Tim Jordan

A sociology of hackers

Illicit computer intruders, or hackers, are often thought of as pathological individuals rather than as members of a community. However, hackers exist within social groups that provide expertise, support, training, journals and conferences. This article outlines this community to establish the nature of hacking within ‘information societies’. To delineate a ‘sociology of hackers’, an introduction is provided to the nature of computer-mediated communication and the act of computer intrusion, the hack. Following this the hacking community is explored in three sections. First, a profile of the number of hackers and hacks is provided by exploring available demographics. Second, an outline of its culture is provided through a discussion of six different aspects of the hacking community. The six aspects are technology, secrecy, anonymity, membership fluidity, male dominance and motivations. Third, an exploration of the communitys construction of a boundary, albeit fluid, between itself and its other, the computer security industry, is provided. This boundary is constructed through metaphors whose central role is to establish the ethical nature of hacking. Finally, a conclusion that rejects any pathologisation of hackers is offered.

Histories of Hating

This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, discrimination, and networked communication, we interrogate the ontological specificity of online hating before going on to explore potential responses to the harmful consequences of hateful speech. Finally, a research agenda for furthering the historical understandings of contemporary online hating is suggested in order to address the urgent need for scholarly interventions into the exclusionary cultures of networked media.

Language and libertarianism: the politics of cyberculture and the culture of cyberpolitics

A significant number of theories concerning the nature of cyberspace or virtuality are being constructed with little regard for the empirical realities of online life. This article sets out certain simple empirical factors related to the nature first of politics in cyberspace and second culture in cyberspace. These questions are posed as ‘what is the politics of cyberculture?’ and ‘what is the culture of cyberpolitics?’. The politics of cyberculture revolves around issues of grossly uneven regional distribution of the Internet and a bias toward anglo-american language and culture that is based on the competitive individual. The culture of cyberpolitics revolves around informational forms of libertarian and anarchist ideologies that posit cyberspace as the realm of individual freedom. These cultures and politics can be related to each other as the structure and action of cyberspace. The assumption that cyberspace is constituted by individuals is revealed as an assumption of both, and connection between, cyberpolitics and cybercultures.

MEASURING THE INTERNET: HOST COUNTS VERSUS BUSINESS PLANS

The excessive media attention in and economic hopes placed on the Internet mean that measures of its size and distribution have been undertaken more often with an eye to business plans than to methodological rigour.This paper examines one disinterested source of Internet statistics, the Internet Domain Survey, to provide accurate measures of Internet size and distribution. Methodological issues in utilizing this survey are discussed to ensure the significance of findings is understood and to identify key methodological problems in a new field of research. Two particular problems are identified; the need to define user per computer host ratios and to identify the national origin of computers with international domain names. Statistics are presented from the five Internet Domain Surveys from January 1998 to January 2000 in the following categories: overall size, regional distribution, human development and economic distribution, linguistic distribution and user numbers. The conclusion is reached that even as the Internet is growing in all regions world-wide it remains concentrated in the highly developed nations. Some consideration of the implications of this for wider debates around the Internet is given.

Affordances, Technical Agency, and the Politics of Technologies of Cultural Production

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig).

A genealogy of hacking

Hacking is now a widely discussed and known phenomenon, but remains difficult to define and empirically identify because it has come to refer to many different, sometimes incompatible, material practices. This article proposes genealogy as a framework for understanding hacking by briefly revisiting Foucault’s concept of genealogy and interpreting its perspectival stance through the feminist materialist concept of the situated observer. Using genealogy as a theoretical frame, a history of hacking will be proposed in four phases. The first phase is the ‘prehistory’ of hacking in which four core practices were developed. The second phase is the ‘golden age of cracking’ in which hacking becomes a self-conscious identity and community and is for many identified with breaking into computers, even while non-cracking practices such as free software mature. The third phase sees hacking divide into a number of new practices even while old practices continue, including the rise of serious cybercrime, hacktivism, the division of Open Source and Free Software and hacking as an ethic of business and work. The final phase sees broad consciousness of state-sponsored hacking, the re-rise of hardware hacking in maker labs and hack spaces and the diffusion of hacking into a broad ‘clever’ practice. In conclusion, it will be argued that hacking consists across all the practices surveyed of an interrogation of the rationality of information technocultures enacted by each hacker practice situating itself within a particular technoculture and then using that technoculture to change itself, both in changing potential actions that can be taken and changing the nature of the technoculture itself.

Mapping Hacktivism: Mass Virtual Direct Action (MVDA), Individual Virtual Direct Action (IVDA) And Cyber-wars

Hackers have been present in computer networks from the moment networks began to exist. Beginning as a term to describe those who wanted to find novel uses for computers and other technologies, by the early 1990s ‘hacker’ had come to refer in popular use to those who break into computers over networks. Until the mid-1990s, despite a 20-year history of hacking, there was little evidence of sustained political engagement by hackers. Rather, hackers were overwhelmingly focused on the manipulation and analysis of computers and networks. However, with the 1994 publication of the Critical Arts Ensemble’s manifesto The Electronic Disturbance and the emergence of pro-Zapatista mass denial-of-service attacks in 1998, a politically motivated hacking movement has emerged. It has been christened ‘hacktivism’. In 2001, this movement has become the focus of mass-media attention and moral panic, often desperately ill-informed. This article will briefly introduce and outline hacktivism’s main components, in keeping with the spatial understanding of the Internet as cyberspace, what follows is a mapping of hacktivism.

The unity of social movements

A coherent intellectual structure for social movement studies has recently been emerging over a range of theoretical and empirical studies. This structure counterposes ‘within social movements’ a diverse range of collective actions against the unity imposed by a collective identity. However, theorisations of this collective identity have so far failed to address the contradiction between structure and agency. A definition of collective identity for social movements that is not caught in the structure/agency divide is proposed by defining the appropriate level of abstraction for such a definition, defining why movements are unified and then how.

Troubling Companions: Companion Species and the Politics of Inter-relations

This article examines Donna Haraways concept of companion species by asking the question: Are technologies a species or not? This question is analysed through a comparison between the companion species of Haraways in her agility dog and the technology of the surfboard and its rider. It is argued that the concept of companion species has difficulty distinguishing between technologies or machines as companion species and the bodies of sporting dogs or pets and that this poses questions about the meaning of “living” in machines and animals. This is examined through qualitative research into the technologies and practices associated with learning to surf. It is suggested that Haraways use of the concept of “becoming-with” in relation to her conception of companion species leads to an empiricism in which relations and connections can be endlessly pursued and that this leads to a politics which is primarily capable of criticizing the naturalization of social relations. I present an analysis of animate versus inanimate based on Haraways concept of companion species to explore one way in which it seems that it is possible to provide a concept that values different sets of entanglements across different instances of becoming-with.

The self‐refuting paradox and the conditions of sociological thought

Modernity and postmodernity have formed an important framework for debate in sociological theory. The often confrontational nature of the debate has obscured key conclusions but these can be outlined by considering an argument often used by modernists against postmodernists, called the self-refuting paradox. This argument takes the form ‘the claim that there is no such thing as the Rational is itself a rational claim and so refutes itself’. First, the notions of self-refutation and self-reference are separated. It is then noted that the result of the self-refuting paradox is neither the loss of modernitys key categories, as claimed by postmodernists, or the failure of the postmodern project, as claimed by modernists. Instead, both sides are shown to succeed and fail; forms of legitimation that previously underlay modernitys thought fail and the strong forms of postmodern claims, such as there are no universals, also fail. The result of this analysis is that attention should be paid to the nature of universals, truths and norms, rather than disputing their existence. These arguments are pursued first at a general level and then in relation to the three key concepts of difference, truth and universality.