The other week on VarsiTech, m’colleague Robin Jack levelled his pen/cursor at the thorny issue of internet piracy, touching upon Sony’s recent efforts to prosecute anyone caught tampering with their PS3 so that it could use software made by other companies. Sony released a statement warning against the “unauthorized circumvention” of the PS3 “by hackers”, and blamed these individuals for “damaging our industry…and [your] online experience…via hacks and cheats”. Sony’s entire approach to this issue has been as aggressively misguided as a drunken bison hitting on women at an LGBT club night, but there is one aspect of their response that I particularly objected to: their attacks against “hackers”.
For Sony and the majority of the mainstream media, the term “hacker” is a negative label. It’s someone who breaks into computers or any other digital system, usually with malicious intent and destructive outcome. As the programmer Paul Graham has pointed out in his brilliant essay on the historical hacking culture of America, to the people who actually make these computers, being called a “hacker” is a big compliment – it denotes a complete mastery over a system; a hacker is someone who can make a computer do what they want regardless of whether the computer wants to or not.
These dualistic and opposing connotations also extend to the noun “hack”. A hack can be an ugly and makeshift solution to a problem or it can be an elegant result that somehow bypasses the difficulty entirely. The two usages of the word have in common the idea of rule-breaking but prove that this in itself can be a good and bad thing. An ugly “hack” might be declaring that washing clothes is for chumps and you can just as easily wear your boxers inside out tomorrow; an ingenious “hack” might decide that a uniform conception of time is for idiots and that we should go ahead and create a new continuum called spacetime.
It’s impossible to say exactly why the term has gotten such a lousy representation – we might cite its history (hack has been a synonym for hewing or mutilation since the 1400s); that when it comes to ugly vs. ingenious hacks, the former is always far more common; or just that hacking is built upon disobedience, something that will always be discouraged by those in authority. I think of hacking as a creative pursuit. If we imagine coding as analogous to writing then normal programmers are the copy writers and journalists – attempting to produce a smooth and functional product but not exactly breaking new ground; hackers then are the artistic geniuses – they don’t follow pre-determined pathways – they innovate and they create.
Of course, all this highfalutin’ conceptualisation means nothing if you get a virus and some foreign botnet starts controlling your computer – that’s what it means to be “hacked” and there isn’t even a hint of artistic flair about it. So what’s going to happen to the word? Is it just going to rot in semantic limbo with the other auto-antonyms? Well, hopefully not: words are fantastically flexible things, especially when meanings are sparkly and fresh, and “hacking” just needs to be reclaimed for the good guys. Although Sony’s lawsuit hasn’t been doing much to help the cause, their rivals Microsoft have got the right idea.
Microsoft’s release of the Kincet last year was a godsend for homebrew hackers. Although officially a ‘full-body controller’ its real attraction was giving the general public a versatile 3D camera stuffed full of infrared sensors for less than £100. Within hours of going on sale the Kinect had been hacked and Microsoft was already warning that they would ““work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups” to prosecute those who dared to tinker with the property they’d bought. The internet collectively ignored this and the Kinect was put to a range of different tasks: it’s turned people invisible, powered autonomous helicopter-robots, made live-action dubstep, and loads besides. Amazingly, the sheer enthusiasm, inventiveness, and good-will of the community seemed to bowl Microsoft over and they decided to change tact. Instead of prosecuting, they embraced the hacks and made an official statement about how “excited” they are that people had started “creating and thinking” with the Kinect.
Alright, I admit that using the Kinect to give yourself virtual boobs is hardly displaying the sort of bravura creativity I claimed hacking possessed, but this entire incident – the hacks, the companies’ reactions – is still a net positive. It shows the massive potential in giving a gadget like the Kinect to the masses and saying ‘Hey, do what you want with this’; it suggests to large corporations that it can be a really good thing to let people hack your stuff; but most importantly, it’s embracing the creative and free-thinking spirit that all good hacking has it’s heart.
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