Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

A new generation of hackers has emerged, techies who don’t see business as an enemy but the means through which their ideas and innovations can find the broadest audience. Take Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has drawn four hundred million users to share their personal lives online. At twenty-five, he has proven a master at the black art of business development—deliberately and purposefully opening his site to advertisers and marketers. Yet he clearly thinks of himself as a hacker; last year, he told the audience at an event for would-be Internet entrepreneurs that “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.” To find out what he meant by that, I visit him at Facebook headquarters, a large building on California Avenue in Palo Alto—the same street where I rented a room in 1983 to research Hackers. Surprisingly, the CEO, best known for wearing North Face fleece, is sporting a tie. He explains that he is nearing the end of a year in which he promised his team that he would show up for work in neckwear every day. It turned out to be a good one for Facebook—despite the recession, it doubled its user base and made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. “Maybe it’s a charm,” he says, of the attire. “But I think it mostly just chokes me.”