Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, “Sputnik was
proof of Russia’s ability to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, the pessimists said, and it was just a
matter of time before the Soviets would threaten the United States.”42 President Eisenhower was not as
concerned as his constituency; he “knew a great deal more than he could say publicly.”43
The president was however set on establishing a central organization to direct the nation’s
missile and rocket programs. To create the National Air and Space Administration however, would “take
time”.44 The President and his new Defense Secretary Neil McElroy wanted to implement something
fast. That something materialized as ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. From 1957 to 1958
39
Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said, 2-3
40
Hafner, Kate & Lyons, Matthew. Where the Wizards Stay Up Late
41
Josh Kopplin. “An Illustrated History of Computers; Part 4.”
http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt4.htm (Accessed May 1, 2011)
42
Hafner, Kate & Lyons, Matthew. Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, 9
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid, 11
Obermeyer, 12
ARPA enjoyed the $5 billion budget that came with control of all of the nation’s air and space
programs.45 But when NASA was enacted by law all of ARPA’s high-profile contracts were stripped from
it. Its mission was unclear. ARPA’s mission was redefined to long-term research goals.46 The military
branches had only ever been interested in short-term goals that could be quickly realized. Setting out
with this redefinition of its mission ARPA drifted more and more into the possibilities of computers for
missile defense, nuclear test detection, and command and control of military resources.47 ARPA was
funding computer research at academic institutions all over the country. The possibilities of computers
really opened up when one group of researchers created a whole new way of using a computer called
“time-sharing” where each individual user only used a part of the computers total power and results of
programs were returned as quickly as possible. This fundamentally new way of using computers was
created by the hackers at M.I.T. whom were funded by ARPA in 1961.48
When a young group of enthusiasts started calling themselves hackers at M.I.T. in 1958 the size
and cost of computers had been limiting them to the few institutions that could afford them.
Consequently computers were designed to serve these institutions, namely the military, banks, and
universities. The idea that these bulk calculators would serve any purpose for a single person was
considered ridiculous. But the hackers who would form out of a shared rejection of the government and
corporate culture that surrounded technology would use their enthusiasm and creativity would to help
create a whole new way of looking at computers.
45
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid, 14
48
Ibid
Obermeyer, 13
History of the Hackers
In Levy’s history of the original hackers and in Douglas Thomas’s Hacker Culture the authors
refer to “generations” of hackers. From the organization of Levy’s book and Thomas’s discussion of the
differences between generations it is possible to identify 5 or 6 generations of hackers over their 53 year
existence (1958-2011).49 These generations and the years during which they were most active are
charted in the timeline below. 50
There are a number of complications to categorizing hackers into generations. The first is that
there has been very little historical research done that provides data that can support any significant
historical argument concerning the years during which each generation has been active or the historical
context in which they were active. Only the brief historical context available in the highly journalistic
works of Levy, Hafner, Markoff, and Lyons support this periodization of generations. The most
important way to improve this timeline would be to obtain oral histories from the hackers themselves.
49
50
The dates are based upon those given in the sections of Levy’s and Thomas’s book that covers those respective
generations. The latest generation of hackers listed is speculative as it is still so recent. More research needs to be
done to make this timeline more authoritative but this one is given to help organize the ideas laid out in this paper.
Obermeyer, 14
However, even this would carry difficulties with it in that many hackers have disagreed over what does
and does not constitute hacking as well as who is and isn’t a hacker.51 This philosophy or the “hacker
ethic” as Steven Levy defines it, is the thread that ties all the generations of hackers together. 52 Each
generation has simply interpreted the hacker ethic in accordance to the political, social, and cultural
context of its time.
The M.I.T. hackers, being the first of their kind, were the first to identify with this hacker ethic.
It was not an agreement that these young students at M.I.T. all adhered to. Levy argues that “the
precepts of this revolutionary Hacker Ethic were not so much debated and discussed as silently agreed
upon.”53 The philosophy grew out of the hacker’s devotion to their work and the new technology being
made available to them, and was facilitated by the small size of their setting, or as Levy refers to it their
“monastic” setting. 54 Thomas summarizes the hacker ethic in Hacker Culture as having six major tenets:
1. Access to computer- and anything which might teach you something about
the way the world works- should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the
Hands-On Imperative!
2. All information should be free.
3. Mistrust Authority- Promote Decentralization
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees,
age, race, or position.
5. You can create art and beauty on your computer.
6. Computers can change your life for the better.55
51
Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture, 15
52
53
Ibid.
54
55
Obermeyer, 15
In a setting so safe, a university laboratory with “nearly unlimited” government funding the hackers had
little difficulty in strictly adhering to this ethic.56 They
would pull pranks to get access to university computers.
They created videogames, music, and telephone pranks on
computers that cost millions of dollars.57 The hackers
became so devoted to maximizing the utility in their code
2
1 Peter Samson and Dan Edwards two M.I.T. that they gave up on regular work days and instead worked
hackers, playing the game Spacewar. It was
developed by the hackers for the first version of in “phases” that consisted of 30 hours of work and after
the Digital Equipment Corporations Programmed
Data Processor. 1962
collapsing, 12 hours of sleep. 58 Yet for all of their pranks,
and neurosis the hackers at M.I.T. helped shape the future of the computer, creating and helping to
realize the idea of an interactive and personal computer by creating the timesharing system by which
multiple users could leverage the power of one large machine both interactively and simultaneously.59
Levy writes, “So by the early sixties, MIT had obtained a long-range grant for its time-sharing project…”60
For this project, ARPA gave the M.I.T. lab three million dollars a year, roughly 30 times the lab’s previous
budget.61 ARPA saw computers as a tool for the command and control of military assets, one that
seemed “endlessly promising”.62 Batch processing would not due for a task of this sort. Computers
needed to be accessed in real time. Timesharing was a part of realizing that, making it very easy for
people to share one computer. The true goal however was to allow people to share many computers.63
In an attempt to reach that goal ARPA would create one of the first computer networks, the predecessor
to the Internet, the ARPAnet.
56
57
58
Ibid, 65
59
Ibid, 58
60
Ibid
61
Ibid
62
63
Ibid
Obermeyer, 16
Levy argues that the ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet, was greatly influenced by the
hackers and their ethic, “in that it among its values was the belief that systems should be
decentralized, encourage exploration, and urge a free flow of information.”64 Thus not only did the
original hackers contribute to and help realize the idea of a computer for everyone but they also
helped shape the ARPAnet and consequently the Internet. In this way the legacy of the original hackers
would not only be carried on by the second generation of hardware hackers who created the personal
computer in the 1970s, but also the third and fourth generations of hackers who would explore
telephone lines and the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s.
The early digital monastery that these hackers existed in did not last. In 1973 in an attempt to
spread the responsibility of basic research among non-military organizations, the Mansfield
Amendment passed requiring that all defense research be associated with military applications.65 This
effectively dried up the funds for basic computer research at the M.I.T. lab.66 One hacker recalled,
“Before *in the sixties], the attitude was, “Here’s these new machines, let’s see what they can do. Now
we had to justify according to national goals.”67 He and other hackers realized that they had been living
in an unsustainable digital utopia which they had only been able to create because of military funds.
Slowly but surely the original hackers moved west to pursue jobs in Silicon Valley and while they
remained active in the technology industry it would be a new generation of hackers that would be
most active during the 1970s. Douglas Thomas writes,
Within a decade, the “old school” had moved to the Silicon Valley and started to build an
64
65
Center for American Progress. “Origins of Dated Federal R&D Policy”
http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/07/origins-of-dated-federal-rd-policy/ (Accessed May 10, 2011)
National Science Board. “The Mansfield Amendment.”
http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2000/nsb00215/nsb50/1970/mansfield.html (Accessed May 10, 2011)
66
67
Ibid, 148
Obermeyer, 17
industry that would look and operate increasingly less like the labs at MIT and Harvard and more
like the corporations and organizations against which the 1960s hackers had rebelled.68
The next generation of hackers, the Hardware Hackers, located on the West coast, held
meetings in each other’s homes to swap tips and parts, and perused junkyards looking for pieces with
which to build computers. According to Levy, these hackers “not only lived by the Hacker Ethic but saw a
need to spread that gospel as widely as possible.”69 The means by which
to do this was the computer, but without the funding that the M.I.T.
hackers enjoyed it soon became necessary for hackers to form
corporations to manufacture and market their machines. The
corporations that rose out of this generation include Apple Computer
and Microsoft, two of the most important technology companies in the
world. This transition, from university labs, to household computer
clubs, to corporations would mark, as Thomas writes, “…the dividing
Figure 1 The MITS Altair computer point between old-school hackers of the 1960s and 1970s and the new-
kit; the computer that realized
many of the hardware hackers
school hackers of the 1980s and 1990s.”70 The hardware hackers had
hopes and the computer that
Microsoft would get its start
writing software for. been rebellious like the hackers at M.I.T.; they had been couched in
much of the counterculture that had surrounded Berkeley in the 1970s, but when the computer clubs
were suddenly overshadowed by the computer corporations the second generation became the keeper
of secrets against which future generations of hackers would rebel.71
The actions of the Hardware hackers effectively created the third generation of hacker, the
suburban war-dialer, in two very ironic ways. First and most obviously, they created the PCs that the
68
69
70
71
Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said, 254-287
Obermeyer, 18
next generation of hackers would learn to use not in universities, but in their homes and schools.
Secondly, by creating corporations and consequently walls around the knowledge with which they had
built computers the hardware hackers had violated a tenet of the hacker ethic much to the chagrin of
the young suburbanites whose exploits would capture the imagination of the media.
Writing on the “new-school” hackers of the 1980s and 1990s Douglas Thomas writes, “Born in
the world that the 1960s hackers shaped, this new generation has been jaded precisely by the failure of
the old-school hackers to make good on their promises”.72 Eric S. Raymond, a programmer who follows
the “old-school” way of hacking quickly sums up the difference between the “old-school” hackers and
the “new-school” hackers, who he calls “crackers” in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: “The basic
difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.”73 Raymond’s comments represent a
fundamental change in the interpretation of the hacker ethic between the “old-school” and “new-
school” hackers. “Old-school” hackers strongly believed that computers could make people’s lives better
and prioritized the creation of art and beauty with computers. The “new-school” hackers on the other
hand most strongly believe that information should be free and that authority should be distrusted and
decentralized. In the same chapter in which Raymond highlights the relationship between “old-school”
and “new-school” hackers he writes that, “If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup
[an early Internet forum] and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren’t as
smart as you think you are.”74 2600, a quarterly hacker magazine that has been published since 1984
has an extensive compilation of its articles over the years with commentary by its famous editor
Emmanuel Goldstein (Goldstein is such an institution of “new-school” hacker culture that his name was
used for a character in the film Hackers, a movie which he provided technical assistance for).75 In it is a
72
73
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral & the Bazaar, 196
74
Ibid, 197
75
Goldstein, Emmanuel. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey, (Wiley Publishing). 2008, ix
Obermeyer, 19
section titled “The Hacker Philosophy”.76 Goldstein reflects on the philosophy over the course of the
magazines life, one which echoes the hacker ethic created by the M.I.T. hackers, the same tradition that
Raymond speaks from; “We talked about freedom: freedom to explore, to be an individual, to spread
information through whatever means were available.”77
It was “breaking things” that finally got the attention of the media. 78 The suburban war-dialers,
whose image was popularized by the film War Games, characterized the hackers of the 1980s with their
unauthorized access to machines across telephone networks. 79 They discovered these machines by a
method known as “war-dialing” whereby they automated the
dialing of telephone numbers with their computer until it found a
number that communicated back, indicating another, possibly
open, computer system. 80 The suburban war-dialers also became
known for their arrests and/or convictions that were widely
covered in the newspapers. The judicial system’s failure to
understand hacking has meant that hackers have been convicted
under many different laws which complicated the search for 3 A page from a sales brochure for the
Apple II, a computer that was popular
evidence showing the increase of convictions of hackers. The with the game hackers of the early 80s
and also likely used by the suburban
hackers. Levy, 303
hackers of the 1990s characterized hacking in much the same vein
as their war-dialing predecessors, except now the medium was the Internet. They had organized into
online collectives, the most famous of which include the 414s, The Cult of the Dead Cow, The Masters of
Goldstein, Emmanuel. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey, (Wiley Publishing). 2008, 234
76
Goldstein, Emmanuel. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey, (Wiley Publishing). 2008, 207
77
Ibid.
78
Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral & the Bazaar, 196
79
80
Goldstein, Emmanuel. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey,401
Obermeyer, 20
Deception, and The Legion of Doom.81 Despite the fundamental difference between the “old-school”
hackers of the 1960s and 1970s and the “new-school” hackers of the 1980s and 1990s, the tradition of
the hacker ethic has continued into these new generations. However it has been continually
reinterpreted according to the changes in the availability in technology as well as the changes in the
computer industry. Thomas writes:
That ethic has been transformed, undoubtedly, but so have the conditions under which that
ethic operates. These conditions are, in many ways, the progeny of the 1960s as well…
Where computers were a novelty in the 1960s, today they are a desktop necessity. As
computers entered the popular imagination, the hacker came along and was transformed
with them.82
Thomas notes another difference between the “old-school” and “new-school” hackers. Where
the stories and accomplishments of the M.I.T. hackers and the hardware hackers occurred without the
attention of most of the media besides trade publications (publications which were often started by
people who shared the same goal of popularizing the personal computer as the hackers did) the exploits
of the hackers of the 1980s and the 1990s would be reported, prolifically and sometimes exaggerated
on, by the press.83 The “new-school” hackers did not fail to notice this media attention. As Thomas
writes, “A primary difference between the hackers of the 1960s and those of today rests with the fact
that the latter are, for want of a better term, “media ready”.”84
81
Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture, 60-90
Goldstein, Emmanuel. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey, 22, 294-296, 525, 559
82
83
Freiberger, Paul & Swaine, Michael. Fire in the Valley, 213-224
84
Obermeyer, 21
The rise of the hackers at M.I.T. out of a rejection of corporate culture, like that of IBM, the
Hardware hackers attempts to popularize the personal computer, and the subsequent rejection of the
commercialization of computers by the Suburban War Dialers are just three small pieces to a very
complex history. Even a basic history such as the one presented here has failed to be recognized by the
news media, film, or literature. A reason for this may be the little work that has been done in this field.
While there are many primary and secondary accounts of the events of hacker history there has
seemingly been no attempts by historians to link those events to the underlying historical context of
America. This makes presenting a history that does this even more difficult because it then requires each
event to be traced through historical cause and effect. Presenting a history of hackers that is thoroughly
linked to American history is a project in and of itself. That historians have never presented a history of
hackers couched in the history of America has likely contributed to the failure of the news, films, and
literature to acknowledge that history. Regardless, the public remains ignorant of even a basic history of
hackers and the ways in which the members of that counter-culture have influenced the technology in
our lives.
Hackers in the News
With the advantage of historical hindsight it’s not hard to understand the importance that
ARPA, the M.I.T. hackers, and the hardware hackers have played in shaping our world. Computers are
everywhere now, in large part thanks to them. But thinking from the point of a contemporary of the
1960s and 1970s and from the point of view of a journalist, it’s easier to understand why there was no
coverage of the original hackers. The M.I.T. hackers especially were such a rare breed in their time and
who did arcane things (like make video games and program robot arms) that they could hardly warrant
the attention of a national newspaper.85 Even “the populist, less sequestered hardware hackers of
85
Obermeyer, 22
California” who would be directly responsible for the PC Revolution would not receive national media
attention on the scale their hacker descendants would come to live with.86 From the outside the
hardware hackers must have looked like a hobbyist strand of counterculture that, for whatever reason,
dedicated itself to building machines out of junkyard parts. That the exploits of the M.I.T. hackers and
the hardware hackers were considered un-newsworthy is only a logical historical assumption. There is
nothing in the literature to suggest that a historian, or anyone else, has verified this with journalists of
the time. There is however data that supports this hypothesis. Using a database of historical New York
Times articles it is possible to visualize the frequency of articles relating to hackers from 1950 to 2010.
The y-axis represents the number of articles with “hacker” in the title or abstract. These numbers have
been cleaned of false positives as best as can be expected.
Frequency of "Hacker" in the NYT

2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
1950-1960 1961-1970 1971-1980 1981-1990 1991-2000 2001-2010
From the data it appears that the exploits of the M.I.T. and Hardware hackers were considered
un-newsworthy by the mainstream press. Most interestingly, it wasn’t until the original hackers had
created the idea of the personal computer and realized it that hackers and computers in general
received attention in the press, in this case specifically the New York Times. In this way the legacy of the
86
Obermeyer, 23
“old-school” hackers of the 1960s and 1970s influenced the context in which “new-school” hackers of
the 1980s were interpreted. Increasing the accessibility and availability of computers not only gave
would-be hackers access to computers outside of universities but also increased the popularity, utility,
and thus media coverage of computers.
The entrance of hackers into the news media was not however a simple matter of the popularity
of computers reaching a
Frequency of "Hacker" in NYT Articles for critical mass. A closer
1980-1989 examination of the

90
80 frequency of “hacker”
70
60
articles in the New York
50
Times during the 1980s
40
30
reveals a peculiarity in
20
10 the distribution of
0
1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 articles across the
decade. 87 The years 1980, 1981, and 1982 all contain a significantly lower occurrence of articles
containing the term “hacker”. What would cause such a drastic change in the news media? Why would
the New York Times suddenly decide that hackers were newsworthy? It was the representation of “new-
school” hackers in the 1983 film War Games. Douglas Thomas writes in Hacker Culture:
With the release of War Games, hacker culture had a national audience…While there certainly
had been a long history of hacking and phreaking [essentially phreaking is to phones as hacking
is to computers] that predated War Games, the hacking community itself was small, exclusive,
87
Proquest. “New York Times.”
http://search.proquest.com/newsstand/publication/11561/citation/12F4F829CDD434C63FB/59?accountid=14070
(Accessed March 4, 2011)
Obermeyer, 24
and rather inconspicuous. With War Games that all changed.88
War Games, a film that can easily be categorized as a “technological thriller”, not only affected
the news media in that it drew attention towards hackers but also in the way that the media
represented them. The film had tapped into the American tradition of simultaneously fearing and being
fascinated with technology. So too would news coverage. A number of articles tried to directly play off
the emotions that War Games brought up. In a 1983 Philadelphia Inquirer article titled “A ‘Hacker’
Accused of Tampering” a young college student hacks into the computer controlling the electronic signs
that advertises sports events on his campus.89 He leaves a warning on the computer; “You thought War
Games was a movie, but it is a reality…There is no way to catch us.”90 Another article from the New York
Times, titled “War Games Cited In Computer Bank Intrusion” tells the tale of two 19-year old hackers
who bonded over their common fascination with the film War Games.91 Communicating with computers
the two teens decided to break into Defense Department computers. Using one computer they would
“leapfrog” from one system to the next until another computer science student at their university
noticed the intrusions.92 The article then describes the District Attorney’s assertion that the break in was
“no childish prank”. 93 The tone of these two articles would be echoed from the 1980s onward and
would cement the newspaper traditional representation of hackers as criminals and trespassers.
In 1999 the coverage of a particular hacker, Kevin Mitnick, brought the issue to a head.94 John
Markoff, a New York Times reporter and author of Cyberpunk and What the Dormouse Said, both of
which are used in this study, was accused by hackers of hyping his coverage of Mitnick in order to
88
89
"A 'HACKER' ACCUSED OF TAMPERING." Philadelphia
Inquirer, September 28, 1983, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 24, 2011).
90
Ibid.
91
UPI. "'WAR GAMES' FILM CITED IN COMPUTER BANK INTRUSION." New York Times, November 6, 1983, Late
Edition (east Coast), http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 24, 2011).
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid.
94
Obermeyer, 25
promote his book Takedown, which he co-authored with one the security researchers who helped catch
Mitnick when he was on the run from the FBI.95 On the 13th of September the hackers hacked the New
York Times website and left a message asking Markoff if he lost sleep at night for his “lies and deceit”.96
Douglas Thomas summarizes the hacker sentiment;
The popular sentiment among hackers is that the coverage of the Mitnick case hyped his arrest
and capture, referring to him as the “Internet’s Most Wanted,” as a “cyberthief,” and in some
cases as a “terrorist,” but paid little or no attention to issues of Mitnick’s pretrial incarceration, to
the denial of his right to a bail hearing, or to the fact that the government had failed to
provide Mitnick with access to the evidence to be presented against him.97
The representation of hackers in the news media can be summarized similarly. The titles of
articles like "Computer Vandals Disrupted F.B.I. Site", "Famed Computer Intruder Gets Prison Term", and
"A Super Hacker Enters A Plea Bargain, in Person" are a tall tale sign of the focus of news articles on
merely the actions of the hackers and of the legal system against them with very little attention paid to
the motivations, specifics, or the context behind the hack and hacker.98 This is not unlike the semi-
“histories” of hacking like, Cyberpunk, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, What the Dormouse
Said, or Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, all of which only narrate the history of hackers without
analyzing or interpreting it. Clearly the tradition of shallow reporting displayed by the thin
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid, 230
97
Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture,, 231
98
Lewis, Peter H. "A Super Hacker Enters A Plea Bargain, in Person." New York Times, April 28, 1996, Late Edition
(east Coast), http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 24, 2011).
Andrew Pollack. "Famed Computer Intruder Gets Prison Term." New York Times, March 27, 1999, Late Edition
(east Coast), http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 24, 2011)
"Computer Vandals Disrupted F.B.I. Site." New York Times, February 26, 2000, Late Edition (east
Coast), http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 24, 2011).
Obermeyer, 26
representations of hackers in the news media followed the authors (many of whom are journalists for
daily publications) to their longer projects.
Without significant research into what exactly the public perception of hackers has been,
independent of the tone of fear that newspapers emote, it is not possible to come to a clear conclusion
about the way the news media coverage of hackers has affected the public’s perception. With
newspaper circulations fluctuating between 58 and 45 million total issues the task of analyzing the
publications’ effect on the perception of hackers is further complicated.99 Despite these difficulties
patterns and possibilities can still be seen. A logical hypothesis would be that the shallow reporting on
hackers by newspapers, specifically the New York Times, facilitated by their daily publication, have led
the majority of the public to believe that hackers, by definition, are malicious criminals whose only
purpose is to affect harm via the technology in our life. Many “new-school” hackers believe this to be
the case. Emmanuel Goldstein writes in The Best of 2600,
To us [hackers], it’s very simple to see the hypocrisy and the exaggeration but it’s not so
readily apparent to people who depend upon the mass media as their sole source of news.
People want clearly defined villains and overly simplistic and satisfying solutions. Or, at least
that’s what those in charge of statistics seem to think. Maybe it’s time to start giving people a
little more credit and offering some alternative scenarios.100
After the turn of the century into the 2000s the representations of hackers in the New York
Times began to diversify reflecting the apparent fragmentation of hacker culture. While feeble
99
100
Goldstein, Eric. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey, 258
Obermeyer, 27
reporting on the exploits of criminal hackers are still abundant in the last decade, newspapers have also
begun to report on the intellectual property pirates in "Movie Studios Seek to Stop DVD Copies", the
return to hacking as a hobby in “Furby Hacker Tinkers, Then He Simplifies”, and the enterprising of
hackers in Silicon Valley in “Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers". 101
The fragmentation of hacker culture reflected in these articles and the sheer fact that
newspapers have begun to represent hackers in ways not necessarily criminal also evidence that the
public perception of hackers is changing. Newspapers will undoubtedly play a large part in any shifting
of the public’s perception of hackers. As long as hackers are only portrayed as digital criminals and
trespassers in the news media it is likely that that is how they will be perceived by the public.
Again it is difficult to come to concrete conclusions on the role the news media plays in shaping
public perception without further research. Yet there are some logical possibilities that, with further
research into the public perception of hackers, the influence of the media on that perception, and the
possible connections between the perception of hackers and political and cultural influences, may prove
to be true. It seems likely that despite the downturn in circulation over the last decade it is still the
newspapers with their daily publications and wide readership that hold the most potential to affect the
public’s perception of hackers, larger than the potential of mediums like film and literature to affect
change in the perception of hackers.102 This could be because while film and literature representations
are often popular with the public and sometimes with hackers as well, the representations in film and
literature are delivered as entertainment and a level of fiction and embellishment are expected by
101
Amy Harmon. "Movie Studios Seek to Stop DVD Copies." New York Times, July 18, 2000, Late Edition (east
Glenn Fleishman. "Furby Hacker Tinkers, Then He Simplifies." New York Times, December 14, 2000, Late Edition
Jennifer 8. Lee. "Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers." New York Times, February 21, 2006, Late Edition
102
Obermeyer, 28
viewing and reading audiences. Newspapers however, are expected to be trustworthy sources of
information and their representations of hackers are taken as the truth versus the often fantastical
representations in film and literature. Newspapers because of their status as a trusted news source and
because of their daily publication versus an occasional release are still the most influential on the
public’s perception of hackers. Because the newspapers, which hold the most influence over the public’s
perception of hackers, have failed to acknowledge the history, culture, or the motivations behind the
actions of hackers the public perception of them has remained a largely negative one since media
coverage of them began.
Hackers in Film and Literature
In seeking a set of films and novels by which to conduct this analysis of hacker representations a
number of patterns became clear. The first is that film representations continue a tradition that pre-
dates hackers of representing technology as something that should be simultaneously feared and
appreciated. Films like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
both represent the potential of technology to serve humanity but quickly turn into cautionary tales of
technology’s possible pitfalls. 103 In Modern Times a feeding machine, and in the case of Colossus: The
Forbin Project a military computer, soon are out of control of their creators.104 More popular films like
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Westworld (1973) echo this tradition of simultaneously presenting
the potentials and dangers of technology.105
A second pattern, which may explain why films have less of an impact on public perceptions of
hackers, is the embedding of hackers into previously established genres of film. Damian Gordon in his
103
Modern Times. Directed by Charles Chaplin. 1936
Colossus: The Forbin Project. Directed by Joseph Sargent. 1970
104
Ibid.
105
2001: A Space Odyssey. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1968
Westworld. Directed by Michael Crichton. 1973
Obermeyer, 29
paper, Forty Years of Movie Hacking: Considering the Potential Implications of the Popular Media
Representation of Computer Hackers from 1968 to 2008, shows how hacker films can easily be
categorized into genres like heist films, heroic films (films where the protagonist is required to do
extraordinary feats, Gordon’s example is 1988’s Die Hard), science fiction films, and true life films (films
that are portrayed as having truthful, realistic narratives, examples being 1999’s Pirates of Silicon Valley
or as a modern example The Social Network (2010)).106
The science fiction literature representations of technology before and after the existence of
hackers present a similar yet unique pattern where the representations of hackers are couched in the
science fiction traditions of the 1960s but in contrast to film representations grow increasingly darker
and more dystopian. This may explain the effects of literature on the public’s perception of hackers.
Douglas Thomas, writing in his book Hacker Culture posits that authors like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick,
Normand Spinrad, and Harlan Ellison wrote literature that was lighter in tone than the science fiction
that the hackers of the 1990s would enjoy. These authors, writes Thomas, “depicted a future of
possibility”, coupled with “cautionary tales”.107
In comparison, the mainstay of the 1990s hacker was literature of cyberpunk, represented by
William Gibson and Jon Brunner. Their novels predominantly dystopic, describing a battle that
has already been fought and lost….The literature of cyberpunk so dominated the imagination of
the 1990s hackers that, in many ways, they game to see themselves as antiheroes, based on
106
Die Hard. Directed by John McTiernan. 1988
Pirates of Silicon Valley. Directed by Martyn Burke. 1999.
The Social Network. Directed by David Fincher. 2010
107
Obermeyer, 30
the prototype of Gibson’s characters and others.108
Thomas’ comparison of science fiction during the 1960s and the 1990s illustrates two patterns.
The first is the increasingly cautionary tone that science-fiction emoted. Representations of technology
and later hackers would move from the positive settings of Philip K. Dicks novel Uber and Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot to the dystopian metropolis of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and William Gibson’s
Neuromancer. Like the tradition of technologically paranoid films that pre-dated hackers, hacker
representations in science fiction literature would be embedded in that tradition. The second pattern is
the increasing removal of science fiction from a contemporary setting. The sci-fi literature enjoyed by
the original M.I.T. and hardware hackers of the 1960s and 1970s was placed in a setting that Thomas
describes as “recognizable”.109 The settings of the cyberpunk literature in the 1990s however were
distinguished by settings like that of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.110 Known as “BAMA” or the
“Boston- Atlanta Metropolitan Axis” the sense of place and setting in Gibson’s novel is changed from a
geographical sense of place to one that is reliant upon information.111 This second pattern may be
indicative of the reasons why, despite science-fiction literature, specifically cyberpunk literature, that
depicts hackers has seemingly not had a large impact on the public perception of them, though as
Thomas notes, it has had a significant effect on hackers. Without publisher sales figures to confirm,
another possibility is that science fiction literature has less of an effect on public perception because the
populace is slowly exposed over time whereas films, if popular, are viewed by millions in a matter of the
few weeks that they are in theatres.
When hackers entered the popular imagination through films like War Games and Tron it was in
the traditions of previous representations of technology that the representations of hackers were
108
109
Ibid
110
Gibson, William. Neuromancer
111
Gibson, William. Neuromancer, 43
Obermeyer, 31
couched.112 Film representations of hackers have been extremely numerous over the years; more and
more films that depict hackers are seemingly released every year. Films like Tron, War Games, and
Hackers have a hidden layer of references to hacker cultural and history. Tron (1982) released in 1982, is
the first film to ever use the verb “hacking”.113 The plot driven by the philosophical debate of whether
computers are for doing business or for the benefit of the users echoes the story of the M.I.T. hackers.
War Games (1983) displays not only realistic portrayals of hacking for the early 1980s, but also portrays
phone phreaking, the preceding telephone equivalent of hacking. 114 Hackers while staying mostly in-
step with hacker ideology also references the editor of the hacking magazine 2600 (and the author of
the 2600 compilation used for this study) Emmanuel Goldstein.115 For all of the films that make subtle
references to hacker culture and history there are many more that do not.
Most films that feature hackers fall into the genres mentioned before: heist, heroic, science
fiction, true life, or (an addition from the genres that Gordon identifies) techno-thriller. Films can often
fit into multiple genres and in the case of the “techno-thriller” this is especially true. Defined loosely for
the purposes of this study a techno-thriller is any film where the plot is forwarded either by the
malfunction of technology or the malicious use of technology. Terminator with its time travel and
human like cyborg assassins is a perfect example of a techno-thriller where technology is used
maliciously.116 As mentioned previously, when hackers entered the public imagination in War Games it
was very much in this tradition that they did so. Hackers were assimilated into the American tradition of
simultaneously fearing and being fascinated by technology. Techno-thrillers, with or without hacker
characters, have continued to be commercially successful since hackers entered the public imagination
in 1983. In fact, as computers, and thus hackers, have become a more ubiquitous part of our lives
112
WarGames. Directed by John Badham. 1983
Tron. Directed by Steven Lisberger. 1982
113
IMDB. “Tron” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/ (Accessed April 3, 2011)
114
WarGames. Directed by John Badham. 1983
115
Goldstein, Emmanuel. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey, 234
116
The Terminator. Directed by James Cameron. 1984
Obermeyer, 32
techno-thrillers may have become even more successful. In 1973 a film called WestWorld was released.
Its plot centered around two friends on vacation at the world’s most expensive resort Delos, where
vacationers can live a week or more of their lives in perfect recreations of the American west, Rome, or
Medieval Europe, made possible by the resorts revolutionary cyborg robots.117 All goes wrong when the
robots begin to malfunction and murder the guests. It grossed $3,000,000 domestically.118 If the
“technology run-amok in a high end amusement park” plot seems familiar then it should come as no
surprise that Michel Crichton, writer of Jurassic Park, is not only also the writer of Westworld but its
director as well. 119 Jurassic Park, which features dinosaurs killing tourists instead of robots and an
antagonistic hacker character, was released in 1993 and grossed $ 357,067,947 domestically.120 It is to
date, the most successful film with a hacker in it ever.
Hacker films have varied in their representations of hackers from light, in movies like, War
Games (1983), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), and Sneakers(1992) to darker in films like Johnny
Mnemonic (1995), The Net (1995), and Enemies of the State (1998).121 Yet while films with hackers have
varied in their representations of them, these films have not done so in a way that seems to be linked to
the political or cultural history of America in the last half of the 20th century. It seems that technology is
topical enough for Hollywood that the insertion of politics or the culture at large would only complicate
the plot. Some films however, are more influenced by the historical context of their release than others.
For example, War Games, with its threats of WWIII with Soviet Russia is clearly a film that is painted by
the heightened paranoia of the increasingly warm Cold War in the 1980s. In the first years of the 21st
century hacker representations have been frequently terroristic in nature. The best example of this is
117
118
The Numbers. “Westworld” http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1973/0WEWO.php (Accessed March 15,
2011)
119
Jurassic Park. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 1993
120
The Numbers. “Jurassic Park.” http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1993/0JRSS.php (Accessed March 18,
2011)
121
Gordon, Damian. Forty Years of Movie Hacking, 68-74
Obermeyer, 33
Live Free or Die Hard in which Bruce Willis reprises his role a stubborn cop, who has to save Washington
DC and the nation from a scorned Department of Defense contractor gone rogue hacker. It is not the
amount by which films have been characterized by their place in time that affects the public’s
perception of hackers it is the films ability to show the motivations or history of the hackers themselves.
A great deal of research, likely in the form of a more focused study on the film representations of
hackers alone may reveal stronger patterns between hacker representations over time.
From the films surveyed for this study it appears that films have generally portrayed hackers in a
better light than that of representations of hackers in news media. Yet for all the numerous films that
have hackers in them, a logical hypothesis, (again because there is little research on what exactly the
public perception of hackers is and has been) is that because the hacker representations in film our
encapsulated within genres of film with which the American public is familiar that film representations
of hackers have done little to shape the public perception of hackers. The overall failure of films to
address or at least acknowledge the complex and rich culture and history of hackers is another piece of
the reason that the public has remained largely ignorant of the existence of that culture and history.
Conclusion
There is a lot to be learned from a study of this nature, most importantly that there are many
directions and a great relevance and need for further research. Across the board, from secondary
sources, to news media, literature, and film representations of hackers, both fictional and real have
been little analyzed, interpreted, or related to the larger history of America. There is a lot of
groundwork that must be laid before deeper connections can be drawn between hackers, their history,
and the representations of them. Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in East German
Cinema by Joseph Feinstein is a fascinating work that connects the threads between the history of East
Obermeyer, 34
Germany and the films that were released (from East Germany) in that era.122 Feinstein’s book is a dense
and complex piece that has much to teach the reader about the connections between media and
history. Feinstein however, had the advantage of a rich historiography of East German history upon
which to build a foundation. The subject of hackers does not, only being cursorily reported on by
journalists in a way that maximizes narrative and entertainment.
Nonetheless through immersion into the literature and film representations as well as what
“history” exists of hackers a number of possible conclusions present themselves. Newspaper
representations, specifically those of the New York Times, only address the facts of incidents in a
manner that is so basic, yet so simultaneously hyped, that it has led to protests by hackers against them.
This prompts two suggestions for further research. First, a larger catalogue of newspaper representation
from across the nation should be explored and analyzed and secondly, a party that is not heavily
invested in the issues, either hackers or the newspapers, should be the ones committing such work.
Film and literature representations of hackers are of course influenced by the traditions and
norms which were held before hackers entered the American imagination or even existed. More
importantly they are influenced in such a way that these representations have seemingly not greatly
shaped the public perception of hackers. The numerous films and novels prior to the turn of the century,
as well as the recent release of films like Tron: Legacy and The Social Network give credence to linking
hacker representation with a study of the American fascination and fear of technology. Tron: Legacy and
The Social Network are especially significant because in the case of the former, it is a sequel to one of
the original representations of hackers, and in the case of the latter, it is telling an important part of
recent hacker history.123
122
Feinstein, Joseph. Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in East German Cinema 1949-1989.
(University of North Carolina Press). 2002
123
Tron: Legacy. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. 2010
Obermeyer, 35
The lack of a true historiography of hacker history has likely contributed to the various media
representations of hackers that have largely ignored that history. In newspapers, which have been
greatly influenced by film representations of hackers, have, since the beginning of their coverage of
hackers, painted hackers solely as criminals and have almost completely ignored the history, culture, or
motivations of hackers. Film representations as well have failed to address or even acknowledge the
rich history or culture of hackers, but this trend may be coming to a close as evidenced by the release of
The Social Network. The effects of film representations on the public’s perceptions of hackers has been
lacking, likely due to the integration of hacker characters into genres of film like heist, heroic, “techno-
thriller”, and science fiction that existed before the hackers did which has caused the audience to not
associate hackers in film with the hackers they read about in the papers. In literature that portrays
hackers has been increasingly fantastical and dystopian in comparison to the science fiction literature
that was popular when the hackers first started at M.I.T. The fantastic and unrecognizable settings and
dystopian view of technology in books like Snow Crash and Neuromancer have caused disconnect
between the audiences perception of hackers in real life and the one’s portrayed in literature, not unlike
the disconnect seen in film representations of hackers.
The failure of the news media, filmmakers, science fiction authors, and even historians to
adequately represent the history, culture, and motivations of hackers has resulted in the public’s
ignorance of that history and culture and has caused the public to only view hackers as criminals and not
as the source for much of the technological innovation that they see in their daily lives. The ubiquity of
technology in our lives is still growing. Hopefully this will cause reporters, filmmakers, authors, and to at
least acknowledge hackers as something far more important than criminals. Hackers, and their ever
evolving counter-culture have been behind some of the most important technological innovation
humanity has ever seen.
123
Obermeyer, 36
The original hackers fueled first by government dollars and then by their own companies,
essentially created the technological environment that we live in today. The full extent of their influence
on our daily lives, through the Personal Computer, the Internet, and recent products like Facebook and
Twitter, is unknown. The history of hackers is one that needs to be analyzed and interpreted in a more
responsible way that has the objective of good history at heart rather than the objective of
entertainment and profit. In a world where technology affects our lives every day, it is all together
fitting and proper that we should do this.
Obermeyer, 37
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Console Cowboys: The Complex Evolution of Representations of Hackers in Media

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“Console Cowboys”

The Complex Evolution of

Representations of Hackers in Media

might be commonly assumed.

development of new technologies.

Methods & Sources

of hackers in the news.

Hackers(1995), Pirates of Silicon Valley(1999), ), Takedown(2000),and Antitrust (2001). At first glance, an

previously existing genres of film.

them on the screen and on the page.

evidence of the relevance and importance of a work on this subject.

Computers before Hackers

political scene which gave rise to them.

computers were the cotton gin or printing press of data.

created by the hackers at M.I.T. whom were funded by ARPA in 1961.48

create a whole new way of looking at computers.

charted in the timeline below. 50

context of its time.

2. All information should be free.

3. Mistrust Authority- Promote Decentralization

5. You can create art and beauty on your computer.

6. Computers can change your life for the better.55

little difficulty in strictly adhering to this ethic.56 They

would pull pranks to get access to university computers.

They created videogames, music, and telephone pranks on

computers that cost millions of dollars.57 The hackers

became so devoted to maximizing the utility in their code

to the Internet, the ARPAnet.

telephone lines and the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s.

most active during the 1970s. Douglas Thomas writes,

need to spread that gospel as widely as possible.”69 The means by which

hackers enjoyed it soon became necessary for hackers to form

corporations to manufacture and market their machines. The

corporations that rose out of this generation include Apple Computer

and Microsoft, two of the most important technology companies in the

world. This transition, from university labs, to household computer

clubs, to corporations would mark, as Thomas writes, “…the dividing

of secrets against which future generations of hackers would rebel.71

information through whatever means were available.”77

method known as “war-dialing” whereby they automated the

dialing of telephone numbers with their computer until it found a

number that communicated back, indicating another, possibly

open, computer system. 80 The suburban war-dialers also became

known for their arrests and/or convictions that were widely

covered in the newspapers. The judicial system’s failure to

understand hacking has meant that hackers have been convicted

computer industry. Thomas writes:

Hackers in the News

been cleaned of false positives as best as can be expected.

Frequency of "Hacker" in the NYT

and thus media coverage of computers.

Frequency of "Hacker" in NYT Articles for critical mass. A closer

1980-1989 examination of the

Douglas Thomas summarizes the hacker sentiment;

provide Mitnick with access to the evidence to be presented against him.97

daily publications) to their longer projects.

the case. Emmanuel Goldstein writes in The Best of 2600,

little more credit and offering some alternative scenarios.100

hackers in Silicon Valley in “Running a Hatchery for Replicant Hackers". 101

coverage of them began.

Hackers in Film and Literature

the potentials and dangers of technology.105

or as a modern example The Social Network (2010)).106

possibility”, coupled with “cautionary tales”.107