Hackers. share common ground with punk or ?

[Carsten]

I was wondering. I seen some hacker documentaries but never really met one or know anything besides watching some documentaries about their culture.

they seem to dress awkward and do awkward things as they please and yet are intelligent and political aware and also very DIY in their way of life. that they have to be off course. they seem to like strange music as well. bet they love punk as much as the next guy



wonder how many punks that are actually hackers and how many hackers that are actually punks when you look at it.

maybe we all share common tribal spirit where some is just better at music where others are good at hardware and software and some cant fit into one or the other so they are just called geeks or nerds .

what you think. ?

[Adam Rebelius]

Interesting point. Some people see hacking as a form of rebellion, while others see it as a threat. It is up to the individual.

[Pacifiction Records]

You should read Burning Chrome or Neuromancer by William Gibson, or anything else you can find by him. There's a reason why the genre is called "cyberpunk." He basically took the nihilistic ideals of the punk movement of the time and projected them on his view of the future of the information age. Just before Anonymous started making headlines I was watching some documentaries on the Weather Underground and other terrorist/activist movements of the 70's (Japan Red Army, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc.) and came to the conclusion that Anonymous is the best analogy of this kind of group of our generation. Punk is a lot of things to different people but hackers are definitely in the mix.

i've known a few hackers, or "crackers" i guess, as what they do is crack code...

we never talked in length about what they do, as i tend to both be too drunk, and technologically inept to understand what they're talking about.

[BravingRuin]

yeah.. i read Neuromancer eons ago.. Cyber Punk really started in the 80's on the east coast anyway. I knew a lot of geeky film students and computer programmers developing programs for what soon would become available for the user friendly Personal Computers just beginning to enter mainstream.... musicians and visual artists who appeared straight edge were all edgy punkstars... bands like Suicide and Throbbing Gristle are part of that Cyber Punk movement... Cyber Punk on the east coast quickly evolved into Raves, which some people call house parties on a gigantic scale including Video digitally programmed and visually new... our Cyber Punk soirees involved every kind of artist imaginable, i suppose even Hackers that liked MDMA, the cyberpunk drug of the new age, were there.
whoever and whatever Hackers appear to be now, i think it's a drag that there are those who just want to fuck with sites like this for example, and fuck with our sense of chill sharing... i'm always imagining them not able to feel the music or the vibe... i've known them only to be abusive bullying cyber terrorists...

[Pacifiction Records]

I follow you here. I never really heard of a cyberpunk music genre, but if I made a mixtape I would put Suicide on it. And I think your right on how it evolved along with rave culture. The current Japanese cyberpunk fashion trend is a composite of this, multi-color hair, aerodynamic face masks, futuristic day-glo wear, and the techno to go along with it.

As for hacker groups, what we see going on today, Gibson put down in 1983 in Neuromancer. razorgirl Molly hires the Panther Moderns, described as "nihilistic technofetishists," to help them cause mayhem at a corporate office building in order to steal the Dixie Flatline. The Moderns' motivation is almost purely for the "lulz" in today's terms. Gibson also states there were numerous teenage hacker groups like this morphing and being created under new names. Sounds a bit like Anonymous, LulzSec, AntiSec, etc. As for the "punk" aspect, they were into extreme body mods, can they do skin grafts yet?

As for the motivations of today's hackers/internet pranksters, I think it's a combination of protecting free speech (against political correctness), the lulz of targeting people that set themselves up by posting embarrassing or private information of the interwebs where everything is forever, and corporations that support censorship of free information. With the FCC trying for more control over the interwebs, it could be that there is a lot more at stake now than the peace punk raver vibe of the 90's.

Originally Posted by BravingRuin

yeah.. i read Neuromancer eons ago.. Cyber Punk really started in the 80's on the east coast anyway. I knew a lot of geeky film students and computer programmers developing programs for what soon would become available for the user friendly Personal Computers just beginning to enter mainstream.... musicians and visual artists who appeared straight edge were all edgy punkstars... bands like Suicide and Throbbing Gristle are part of that Cyber Punk movement... Cyber Punk on the east coast quickly evolved into Raves, which some people call house parties on a gigantic scale including Video digitally programmed and visually new... our Cyber Punk soirees involved every kind of artist imaginable, i suppose even Hackers that liked MDMA, the cyberpunk drug of the new age, were there.
whoever and whatever Hackers appear to be now, i think it's a drag that there are those who just want to fuck with sites like this for example, and fuck with our sense of chill sharing... i'm always imagining them not able to feel the music or the vibe... i've known them only to be abusive bullying cyber terrorists...

[Carsten]

ok I got too much interest in these hackers now as a subcuiture to not find everything out I can about them.

I am not going to become a hacker myself. I am satisified with being just who I am but I find other subcultures very interesting to research and find similarities. might belong some where in one of them or not. but its more a research matter.

can anyone find me some infomation on the culture. its easy enough to find them on blogs and forums but I do not want to join one of these as I am not into the tech stuff they are. only have common interest in operative systems and computer history where hackers also are a major part.

if anyone here is a hacker or knows hackers that will share a little background information then I would be happy if you did in a PM.

the book I cant find. but seen a lot of stuff in movies and read all I could find up until now. time to find someone that actually are a part of the culture and hear about it from one in it I think.

[vareg]

well...from a programmer standpoint, first thing i wanna say, one shall make a distinction between hackers and script kiddies. Not wanting to go too far into details coz this forum is not a tech forum, but there are lots of script kiddies out there that call themselves hackers while for the most part they're only teenagers who download tools they can't figure out read a few tutorials and think they're going to reinvent the wheel with a month. True hackers are programmers, and among hackers there are distinction to make also. Mostly regarding the ethical side. Since hacking centers around the concept of finding vulnerabilities, there are good hackers and bad hackers. Some companies actually hire hackers, IBM does, and most companies relying on significant networks do test their security as well. They either do this themselves or hire security professionals, of which a percentage are/were hackers. This truely is a bilateral thing. IT-related portals are used both by hackers and anti-hackers. True hackers are programmers, and spend years reading books about network protocols and so on, develop their own tools. They're geeks in essence, geeks that once became hip/or rebelled, dunno what fits here, but that's not the case for every hacker, if that makes sense. Now hacking is fun, brings adrenaline and gives a sense of breaking the rules, being free above anyone else, a group of hackers is like a group of punk friends who decide one night to stick up a warehouse. Knowledge is power, so there's inevitably an anti-establishment/power sort of concept attached to hacking at some point. When not ethical, hacking mostly is about breaking into systems, defiance, a way of life too that's punk becuse somehow being a hacker you hardly manage to keep your room tidy or eat healthy food at normal hours or look other than a zombie that's been exposed to its screen for too long. I have known hackers who weren't especially punkers, but yeah the hacker's way of thinking always seemed to well fit the punk pattern somehow.