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Abstract

The world of hackers: A community of practices

Unlike other writings on the free software community that delineate a firm hacker culture amongst the members, I focus on the heterogeneity, diversity and contingency in the hacker community in this talk. Instead of presuming a pregiven hacker community (or as a counterpart - free software community), I analyse how a community is constructed through constinuous negotiations and communications between members from different social groups. Such a sociological analysis will help the members in the hacker community to be aware of the differences between each other, tp understand each others shared and divided interests, and to communicate in a more efficient way to succeed building a community together.

Description

The hacker “community� shares many postmodern features of the form and character discussed more generally elsewhere by post-structuralist scholars such as Derrida (1978), Lyotard (1984) and Baudrillard (1988). The complex process of interpretation and negotiation does not enable ‘hacking’ to have a stable and self-evident content and meaning. As one shall see later, the value of hacking and what shall be defined as hacker ethics are constantly negotiated through various claim-makings of participants coming from different social worlds. Their expressions and performances are embedded and embodied in the problem-solving process as their everyday programming practices, as will be analysed in chapter 5 and 6.

In light of my visits to various hacker meetings and conferences, I observed that the membership of the hacker community is highly mobile, and there exists a high degree of cultural, social, and technical diversity. The term ‘hacker’ has been contested (Taylor 1993, 1999; Thomas 2002; Skibell 2002) for decades in various discourses. As has been argued, ‘the term “hacker� has its own historical trajectory, meaning different things to different generations’ (Thomas 2002: ix). ‘“[H]acker� has been stretched and applied to so many different groups of people that it has become impossible to say precisely what a hacker is. Even hackers themselves have trouble coming up with a definition that is satisfactory, usually falling back on broad generalizations about knowledge, curiosity, and the desire to grasp how things work.’ (ibid.: 5). Despite being aware of the ambiguous nature of the term ‘hacker’, Taylor confines his research to the territory of computer security at a certain time and place, and examines the relationships between the computer underground where ‘hackers’ reside, and the computer security industry where a mainstream ICT culture dominates. In emphasising and focusing on this antithesis, his research object, hackers, is inevitably allocated to a deviant position in society. The dichotomy he draws between the computer underground and the computer security industry locates hackers on the dark side of the development of computer science. Taylor’s account fails to avoid stigmatising hackers; instead, it offers another rather reductive account of hackers as “outsiders�.

Thomas, subsequently, gave this overly reductionist view on hackers a postmodern twist. He argues that ‘hackers both adopt and alter the popular image of the computer underground and, in so doing, position themselves as ambivalent and often undecidable figures within the discourse of technology.’ (Thomas 2002: xx). Being aware of the complexity of the hacker field, he considers hacking from various aspects, biographically (a dichotomy of 50s-60s old-school and 80s-90s new-school hackers), socially (e.g. social positions, social roles), technically (e.g. security, game, kernel programming) and culturally (e.g. cyberpunk and social engineers). Thomas’ strong belief in the historical categorisation of hackersi, however, leads him to position hackers in the 90s, in the context of network security, as Taylor and others do. For the purpose of his research, he gives hackers a broad definition: “a group of computer enthusiasts who operate in a space and manner that can be rightly defined by a sense of boundless curiosity and a desire to know how things work, but with the understanding that such knowledge is further defined by a broader cultural notion: secrecy� (ibid.: 3). Despite Thomas’ view being more open to the diversity of the hacker world, the term “subculture� he also ascribes to hackers suggests a tight, coherent social group. In treating the hacker culture as an already existing entity referring to a solid and stable reality, ‘the concept of subculture tends to exclude from consideration the large area of commonality between subcultures, however defined, and implies a determinate and often deviant relationship to a national dominant culture’ (Jenkins 1983: 41). The concept of “subculture�, as I argued in chapter 3, is essentially flawed due to its attempt to impose a hermeneutic seal around the relationship between hacking practices and participants in the hacker social world. As Bennett (1999) argues elsewhere, “[T!]he term “subculture� is deeply problematic in that it imposes rigid lines of division over forms of sociation which may, in effect, be rather more fleeting, and in many cases arbitrary, than the concept of subculture, with its connotations of coherency and solidarity, allows for.� (Bennett 1999: 603). The contemporary hacker community, in fact, is an assemblage of practices—techniques and tools, political rationales, expert discourses, user customs—that constitute ‘its’ manifold components in diverse contexts, as we shall see in the following sections. In my view, if there exists a subculture in the hacker community, what it maintains is a postmodern lifestyle in which notions of identity are constructed rather than given, and fluid rather than fixed. The hacker community in fact, is built around a constellation of practices shared by diverse actors. In other words, “hacker� is de facto an umbrella term which enables a wide range of actors coming from diverse social worlds (including teens, college students, programmers, sci!entists, free speech advocators etc.) to take a part in a common platform built around the shared practices/interests among these actors. Thomas is right to argue that ‘hackers and hacking are much more about a set of social and cultural relations’ and ‘hackers cannot be understood solely in terms of the technology with which they are interwined’ (ibid.: 4). But while studying the cultural and relational forces that define the contexts in which hacking takes place is essential, one should not overlook the manner in which hacking is done, the tools used, and the strategies that actors deploy. It is these material practices that hacking is grounded in and that are found adopted, converted and integrated within the hacker social world. Hacking is a dynamic and complex process, and the practices are the crucial site for my research if I am to understand how actors utilise these material resources in the specific setting of a postmodern ‘community’.

It is within this context that the notion ‘a community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) is drawn on to characterise the hacker world, a highly complex and dynamic field, and to investigate the material practices grounded in the field, instead of categorising and presuming a rather tight subculture of hackers. ‘The concept of community of practice focuses on what people do together and on the cultural resources they produce in the process’ (Wenger 1998: 283, n. 8). This does not mean we will ignore the ideologies of and attitudes towards “hacking� in the community. Rather we are trying to find out how a constellation of practices existing in the software innovation system (e.g. compiling the kernel of an operating system, writing patches for programmes, reporting bugs etc.) forms a specific social world. Hacking is not an activity that has a single or stable meaning. Instead, it involves a range of practices and can be found in different contexts. Those who eng!age in some or all of these practices also very usually occupy diverse social worlds at the same time. The concept of 'hacker’ therefore is an analytical notion that points to these hacking practices, and that is expressed through and embodied in real-time social action.

While there may be circumstances where hacking practices come together and help engender strong cultural networks that shape and inform hacking itself, the boundaries of these networks are much more permeable and mutable than subcultural theory would allow. In fact, rather than seek a single definition of ‘the hacker’ it is more appropriate to examined hacking-type practices as they are found within and outside of the conventional world of computing. Among diverse practices found in the hacker community, it is notable that some of them are also found in the broader software innovation system. For example, potential attackers and system managers use the same tools to execute a penetration test of a system. The security tool they deploy and share, usually FLOSS that has been tested in hostile ICT environments, becomes a boundary object that in some settings, as I will show, enables diverse actors from different social worlds to come together (see section 4.3 below). Apart !from the increasing awareness of the security issue, many programmers nowadays believe that sharing source code, the hackers’ rule of thumb, can itself facilitate software innovation. In this context, the open source code also becomes a boundary object in the software industry. It is not then a coincidence to find the hacking practices being adopted in the broader software innovation system. The research thus endeavours to understand the process through which specific practices emerge out of a diversity of practices and grow to be collaborative (see section 4.3 below). This points to the socio-technical construction of software technologies where “hacking practicesâ€? originally marginalized, are taken up. Consequently, I will argue the translation of hacking practices by wider ICT players has shaped the software innovation process.

I now want to look more closely at the notion of a community of practice that I discussed briefly above, hereby reporting on my material and data gathered at the HAL 2001 hacker conference held in the Netherlands.

Speakers

• Yuwei Lin

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