Douglas Thomas: Hacker Culture (2003)

A provocative look at the subculture that has shaped our changing attitudes toward the digital age.

Demonized by governments and the media as criminals, glorified within their own subculture as outlaws, hackers have played a major role in the short history of computers and digital culture-and have continually defied our assumptions about technology and secrecy through both legal and illicit means. In Hacker Culture, Douglas Thomas provides an in-depth history of this important and fascinating subculture, contrasting mainstream images of hackers with a detailed firsthand account of the computer underground.

Programmers in the 1950s and ’60s—”old school” hackers—challenged existing paradigms of computer science. In the 1960s and ’70s, hacker subcultures flourished at computer labs on university campuses, making possible the technological revolution of the next decade. Meanwhile, on the streets, computer enthusiasts devised ingenious ways to penetrate AT&T, the Department of Defense, and other corporate entities in order to play pranks (and make free long-distance telephone calls). In the 1980s and ’90s, some hackers organized to fight for such causes as open source coding while others wreaked havoc with corporate Web sites.

Even as novels and films (Neuromancer, WarGames, Hackers, and The Matrix) mythologized these “new school” hackers, destructive computer viruses like “Melissa” prompted the passage of stringent antihacking laws around the world. Addressing such issues as the commodification of the hacker ethos by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the high-profile arrests of prominent hackers, and conflicting self-images among hackers themselves, Thomas finds that popular hacker stereotypes reflect the public’s anxieties about the information age far more than they do the reality of hacking.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2003
ISBN 0816633460, 9780816633463
Length 266 pages

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R. L. Rutsky: High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (1999)

In an age of high tech, our experience of technology has changed tremendously, yet the definition of technology has remained largely unquestioned. High Techne redresses this gap in thinking about technology, examining the shifting relations of technology, art, and culture from the beginnings of modernity to contemporary technocultures.

Drawing on the Greek root of technology (techne, generally translated as “art, skill, or craft”), R. L. Rutsky challenges both the modernist notion of technology as an instrument or tool and the conventional idea of a noninstrumental aesthetics. Today, technology and aesthetics have again begun to come together: even basketball shoes are said to exhibit a “high-tech style” and the most advanced technology is called “state of the art.” Rutsky charts the history and vicissitudes of this new high-tech techne up to our day — from Fritz Lang to Octavia Butler, Thomas Edison to Japanese Anime, constructivism to cyberspace.

Progressing from the major art movements ofmodernism to contemporary science fiction and cultural theory, Rutsky provides clear and compelling evidence of a shift in the cultural conceptions of technology and art and demonstrates the centrality of technology to modernism and postmodernism.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816633568, 9780816633562
196 pages

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Richard Burt (ed.): The Administration of Aesthetics. Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (1994)

The “new” censorship of the arts, some cultural critics say, is just one more item on the “new” Right’s agenda, and is part and parcel of attempts to regulate sexuality, curtail female reproductive rights, deny civil rights to gays and lesbians, and privatize public institutions. Although they do not contest this assessment, the writers gathered here expose crucial difficulties in using censorship, old and new, as a tool for cultural criticism.

Focusing on historical moments ranging from early modern Europe to the postmodern United States, and covering a variety of media from books and paintings to film and photography, their essays seek a deeper understanding of what “censorship,” “criticism,” and the “public sphere” really mean.

Getting rid of the censor, the contributors suggest, does not eliminate the problem of censorship. In varied but complementary ways, they view censorship as something more than a negative, unified institutional practice used to repress certain discourses. Instead, the authors contend that censorship actually legitimates discourses-not only by allowing them to circulate but by staging their circulation as performances through which “good” and “bad” discourses are differentiated and opposed.

These essays move discussions of censorship out of the present discourse of diversity into what might be called a discourse of legitimation. In doing so, they open up the possibility of realignments between those who are disenchanted with both stereotypical right-wing criticisms of political critics and aesthetics and stereotypical left-wing defenses.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1994
ISBN 0816623678, 9780816623679
Length 381 pages

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