Hackers have become cool to the mainstream public? Since when? This is definitely news to me! Sure, actors such as Matthew Broderick, Jonny Lee Miller, and Angelina Jolie can briefly make hacking
look cool on the big screen in a wild fantasy sort of way, but I have never seen any real life hackers being truly celebrated and thought of as being "cool" outside of the hacker community itself.
I personally have been interested in the hacker subculture for well over a decade now. Kobuk's attitude towards what he believes hackers are is usually what I expect to receive from other people, so I don't bring up my interest in the hacker subculture to others very often outside of certain circles. I also don't ever like to call myself a "hacker" either. That is a label that should be given to you only by other hackers who have recognized something that you have done as having "
hack value". It is not a title that should be self-proclaimed. If anything that I accomplish ever happens to have any kind of significant hack value, it will speak for itself.
And as far as identifying as a hacker would make me seem "cool" goes, let me just say that I have *never* had a member of the opposite sex take any interest in any of the "
2600: The Hacker Quarterly" t-shirts and hats that I have worn for the last decade, and saying that I have two compute nodes from an
SGI Origin 300 supercomputer hooked together with a Craylink cable in my basement has never worked as a pickup line (O.K., that's a lie-- girls lose interest in me looooong before I ever get to tell them about my supercomputer
). Whenever I tell people that I first learned how to program in x86 assembly language by reading tutorials on how to write MS-DOS-based COM-file overwriting computer viruses, all I get back from them are horrified looks until I carefully explain to them that it is perfectly legal to write computer viruses as long as you never spread them, and naturally I have never spread them. (I just taught myself how to write them for the learning exercise and to find out how they actually worked.) And if hackers are suddenly so popular now, when can I start using the "-P Convention" in my everyday speech and have people know what I mean? And Avor, don't make me laugh with that whole "girls love the bad boys" thing. Nobody will ever see a cubicle-dwelling pasty-skinned
sysape as a "bad boy," whether he boasts that he is a hacker or not. It never helped me swoon that football cheerleader who had her locker right next to mine in high school, that is for sure!
You don't see true hacker culture pervading much in the mass media either-- I have never seen any of Hollywood's beautiful people discussing what has been newly added to the Linux kernel with its latest release. Very few people know what was talked about recently on WBAI's "
Off the Hook" radio show. The most hacker-friendly show that was on television in recent years,
"The Screen Savers," which was shown on what was then the cable channel
TechTV, was unceremoniously canceled in 2005. Not only were all of the staff from the show pretty much fired, but nearly everyone from the entire TechTV cable station staff ended up being let go. The channel lost its computer and technology focus and was renamed "G4" to appeal to "gamers." What used to be "The Screen Savers" was replaced by the severely dumbed-down "Attack of the Show," which while sometimes entertaining, is definitely
not a hacker show. In print media, when was the last time you have seen a book such as
The Art of Intrusion,
The Mythical Man-Month, or
The Soul of a New Machine on the New York Times Best Seller List? Even the before-mentioned
2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which is probably the longest running print magazine dedicated exclusively to hacking, currently has only a mere 3,670 paid annual subscribers, and a circulation of 38,417 in total. In comparison, the magazine
Better Homes And Gardens has a circulation of 7,648,900. Surely, if hackers were truly cool we would have more influence in the media than this!
Lets face it-- real hackers and real hacking will only genuinely be considered "cool" by people who are actually interested in hacking themselves because only they can appreciate the
hack value of the particular technical challenge that was overcome or limitation that was circumvented by the hacker while he was pursuing his or her goal. Outsiders will always just look at hackers as being geeks who waste far too much of their time obsessively pursuing solutions to seemingly useless technical challenges at best, or misidentify them as being criminals at worse due to the overly-broad brush the news media has painted the term "hacker" with. Unfortunately, these misconceptions are just what happens when your pastime happens to be meddling with the normally unseen underpinnings of technologies that few people understand the workings of and just take for granted, be it computers, consumer electronics, networks, or any other complex system or device, really.
