O Cap'n, My Cap'n
Nov. 22nd, 2003 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004This weekend's reading:
Douglas Thomas' Hacker Culture,
Ron Rosenbaum's Little Blue Box article,
Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas,
Stephen Usselman's Regulating Railroad Innovation,
and Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT.
What do these have in common?
Mostly me chewing over whether I want to do an article on the history and politics of telephone hacking. Thomas' book was recommended to me as the best academic writing to date on hackers, which is a lot like being the tallest midget in the circus or the most articulate member of the Road Rules cast. Jeremiah lent me Rosenbaum's 1971 article on phone phreaks, often cited as a key inspiration for hacker culture and indeed the invention of the personal computer. Usselman's book is about a different technological system, but is the closest thing I've yet seen to a genuinely political history of technology the way I'm trying to write it. And Lessig has a nice succinct comparison of political choices embedded in the telephone network and the internet. The outlier here is Nightwork, which despite the title has little connection to that other kind of hacking. I just read that for fun. (ARFF!)
I know it's a little perverse to set about learning about hacker culture from anything so prehistoric as books. Whatever makes into onto a printed page is almost certain to be a) written by an outsider and b) woefully out of date (cf Thomas' chapter-long digression on the merits of the movie Hackers starring Angelina Jolie). But being up to date is not particularly important to me. And plunging into the history of hackerdom online would probably be a one way ticket down a rabbit hole of badly spelled cybermanifestos and memorials to deceased Shadowrun PCs. (Actually the spelling of that first link seems fine. But you know the kind of pages I mean.)
Now, for those of you just joining us, my dissertation is a history of the telephone network from the 1870s through the 1920s. And one of the axes I grind is that technological choices are inescapably political. Both in that they are made through the exercise of power and in that even innocuous technical choices have political relevance. The architecture of our communications infrastructure is itself political, and can't be understood outside the context of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics that produced it. And one of the ways I get at the question is by looking at people who "misuse" the telephone system of the day.
So the question is whether there is a similiar story to tell about phone phreaks and hackers in the 1970s and 1990s. Well, there's certainly a story. The question is whether there is a genuinely interesting historical argument to make. I have this suspicion there is one, either in connections or contrasts between the phone phreaks and the hackers, or in explicating choices embedded in the original construction of the telephone system, in the pre-breakup Bell of the 1970s, or in the internet of the 1990s, and in misuses of those systems. And then how all this is intersected by the Bell breakup, the Microsoft antitrust suit, and the politics of monopoly and antitrust in general. But I don't know. The politics of the hackers themselves usually seem pretty superficial, and are all bound up in psycho-social issues of geek culture and technological mastery. It's understandable, given who they were and hardly a slam on them, but I fear "boys will be boys" doesn't make for particularly revealing history. The real story might lie in Bell's responses to the phreaks and in analogous responses to computer hacking in the 1990s. But the hook, damn it, remains beyond my reach.
It may be just as well. The primary sources on this are very hard to get to. AT&T closed access to their archives in 2001. And Captain Crunch has not donated his papers to the Library of Congress, as far as I know. Still, it's frustrating.
Tangent #1: Thomas and Rosenbaum both make the interesting (to me) point that hacking is essentially a social, rather than a technological, activity. The key to a big hack (they say) is far more likely to be the hacker's ability to fast talk someone into giving up their password than it is some virtuoso technological performance. Which is funny because I haven't really read much that dissuades me from the stereotype of hackers as socially inept. (Angelina Jolie notwithstanding.) Rosenbaum's article is full of classic undersocialized guys who bluster in cheesy 1970s argot about all the action they're getting from highly hypothetical girlfriends. "I'm going to do some phreaking tonight of another kind... if you know what I mean," Captain Crunch tells his buddies. If you say so, Cap'n.
Tangent #2: Of a dozen master phone phreaks cited in Rosenbaum's article, five were blind. Got nothing to say about that, it's just an interesting factoid for you.
Douglas Thomas' Hacker Culture,
Ron Rosenbaum's Little Blue Box article,
Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas,
Stephen Usselman's Regulating Railroad Innovation,
and Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT.
What do these have in common?
Mostly me chewing over whether I want to do an article on the history and politics of telephone hacking. Thomas' book was recommended to me as the best academic writing to date on hackers, which is a lot like being the tallest midget in the circus or the most articulate member of the Road Rules cast. Jeremiah lent me Rosenbaum's 1971 article on phone phreaks, often cited as a key inspiration for hacker culture and indeed the invention of the personal computer. Usselman's book is about a different technological system, but is the closest thing I've yet seen to a genuinely political history of technology the way I'm trying to write it. And Lessig has a nice succinct comparison of political choices embedded in the telephone network and the internet. The outlier here is Nightwork, which despite the title has little connection to that other kind of hacking. I just read that for fun. (ARFF!)
I know it's a little perverse to set about learning about hacker culture from anything so prehistoric as books. Whatever makes into onto a printed page is almost certain to be a) written by an outsider and b) woefully out of date (cf Thomas' chapter-long digression on the merits of the movie Hackers starring Angelina Jolie). But being up to date is not particularly important to me. And plunging into the history of hackerdom online would probably be a one way ticket down a rabbit hole of badly spelled cybermanifestos and memorials to deceased Shadowrun PCs. (Actually the spelling of that first link seems fine. But you know the kind of pages I mean.)
Now, for those of you just joining us, my dissertation is a history of the telephone network from the 1870s through the 1920s. And one of the axes I grind is that technological choices are inescapably political. Both in that they are made through the exercise of power and in that even innocuous technical choices have political relevance. The architecture of our communications infrastructure is itself political, and can't be understood outside the context of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics that produced it. And one of the ways I get at the question is by looking at people who "misuse" the telephone system of the day.
So the question is whether there is a similiar story to tell about phone phreaks and hackers in the 1970s and 1990s. Well, there's certainly a story. The question is whether there is a genuinely interesting historical argument to make. I have this suspicion there is one, either in connections or contrasts between the phone phreaks and the hackers, or in explicating choices embedded in the original construction of the telephone system, in the pre-breakup Bell of the 1970s, or in the internet of the 1990s, and in misuses of those systems. And then how all this is intersected by the Bell breakup, the Microsoft antitrust suit, and the politics of monopoly and antitrust in general. But I don't know. The politics of the hackers themselves usually seem pretty superficial, and are all bound up in psycho-social issues of geek culture and technological mastery. It's understandable, given who they were and hardly a slam on them, but I fear "boys will be boys" doesn't make for particularly revealing history. The real story might lie in Bell's responses to the phreaks and in analogous responses to computer hacking in the 1990s. But the hook, damn it, remains beyond my reach.
It may be just as well. The primary sources on this are very hard to get to. AT&T closed access to their archives in 2001. And Captain Crunch has not donated his papers to the Library of Congress, as far as I know. Still, it's frustrating.
Tangent #1: Thomas and Rosenbaum both make the interesting (to me) point that hacking is essentially a social, rather than a technological, activity. The key to a big hack (they say) is far more likely to be the hacker's ability to fast talk someone into giving up their password than it is some virtuoso technological performance. Which is funny because I haven't really read much that dissuades me from the stereotype of hackers as socially inept. (Angelina Jolie notwithstanding.) Rosenbaum's article is full of classic undersocialized guys who bluster in cheesy 1970s argot about all the action they're getting from highly hypothetical girlfriends. "I'm going to do some phreaking tonight of another kind... if you know what I mean," Captain Crunch tells his buddies. If you say so, Cap'n.
Tangent #2: Of a dozen master phone phreaks cited in Rosenbaum's article, five were blind. Got nothing to say about that, it's just an interesting factoid for you.
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Hack Attack, Mr. Mac?
Date: 2003-11-22 03:57 pm (UTC)Have you plundered the archives of 2600 magazine? They were inspirational growing up...
no subject
Date: 2003-11-23 08:25 am (UTC)2600 = good idea.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-23 10:14 am (UTC)