Hackers and Recursive Publics
This week, we talked about the history and genres of hacking practice and hackers. It’s quite interesting that how earlier public impression of hackers was different from the public image now often portrayed and depicted in media and public sphere.
In this blog, we can see how in the 70s and 80s, hacker are the label created for the most intelligent and most intelligently advanced people in the universities and researches institutions. “The term hacker was accepted as a positive label slapped onto computer gurus who could push computer systems beyond the defined limits.” However, the stereotype of hackers in publics’ eyes changed as more and more appearance of coverage on police raid and public trail on hackers’ organizations.
Despite the bad public impression, I think that hackers’ communities and their behaviors are still recursive publics. Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying of software are new alternative forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free press. Hackers engaging in such activities are expressive in ways that they are expressing their ideologies of the social and moral liberalism in the society as well as “implementing” those ideologies through exploiting security holes in critical systems as well as designing and distributing Free Open Source Software. As we are growing dependent on digital computer systems in our daily life, the act of “gaining unauthorized access to computers” may, in some way, not necessarily be a moral and social drawback.
In the end, I attached the link to a very interesting blog that describes how would a course of anthropology of hackers be organized and conceived by the publics.
