Throughout the first part of Hackers, Steven Levy describes the lifestyle and values of “True Hackers”. Ultimately, this referred to people with an overwhelming curiosity and truly loved working with the bleeding edge of technology. These people wanted to create cool stuff that had never been built before just for its own sake. Along with this came a distinctive culture. They were often the outcasts for being too nerdy, so the hacker ethic grew as a way to make sense of their subculture. The most important thing was the hacking - nothing else mattered - so when a 12 year old came with incredible technical skills, he was welcomed rather than shunned. It’s important to note that hacking is quite different from just an intellectual pursuit. The best example is the notion of “winners” vs. “losers”. To the hacker community, you would be considered a “loser” even if you know everything about the system, yet you spend all your time theorizing about what’s best, rather than just rolling up your sleeves and building it. This enabled the hackers to run circles around the graduate students and businesses when they put their minds to it, because they didn’t waste time on theory, meetings, or anything non essential - they just got to work.

Importantly, the hackers worked on cool projects that didn’t directly go towards any established objective. An interesting example is playing music on a computer for the first time, where there was no real objective being solved, but something objective cool that was way ahead of its time. See also Spacewar, something that wasn’t taken seriously until tons of work and a culture was built around it, which also put into motion the idea of modern video games.

The portrayal of a “True Hacker” doesn’t really go against my previous notion of a “hacker” because I was already familiar with the original meaning of the word. In high school, I participated in several hackathons and was a member of the Hack Club at my high school, and I always had trouble explaining the meaning of the word “hack”. By default, everyone assumed I was part of a cybersecurity focused organization or that I could somehow hack into their Instagram account.

To an extent, I am sympathetic to the hacker way of life. While I have never been into the sci-fi culture, I have had my fair share of all nighters fueled by Coke banging out buggy webapps or working on the robot for our FRC team. My experience on the robotics team makes me particularly sympathetic to the origin of hacking in the model railroad club. However, as I have gotten older I have began to lose some of the hacker spirit I once had years ago. I’m still willing to roll up my sleeves and debug a Linux machine, but I’ve begun to value stability much more. Working a corporate big tech 9 to 5 job has at least been partially successful in turning me into a wagie and getting locked into the Golden Handcuffs. But on the other hand, a major consideration in scaling back my hacking time has been my course load and most importantly the social consideration of making the most of my college years, so hopefully my increased free time in about a year looks a little different.