Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

A previous generation of hackers—and I—worried that the world of commerce would choke off innovation and stymie a burgeoning cultural movement. But hackerism has survived and thrived, a testament to its flexibility and its power. According to computer book publisher Tim O’Reilly—who fosters hackerism through his Foo Camp "unconferences“—the hacking culture will always find new outlets. (It’s no coincidence that this new edition of Hackers is under the O’Reilly imprint.) Big business may stumble upon and commodify hackers’ breakthroughs, but the hackers will simply move on to new frontiers. “It’s like that line in Last Tango in Paris,” O’Reilly says, “where Marlon Brando says, ‘It’s over, and then it begins again.’” The current frontier for hackers, O’Reilly says, is not the purely mathematical realm of ones and zeros, but actual stuff—taking the same tear-it-down-and-built-it-anew attitude that programmers once took to compilers, and applying it to power-generating kites and body parts. (O’Reilly publishes Make magazine and runs the Maker Faire festivals, celebrations of this DIY spirit.) “DIY is really another word for hacking,” he says. But even this area, he points out, has begun the shift towards entrepreneurship. O’Reilly says the action now is in DIY biology—manipulating cell’s genetic code in a way a previous generation of hackers manipulated computer code. “It’s still in the fun stage.”