I am a hacker and I’m ok
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008For a while, the word “hacker” seemed to have lost its historical meaning and migrated to the one used in the moral panic-happy media. Quoth Stallman:
Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think. You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term “cracking” for security breaking. The people who do it are “crackers”. Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not.
His insistent campaigning did not seem to work for the longest while — years and years. The word had been abandoned by those who would refer to themselves as “hacker” under the original definition of an amateur (someone who does it for love; might be a daytime professional) maverick (meaning precisely Wordnet’s definition of someone who exhibits great independence in thought and action) programmer.
Yet there is a ressurgence in the original use of hacker. I can think of a few reasons. Firstly, improved computer security made amateur “hacking” as in break-and-enter either unfeasible or dangerous. Secondly, the absence of news stories revolving around computer-based swindles begot a general lack of usage of the word “hacker” in the media. Thirdly, a new generation of hackers-in-the-Stallman meaning got connected with the hacker lore and started to define to their amateur personal hacking as, er, hacking — with all the implications of not being professional but done for love and curiosity and exploration. Finally, a few financial successful members of this generation have come publicly using the word “hacking” to describe what they do.
