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Addendum Issue 034
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Addendum Issue# 34 - 23rd April 2002
URL: http://www.adden.tr.cx/
Author : The Jargon File, version 4.2.2
================== Hacking and hackers explained ===========================
Dear Editor:
This letter is not meant for publication, although you can publish it if
you wish. It is meant specifically for you, the editor, not the public.
I am a hacker. That is to say, I enjoy playing with computers -- working with,
learning about, and writing clever computer programs. I am not a cracker; I
don't make a practice of breaking computer security.
There's nothing shameful about the hacking I do. But when I tell people I am
a hacker, people think I'm admitting something naughty -- because newspapers
such as yours misuse the word "hacker", giving the impression that it means
"security breaker" and nothing else. You are giving hackers a bad name.
The saddest thing is that this problem is perpetuated deliberately. Your
reporters know the difference between "hacker" and "security breaker".
They know how to make the distinction, but you don't let them! You insist
on using "hacker" pejoratively. When reporters try to use another word,
you change it. When reporters try to explain the other meanings, you cut
it.
Of course, you have a reason. You say that readers have become used to your
insulting usage of "hacker", so that you cannot change it now. Well, you
can't undo past mistakes today; but that is no excuse to repeat them tomorrow.
If I were what you call a "hacker", at this point I would threaten to crack
your computer and crash it. But I am a hacker, not a cracker. I don't do
that kind of thing! I have enough computers to play with at home and at work;
I don't need yours. Besides, it's not my way to respond to insults with
violence. My response is this letter.
You owe hackers an apology; but more than that, you owe us ordinary respect.
Sincerely, etc.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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A Portrait of J. Random Hacker
This profile reflects detailed comments on an earlier `trial balloon' version
from about a hundred Usenet respondents. Where comparatives are used, the
implicit `other' is a randomly selected segment of the non-hacker population
of the same size as hackerdom.
An important point: Except in some relatively minor respects such as slang
vocabulary, hackers don't get to be the way they are by imitating each other.
Rather, it seems to be the case that the combination of personality traits
that makes a hacker so conditions one's outlook on life that one tends to end
up being like other hackers whether one wants to or not (much as bizarrely
detailed similarities in behavior and preferences are found in genetic twins
raised separately).
---
General Appearance
Intelligent. Scruffy. Intense. Abstracted. Surprisingly for a sedentary
profession, more hackers run to skinny than fat; both extremes are more
common than elsewhere. Tans are rare.
---
Dress
Casual, vaguely post-hippie; T-shirts, jeans, running shoes, Birkenstocks
(or bare feet). Long hair, beards, and moustaches are common. High incidence
of tie-dye and intellectual or humorous `slogan' T-shirts (only rarely
computer related; that would be too obvious).
A substantial minority prefers `outdoorsy' clothing -- hiking boots ("in
case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the machine room", as one
famous parody put it), khakis, lumberjack or chamois shirts, and the like.
Very few actually fit the "National Lampoon" Nerd stereotype, though it
lingers on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. At least
since the late Seventies backpacks have been more common than briefcases,
and the hacker `look' has been more whole-earth than whole-polyester.
Hackers dress for comfort, function, and minimal maintenance hassles rather
than for appearance (some, perhaps unfortunately, take this to extremes and
neglect personal hygiene). They have a very low tolerance of suits and other
`business' attire; in fact, it is not uncommon for hackers to quit a job
rather than conform to a dress code.
Female hackers almost never wear visible makeup, and many use none at all.
---
Reading Habits
Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction. The
typical hacker household might subscribe to "Analog", "Scientific American",
"Whole-Earth Review", and "Smithsonian" (most hackers ignore "Wired" and
other self-consciously `cyberpunk' magazines, considering them wannabee fodder).
Hackers often have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend
not to talk about it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time
reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep shelves
and shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes.
---
Other Interests
Some hobbies are widely shared and recognized as going with the culture: science
fiction, music, medievalism (in the active form practiced by the Society for
Creative Anachronism and similar organizations), chess, go, backgammon, wargames,
and intellectual games of all kinds. (Role-playing games such as Dungeons and
Dragons used to be extremely popular among hackers but they lost a bit of their
luster as they moved into the mainstream and became heavily commercialized.
More recently, "Magic: The Gathering" has been widely popular among hackers.)
Logic puzzles. Ham radio. Other interests that seem to correlate less strongly
but positively with hackerdom include linguistics and theater teching.
---
Physical Activity and Sports
Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and are
determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in spectator sports
is low to non-existent; sports are something one does, not something one
watches on TV.
Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague. Volleyball was
long a notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and relatively
friendly; Ultimate Frisbee has become quite popular for similar reasons.
Hacker sports are almost always primarily self-competitive ones involving
concentration, stamina, and micromotor skills: martial arts, bicycling,
auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting,
sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating, skydiving, scuba diving. Hackers'
delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty
complicated equipment that they can tinker with.
The popularity of martial arts in the hacker culture deserves special mention.
Many observers have noted it, and the connection has grown noticeably stronger
over time. In the 1970s, many hackers admired martial arts disciplines from a
distance, sensing a compatible ideal in their exaltation of skill through
rigorous self-discipline and concentration. As martial arts became increasingly
mainstreamed in the U.S. and other western countries, hackers moved from
admiring to doing in large numbers. In 1997, for example, your humble editor
recalls sitting down with five strangers at the first Perl conference and
discovering that four of us were in active training in some sort of martial art -
and, what is more interesting, nobody at the table found this particularly odd.
Today (2000), martial arts seems to have become established as the hacker exercise
form of choice, and the martial-arts culture combining skill-centered elitism with
a willingness to let anybody join seems a stronger parallel to hacker behavior
than ever. Common usages in hacker slang un-ironically analogize programming to
kung fu (thus, one hears talk of "code-fu" or in reference to specific skills like
"HTML-fu"). Albeit with slightly more irony, today's hackers readily analogize
assimilation into the hacker culture with the plot of a Jet Li movie: the aspiring
newbie studies with masters of the tradition, develops his art through deep
meditation, ventures forth to perform heroic feats of hacking, and eventually
becomes a master who trains the next generation of newbies.
---
Education
Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or self-educated to
an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other
hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped
counterpart. Academic areas from which people often gravitate into hackerdom include
(besides the obvious computer science and electrical engineering) physics,
mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.
---
Things Hackers Detest and Avoid
IBM mainframes. All the works of Microsoft. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of
offensive cuteness. Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music.
Television (with occasional exceptions for cartoons, movies, and good SF
like "Star Trek" or Babylon 5). Business suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence.
Boredom. COBOL. BASIC. Character-based menu interfaces.
---
Food
Ethnic. Spicy. Oriental, esp. Chinese and most esp. Szechuan, Hunan, and
Mandarin (hackers consider Cantonese vaguely déclassé). Hackers prefer
the exotic; for example, the Japanese-food fans among them will eat with
gusto such delicacies as fugu (poisonous pufferfish) and whale. Thai
food has experienced flurries of popularity. Where available, high-quality
Jewish delicatessen food is much esteemed. A visible minority of
Southwestern and Pacific Coast hackers prefers Mexican.
For those all-night hacks, pizza and microwaved burritos are big.
Interestingly, though the mainstream culture has tended to think of
hackers as incorrigible junk-food junkies, many have at least mildly
health-foodist attitudes and are fairly discriminating about what they
eat. This may be generational; anecdotal evidence suggests that the
stereotype was more on the mark before the early 1980s.
---
Politics
Vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent
which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe
generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian;
thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard' leftism are rare. Hackers
are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively
apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas
and actually try to live by them day-to-day.
---
Gender and Ethnicity
Hackerdom is still predominantly male. However, the percentage of women
is clearly higher than the low-single-digit range typical for technical
professions, and female hackers are generally respected and dealt with
as equals.
In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities
of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish contingent
has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural influence (see Food, above,
and note that several common jargon terms are obviously mutated Yiddish).
The ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a function
of which ethnic groups tend to seek and value education. Racial and ethnic
prejudice is notably uncommon and tends to be met with freezing contempt.
When asked, hackers often ascribe their culture's gender- and color-blindness
to a positive effect of text-only network channels, and this is doubtless a
powerful influence. Also, the ties many hackers have to AI research and SF
literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is
inclusive rather than exclusive -- after all, if one's imagination readily
grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and
extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important
any more.
---
Religion
Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly, three
or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional faith-holding
Christianity is rare though not unknown.
Even hackers who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be relaxed
about it, hostile to organized religion in general and all forms of religious
bigotry in particular. Many enjoy `parody' religions such as Discordianism
and the Church of the SubGenius.
Also, many hackers are influenced to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism or
(less commonly) Taoism, and blend them easily with their `native' religions.
There is a definite strain of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility that
shows up even among those hackers not actively involved with neo-paganism,
Discordianism, or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage to `wizards' and
speaks of incantations and demons has too much psychological truthfulness
about it to be entirely a joke.
---
Ceremonial Chemicals
Most hackers don't smoke tobacco, and use alcohol in moderation if at all.
However, there has been something of a trend towards exotic beers since
about 1995, especially among younger Linux hackers apparently influenced
by Linus Torvalds's fondness for Guiness.
Limited use of non-addictive psychedelic drugs, such as cannabis, LSD,
psilocybin, nitrous oxide, etc., used to be relatively common and is
still regarded with more tolerance than in the mainstream culture. Use
of `downers' and opiates, on the other hand, appears to be particularly
rare; hackers seem in general to dislike drugs that make them stupid.
But on the gripping hand, many hackers regularly wire up on caffeine
and/or sugar for all-night hacking runs.
---
Communication Style
See the discussions of speech and writing styles near the beginning of
this File. Though hackers often have poor person-to-person communication
skills, they are as a rule quite sensitive to nuances of language and
very precise in their use of it. They are often better at writing than
at speaking.
---
Geographical Distribution
In the United States, hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area-to-Boston axis;
about half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of
Cambridge (Massachusetts) or Berkeley (California), although there are
significant contingents in Los Angeles, in the Pacific Northwest, and
around Washington DC. Hackers tend to cluster around large cities,
especially `university towns' such as the Raleigh-Durham area in North
Carolina or Princeton, New Jersey (this may simply reflect the fact that
many are students or ex-students living near their alma maters).
---
Sexual Habits
Hackerdom easily tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle
variation than the mainstream culture. It includes a relatively large
gay and bisexual contingent. Hackers are somewhat more likely to live
in polygynous or polyandrous relationships, practice open marriage, or
live in communes or group houses. In this, as in general appearance,
hackerdom semi-consciously maintains `counterculture' values.
---
Personality Characteristics
The most obvious common `personality' characteristics of hackers are
high intelligence, consuming curiosity, and facility with intellectual
abstractions. Also, most hackers are `neophiles', stimulated by and
appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty). Most are
also relatively individualistic and anti-conformist.
Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is
not the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even
more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference
large amounts of `meaningless' detail, trusting to later experience to
give it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical
intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but
a creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced
by people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals
into their brains. [During the production of the first book version of
this document, for example, I learned most of the rather complex
typesetting language TeX over about four working days, mainly by inhaling
Knuth's 477-page manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction to this
genuinely surprised me, because years of associating with hackers have
conditioned me to consider such performances routine and to be expected.
--ESR]
Contrary to stereotype, hackers are not usually intellectually narrow;
they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental
stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even interestingly
on any number of obscure subjects -- if you can get them to talk at all,
as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.
It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the
better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have
outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent.
Hackers are `control freaks' in a way that has nothing to do with the
usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term. In the same
way that children delight in making model trains go forward and back
by moving a switch, hackers love making complicated things like
computers do nifty stuff for them. But it has to be their nifty stuff.
They don't like tedium, nondeterminism, or most of the fussy, boring,
ill-defined little tasks that go with maintaining a normal existence.
Accordingly, they tend to be careful and orderly in their intellectual
lives and chaotic elsewhere. Their code will be beautiful, even if
their desks are buried in 3 feet of crap.
Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional rewards
such as social approval or money. They tend to be attracted by challenges
and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the interest of work or
other activities in terms of the challenges offered and the toys they
get to play with.
In terms of Myers-Briggs and equivalent psychometric systems, hackerdom
appears to concentrate the relatively rare INTJ and INTP types; that is,
introverted, intuitive, and thinker types (as opposed to the
extroverted-sensate personalities that predominate in the mainstream
culture). ENT[JP] types are also concentrated among hackers but are
in a minority.
---
Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality
Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with other
people. This may be because hackers generally aren't much like `other
people'. Unsurprisingly, hackers also tend towards self-absorption,
intellectual arrogance, and impatience with people and tasks perceived
to be wasting their time.
As cynical as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the world,
they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational, `cool', and
imaginative as they consider themselves. This bias often contributes to
weakness in communication skills. Hackers tend to be especially poor at
confrontation and negotiation.
Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the
Right Thing, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on
technical issues, in marked contrast to their general spirit of camaraderie
and tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise. Old-time ITS partisans
look down on the ever-growing hordes of Unix hackers; Unix aficionados
despise VMS and MS-DOS; and hackers who are used to conventional
command-line user interfaces loudly loathe mouse-and-menu based systems
such as the Macintosh. Hackers who don't indulge in Usenet consider it a
huge waste of time and bandwidth; fans of old adventure games such as
ADVENT and Zork consider MUDs to be glorified chat systems devoid of
atmosphere or interesting puzzles; hackers who are willing to devote
endless hours to Usenet or MUDs consider IRC to be a real waste of time;
IRCies think MUDs might be okay if there weren't all those silly puzzles
in the way. And, of course, there are the perennial holy wars -- EMACS vs.
vi, big-endian vs. little-endian, RISC vs. CISC, etc., etc., etc. As in
society at large, the intensity and duration of these debates is usually
inversely proportional to the number of objective, factual arguments
available to buttress any position.
As a result of all the above traits, many hackers have difficulty maintaining
stable relationships. At worst, they can produce the classic computer geek:
withdrawn, relationally incompetent, sexually frustrated, and desperately
unhappy when not submerged in his or her craft. Fortunately, this extreme
is far less common than mainstream folklore paints it -- but almost all
hackers will recognize something of themselves in the unflattering
paragraphs above.
Hackers are often monumentally disorganized and sloppy about dealing with
the physical world. Bills don't get paid on time, clutter piles up to
incredible heights in homes and offices, and minor maintenance tasks get
deferred indefinitely.
1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome called Attention Deficit
Disorder (ADD), supposedly characterized by (among other things) a
combination of short attention span with an ability to `hyperfocus'
imaginatively on interesting tasks. In 1998-1999 another syndrome that is
said to overlap with many hacker traits entered popular awareness: Asperger's
syndrome (AS). This disorder is also sometimes called `high-function autism',
though researchers are divided on whether AS is in fact a mild form of
autism or a distinct syndrome with a different etiology. AS patients
exhibit mild to severe deficits in interpreting facial and body-language
cues and in modeling or empathizing with others' emotions. Though some
AS patients exhibit mild retardation, others compensate for their
deficits with high intelligence and analytical ability, and frequently
seek out technical fields where problem-solving abilities are at a
premium and people skills are relatively unimportant. Both syndromes
are thought to relate to abnormalities in neurotransmitter chemistry,
especially the brain's processing of serotonin.
Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency
to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially
those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures
and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those
questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they
are really `diseases' rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation
like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they
have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed
and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be
inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly,
intelligent individualists - thus, any social system that depends on
authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize
and drug such `abnormal' people until they are properly docile and
stupid and `well-socialized'.
So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about
clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being said, most
would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with indicators for
ADD and AS - the status of caffeeine as a hacker beverage of choice may
be connected to the fact that it bonds to the same neural receptors as
Ritalin, the drug most commonly prescribed for ADD. It is probably true
that boosters of both would find a rather higher rate of clinical ADD
among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is rarer
and there are not yet good estimates of incidence as of 2000).
Miscellaneous
Hackers are more likely to have cats than dogs (in fact, it is widely
grokked that cats have the hacker nature). Many drive incredibly decrepit
heaps and forget to wash them; richer ones drive spiffy Porsches and
RX-7s and then forget to have them washed. Almost all hackers have
terribly bad handwriting, and often fall into the habit of
block-printing everything like junior draftsmen.
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Addendum Issue# 34 - 23rd April 2002
(c) Who knows who....
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