Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

Finally, true hackers became cool. Under the rubric of “cyberpunk,” a term appropriated from the futuristic noir novels of smart new science fiction writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker, a new cultural movement emerged in the early 1990s. When the flagship publication of the movement, Mondo 2000 (a name change from Reality Hackers) began to elucidate cyberpunk principles, it turned out that the majority of them originated in the Hacker Ethic. The implicit beliefs of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (Information Should Be Free, Access to Computers Should Be Unlimited and Total, Mistrust Authority . . .) have been shuffled to the top of the stack. By the time cyberpunk hit the zeitgeist, the media was ready to embrace a broader, more positive view of hacking. There were entire publications whose point of view ran parallel to hacker principles: Mondo 2000, and Wired, and loads of fanzines with names like Intertek and Boing Boing. There was an active computer trade press written by journalists who knew that their industry owed its existence to hackers. Even more significant, the concepts of hackerism were embraced by journalists at the same traditional publications whose cluelessness had tainted hackerism to begin with.