What the thing is
A set of practices and values centred on playful cleverness, freedom of inquiry, and creative circumvention—not coding itself, but how coding is done.
The quality known as “hack value” means something is worth doing because it is done with finesse or cleverness. Picking a difficult lock has hack value and smashing it does not, and neither does solving a problem by trying every possibility. Using a thing outside its intended purpose often counts, as with a dot matrix printer producing musical notes or a flatbed scanner taking ultra-high-resolution photographs. The Jargon File defines a hacker as someone who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who learn only the minimum necessary. People in this subculture distinguish themselves from “crackers”, the term they use for those who exploit weaknesses in computer security, whom the media and public usually call “hackers”.
Where it came from
Academic computer enthusiasts at MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club and AI Lab in the 1960s.
The Tech Model Railroad Club’s dictionary defined “hack” in 1959, before any computer context, as an article or project without constructive end, among other senses. The club later used a DEC PDP-1, and its slang carried into early computing culture, including “losing” for equipment that is not working and “munged” for equipment that is ruined. Early hacks at MIT were pranks that showed technical aptitude, such as placing a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome. Before computers were widely networked, several independent hacker subcultures existed, often unaware of each other, at places such as MIT, the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. A PDP-10 at MIT called AI, running ITS, became an early meeting point. The first Jargon File appeared in 1973, the GNU Manifesto in 1985 and Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997.
What it gets right
It treats cleverness as a method, not a trait. It values forking over loyalty. It built cohesion without gatekeeping credentials.
Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) set out the hacker ethic. Its tenets include that access to computers should be unlimited and total, that all information should be free, that hackers should be judged by their hacking and not by degrees, age, race or position, and that you can create art and beauty on a computer. Many values of the free and open source software movement stem from these ethics, which originated at MIT and the Homebrew Computer Club. Shared traits across the early subcultures included, among others, hostility to secrecy, the right to fork, and a distaste for authority.
What it gets wrong
It conflates hostility to secrecy with hostility to accountability. It assumes rationality excludes emotion or power analysis.
The programmer subculture’s ethic holds that information should be free but that it is not up to the hacker to make it free by breaking into private systems. In his 1983 Turing Award lecture, Ken Thompson showed how a compiler could be modified to insert a hidden backdoor into the UNIX login command, then criticised the press’s handling of “hackers”, calling the acts of the 414 gang vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. The Jargon File calls Robert T. Morris, who wrote the Morris worm, “a true hacker who blundered”. Clifford Stoll’s tracing of intruders who sold data from military and academic computers to the Soviet secret service, told in The Cuckoo’s Egg, is cited by Raymond as illustrating the difference between hacker and cracker.
Why it matters now
Because its core tension—between open collaboration and commercial capture—is now the default condition of digital life.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you want to understand how technical autonomy, shared knowledge, and anti-authoritarian practice became infrastructure.
