"My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for."
So wrote "Mentor" in The Conscience of a Hacker, probably the most succinct definition of what, exactly, hacking is. He (or she) wrote that in 1986, three years after adorable Matthew Broderick showed us that hacking could lead to global nuclear war. (Most people forget that it’s the hacker who finally stops the countdown to Armageddon.)
Mentor’s manifesto appeared during a nationwide wave of hacker arrests. The idea that teenagers with some technical skills could start World War III via touch-tone phones was conventional wisdom. The Hacker was feared; the shadow lurking behind our new, wired world.
Fast-forward to 1995 and the movie Hackers, which glorified hackers as punk kids with piercings and outrageously dyed hair. The movie launched a thousand roller-bladers to their nearest Radio Shack in search of the tone dialers that would allow them to start World War III – or just change their grades. Of course, by the time Hollywood gets on board any trend, it’s already passed.
So jump forward again, to Summercon 2004. A small army of hackers descend on Pittsburgh for two days of "putting the 'con' back in summer." To translate: two days of steady drinking and a lot of talk about fairly obscure technical issues.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a computer geek convention. There’s a difference between a computer geek and computer hacker. The computer geek is totally absorbed by computers; they are the only language he speaks, and really, he doesn’t do a lot with that language. He is efficient but not necessarily innovative.
Hackers, on the other hand, are always in search of what is new and innovative. Hacking, at its best, always breaks that one rule – you can’t do that – that confines people with a non-hacker mindset. Confronted with you can’t do that, an average person will say, resignedly and with a little sulk, "Ok." The hacker law, as put by Samuel Norris in one afternoon’s speech, is, "Any law they give you is probably true until later this afternoon." These are the people who break the conventional laws, though in the two days that they’re here, there’s only one run-in with the police: a bizarre late-night incident that results in two citations for "lying in the street and simulating a sex act" at the corner of 5th and Bouquet. (It’s unclear what kind of fine comes with simulating a sex act.)
This collision of technical expertise and a rebellious, almost adolescent attitude toward authority yields some interesting characters. One speaker, dubbed "the Snoop Dogg" of random number theory, gives a condensed version of what he claims should be a twelve hour talk about the impossibility of generating truly random numbers without resorting to physical processes. I’m following maybe 25% of what he says; meanwhile, behind me, two hackers are marveling that "Snoop Dogg" managed to score several strippers’ phone numbers at the last convention.
Even with specially designated "drinking and thinking" times, the conference soon becomes a mix of PowerPoint, technical jargon and fairly expensive rum from the University Club bar. By the end of day, every new PowerPoint slide is followed by and eruption of "Drink! Driiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnk!" from the crowd. Most speakers go along with it as long as someone in the audience is buying the drinks, but there’s an ugly half-hour when one speaker – a pretentious "artiste" type – opens his (dry as the Communist Manfesto!) presentation by refusing to drink. Half-drunk and realizing this is going to be a bad scene, I duck out of the conference room to talk to Mark Trumpbour, the guy who coordinates all this hacker madness.
Then, like a goddamn amateur, I promptly lose the tape with our chat on it. It went something like this:
Me: Things are going ugly in there. That’s a shame because it seems like everyone else here gets along pretty well; everybody knows one another.
Mark: That’s true. Everyone here is family. We’ve all been doing this for a long time and are some of the few people who understand just how much technology influences our lives. Unlike most people, however, we try to take back some sort of control wherever possible.
Me: You are an amazingly eloquent drunk.
Mark: I know, and thank you.
Posted by JHicks at August 27, 2004 5:49 PM| TrackBack