Hacker Culture is thankfully not a stylized look at subculture, as an embryonic cult aspiring to become marketable culture, but rather a much broader view of the increasingly computerized networks that comprise society. It is an intelligent exploration beyond the package-design boxes of software, covering our documents, and the product-design casings of computers, housing our institutions. Seen from, or via, an autonomous, skilled perspective on the command line, Hacker Culture provides an indispensable insight into a history of computing that it has become increasingly important to understand for computer users of all levels and abilities. As such, it is perhaps best suited, and intended, for those who do not frequent sites like this, but even pundits with Slashdot bookmarked since it was listed in the root will presumably enjoy the thoughtful analysis Thomas brings to the subject.

A lingering criticism, not exactly directed at the book, is that this publication truly marks the entry of the "hacker" into the realm of academia, where this figure will be dissected ad nauseam along with other minority reports concerned with the so-called radical fringes. Earlier blockbusters on the hacker topic, like Steven Levys eponymous Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution from 1994, had a certain "sensationalist" appeal that, akin to William Gibsons Neuromancer, drew more of their leitmotifs from classic frontier westerns than cultural criticism. Instead of reading about jacking in and cracking from these primal sources, we got a ton of obligatory theory that read between the lines and reported on the findings at twice the length. Thomas, although he writes both eloquently and lucidly in an entertaining style, is fundamentally connecting the dots of theoretical writing as a second-generation commentator, frequently quoting Levy, for example, and at times the discussion embarks on rather redundant pontifications as a result. (Recall how you can guess the subject of most connect-the-dots outlines, while it usually takes a child careful tracing to number 147 or so before a shriek of joy recognizes the rabbit.) Such misgivings, which are essentially more inspired by the predictable rhetorical mode of academia than this book, are however relatively minor compared to the welcome prospects of actually having some core ideas about free information and open-source computing distributed to a wider audience.

A question remains about what will happen to the figure of the hacker now that we have had, and discussed, both Matthew Broderick, in Hollywoods War Games, and Kevin Mitnick, in jail. In Hacker Culture, both lay claim to capture and coach the collective imagination with regards to what informed autonomy means and the paybacks it receives. Perhaps the future, following Hacker Culture, will prepare a better balance between revered stardom, obscene bankrolls, criminal records and lone isolation cells?

Review from Seminary Co-op (University of Chicago) (September, 2002)

Nerds or hoodlums? Usually the distinction is pretty easy to draw, but in the case of computer hackers, feared and reviled by corporations and law enforcement officials, the lines begin to blur. In his sharp and original take on hackers, Douglas Thomas discusses the development and ethos of hacker culture. He also considers representations of hackers in popular culture and what they say about the publics anxiety about technology and issues of secrecy in contemporary life. The term hacker first referred to the industrious and eager computer scientists at universities, braving the new world of computer technology. Their dedication to exploring the new possibilities of the computer was matched by their insistence that computer software be accessible to all, an ideal shared by their future namesakes. With the PC revolution, the computer moved into the home and became a vehicle for teenage boys to test the limits of not only cyberspace but authority as well. As Thomas persuasively argues, the primarily white suburban teenage hackers of the 80s and 90s rebelled in familiar patterns of asserting their independence, acting out their aggressions, and challenging the system. What was different, of course, was that, unlike staying out late, smoking, and drinking, hacking had serious consequences in the adult world. Thomas evaluates the construction of hacking as a subculture in terms of its belief system, relationship to mainstream culture, and technology. He also looks at hackers increasingly political outlook on technology and their challenge to the policies and business practices of the computer industry. He also examines how hacking defies a host of cultural assumptions about the stability of certain categories and cultural norms regarding identity. Combining elements of cultural studies and the history of technology, Thomas has fashioned an illuminating and surprising examination of hackers and their place in contemporary culture.

Review from Nonfictionreviews.com (August, 2002)

Hacker History

by Rob Hardy -- 08/28/2002

Are hackers dangerous criminals who need to be put behind bars? Or are they really an example of our own worry over all the new computer tools taking over our homes and offices? The latter is the view of Douglas Thomas, who, in Hacker Culture, has written a history of how hackers came to be, and how they came to be seen as villainous outcasts.

It may be that computer hackers, those who can break into someone else's computer system and take data, or fiddle with it, or just look around, are scary criminals who may collapse our baroque internet architecture. It may be that they are dangerous outlaws who, since they know computers so well, must be put into prison for years, away from any keyboard or mouse. It may also be that they simply know people very well, and that stereotypes of hackers in the media (even in journalism) show nothing so much as our worry over the unprecedented new computer tools piped into our homes and offices. This last is the view of Douglas Thomas, who, in Hacker Culture (University of Minnesota Press), has written a history of how hackers came to be, and how they came to be seen as villainous outcasts. It is a surprising look at hackers, but is more about how a society uses computers, and it takes in the entire short history of digital electronics.

One of the surprising parts of this history is just how far antipathy between hackers and Microsoft goes, and it starts right at the beginning with the first personal computer. The Altair was such a hobbyist's tool that it had to be soldered together by the purchaser, but Bill Gates co-wrote a version of the BASIC programming language that could be run on the Altair. The problem was that BASIC had been put into the public domain a decade earlier, and Altair users were used to sharing all the programs they could for their primitive hardware. They weren't used to buying them. Gates thought of his BASIC as a secret that could be licensed or purchased, and hobbyists that shared it (the earliest hackers) were simply thieves. Ill feelings between Gates and hackers have continued for almost three decades now, with hackers insisting that the generations of Windows operating systems are inferior products which cost too much and take advantage of non-hackers who have few options but to use a popular system. (Hacker conflicts with Apple are not as deep, but are also covered here.) Hackers chide Microsoft because it has favored convenience while sacrificing security, and have released one program after another to embarrass Microsoft and force it to make software changes. When hackers have cracked Microsoft programs and made them available to share, Microsoft has displayed the pattern of denying that there was any security weakness, and admitting it only when a patch was in place to strengthen the weak point. Usually the patch itself was weak and hackers worked around it. Hackers have the idea that Microsoft will only improve security when shamed into it, and that seems to be the pattern. Such battles become surprisingly political when coupled with world trade; U.S. hackers have partnered with dissident Chinese hackers, and see themselves as acting against a multinational corporation and for human rights.

The conflict between secrecy and openness is a constant theme. Hackers are able to use secrets not only because they understand the equipment so well, but because they understand people well, too. Getting someone's password is the key to accessing a system, and you'd think that if your password were your own and you told no one else it would be secure. However, there are patterns of selecting passwords that hackers exploit. One word passwords could be uncovered and exploited simply by trying every word in an electronic dictionary. When advised not to use such words, users often change to even less secure passwords like names, or terms found in Star Trek. An English professor's password might be cracked by a program that tried every six to eight letter word found in the works of Dickens. Even easier, a hacker can practice "social engineering," the process of milking users for data. Hackers call up a cubicle inhabitant on the phone, claim they are calling from the firm's computer central, and start asking about problems on the computer, and enquiring exactly what keystrokes the user uses to get started. If one user reveals a password, the hacker is in.

Credit card information is highly secret, and so it makes a tempting target for hackers. Surprisingly, just getting the information is the goal. Using stolen credit numbers "has always been seen as criminal in the hacker community. More to the point, it has been seen as the quickest way to get arrested." Accessing the numbers, even if they are not used for credit card fraud, on the other hand, gets media and corporate notice. The information can also be used in a non-commercial way, like using the financial records to confirm an identity by which technical support would tell a hacker a "forgotten" password.

The reputation of hackers, forged in the popular media, is one of this book' s strengths. WarGames, the 1983 release about the kid who nearly causes nuclear war by hacking into military supercomputers, gave hacker culture a national audience. When the kid hacked into the school computer to improve the marks on his report card, plenty of other kids had something to shoot for (and quite a few current hackers will with embarrassment admit that the movie started their careers). The 1995 Hackers showed hackers as young Robin Hoods, but had a freakish number of technical errors and it tried to promote erroneous hacker language and clothing styles. The film's website, therefore, became a focus for hacker attacks, with defacement of the photographs and replacement of ad-copy hype with such non-recommendations as, "Hackers, the new action adventure movie from those idiots in Hollywood, takes you inside a world where there's no plot or creative thought, there's only boring rehashed ideas."

The scariness of the depictions of hackers in the media has resulted in strange legal decisions. The famous Kevin Mitnick was trumpeted as such an "evil genius" and "cyberterrorist" that he was denied a bail hearing and was kept in jail for over four years awaiting trial, with the government denying his legal team access to evidence to be presented against him. (Some fellow hackers redesigned web sites as political pranks to call attention to his plight.) This sort of basic misunderstanding about what hackers are and what they do is what Hacker Culture seeks to correct. Douglas Thomas, an academic who is able to use ideas from Plato, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, kindly does not use this talent too often, but restricts his entertaining depiction of hacker history to the important battles the information age has spawned concerning basic issues of privacy, property, and secrecy. He shows us that hackers have been at the edge of defining these issues, and in a remarkably well balanced account which refuses black and white labels, he shows that they are not always on the wrong side.

Review from Computer User (August, 2002)

Hackers demystified

Douglas Thomas's "Hacker Culture."

Hackers are malicious thieves who break into company computers for profit. Hackers are benevolent network monitors who only want to make systems more secure. Hackers are grizzled old programmers who helped to make the computer industry what it is today. Hackers are little boys who don't know much about computers but can wreak havoc on the Internet fairly easily.

Hackers are all these things, and more. Yet the media tends to stereotype hackers into the first or the last category and ignore the middle two. The reality is, without hackers, the computer industry would crumble under its own weight. Understanding this reality is perhaps the most important and overlooked skill for anyone whose business depends on networks.

For this reason, Douglas Thomas's "Hacker Culture" (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) is a must read for most of ComputerUser's audience. Thomas explains the many strains of hackers in terms of the predominantly male culture in which they live. In so doing, he gives the reader a thorough and accurate picture of who hackers are, how they interact, and what their motivations are. If everyone had this picture, Internet-connected computers would be a lot safer. But by lumping so-called black-hat hackers with white-hat hackers, tech society shuns one of its most precious resources--conscientious computer wizards.

In spite of the book's topic strength of thoroughness, it is not without flaws. Thomas feels a need to deconstruct hacking culture with a confusing analysis in the style of Jacques Derrida. I found myself skimming those sections and thinking to myself, "Skip the post-modern blather and just describe the events as they unfolded." On the other hand, I found myself slowing down to read the descriptions of actual hacking events and how their perpetrators were influenced by the media.

Still, if you can get past the academic style, the book makes for a strong and important read. -- James Mathewson

Review from San Francisco Chronicle (March 31, 2002)

Hackers may be feared for all they know about computers, but their real power lies in how well they understand the average user. In "Hacker Culture," communications professor Douglas Thomas provides an unusually balanced history of the computer underground and its sensational representation in movies and newspapers. His account starkly shows what hackers have realized all along: Our unease with Kevin Mitnick and his sort actually reflects our discomfort with technology itself.

Hackers know that. As a result, a standard way to break into a system is to impersonate technical support -- and simply ask any user for his or her password. Hackers call it "social engineering," and it vividly illustrates that, as Thomas explains, "the weakest point in any system's security is the people who use it."

But the insight hackers have into our behavior goes even deeper, considering a second method used to get password access. Early on, hackers figured out that most people choose their passwords very poorly, so it made no difference how many billion alpha-numeric combinations were possible if users routinely chose access codes like "sesame" or their favorite hobby or even their own name. A little bit of information goes a long way: By now there are word lists hackers can run, depending on whose account they're after, of everything from "Star Trek" characters to regional geography. "In employing such brute force attacks," Thomas rightly observes, "hackers exploit the cultural and social dimensions that are reflected in the kinds of choices people make in relationship to technology and in the ways in which they domesticate or personalize it."

Review from Library Journal

"Thomas traces the history and origin of hacker culture within mainstream society, the computer industry, and the media. . . . Thomas effectively argues that the popular image of the hacker reflects more the public's anxieties about technology than the reality of hacking. Addressing general audiences in a readable, engaging style, his book would be of interest to students of communication and journalism."

--Library Journal

Review from Publisher's Weekly

"Silently navigating the virtual corridors of the global telecom networks, peeking into restricted files and generally causing mischief, hackers are the tricksters of the digital age. But although Hollywood and the publishing industry have long been fascinated by these technosneaks, they've nearly always overestimated hackers' malisious intents and techinical abilities, argues Thomas, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He attempts to set things right, steering a middle course between the alarmists, who perceive hackers as suburban terrorists of the new century, and the apologists, who want to see them as brave revolutionaries against a corporate/government assault on personal liberties. With a real affinity for his subject, Thomas uses hacker publications like 2600 and Phrack for most of his research, instead of the all-too-common procession of online security experts doing their best Chicken Little impersonations. Thomas avoids another trap of this genre by not letting hackers--the publicity-loving, self-aggrandizing ones--spout off at length about their skills and achievements. He presents a sober but sympathetic analysis, maintaining that, more often than not, hackers are simply playing around, testing a system's security to see if it's sound: '[They] see themselves as educators about issues of security, fulfilling the same function as Consumer Reports.' Though Thomas may rely too heavily on that old academic touchstone, Foucault, he has produced an intelligent and approachable book on one of the most widely discussed and least understood subcultures in recent decades."

--Publishers Weekly

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