Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

The machines which stood at the soul of hackerism were also loathed by millions of common, patriotic citizens who saw computers as a dehumanizing factor in society. Every time an inaccurate bill arrived at a home, and the recipient’s attempts to set it right wound up in a frustrating round of calls—usually leading to an explanation that “the computer did it,” and only herculean human effort could erase the digital blot—the popular contempt toward computers grew. Hackers, of course, attributed those slipups to the brain-damaged, bureaucratic, batch-processed mentality of IBM. Didn’t people understand that the Hacker Ethic would eliminate those abuses by encouraging people to fix bugs like thousand-dollar electric bills? But in the public mind there was no distinction between the programmers of Hulking Giants and the AI lab denizens of the sleek, interactive PDP-6. And in that public mind all computer programmers, hackers or not, were seen either as wild-haired mad scientists plotting the destruction of the world or as pasty-skinned, glassy-eyed automatons, repeating wooden phrases in dull monotones while planning the next foray into technological big-brotherism.