The Hackers Conference Concepts

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

by E. Gabriella Coleman · 25 Nov 2012 · 398pp · 107,788 words

), they are invariably stamped by particular events, material conditions, and time. There is one event, however, which is generally experienced as startlingly unique and special—the hacker conference, which I cover in detail at the end of the chapter. The conference is culturally significant because it allows hackers to collectively enact, make visible

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immense value these hackers place on these face-to-face encounters points to how they imagine the nature of and even limits to virtual interactivity. The hacker conference is not only a social drama that produces feelings of unity, as I will demonstrate below, but can also be fruitfully approached as ethical and

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this matter to others in the same way as it does to me? In what ways does this matter?” And more than any other event, the hacker conference answers such questions with lucidity and clarity. During the con, hackers see themselves. They are collectively performing a world that is an outgrowth of their

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spaces, such as Noisebridge in San Francisco, have been established in cities across Europe and North America. 21. Some of the first hacker cons were the Hackers Conference held in California (1984), the Computer Chaos Club Congress held in Germany (1984), and Summercon held in Saint Louis (1987). 22. While no hacker con

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child

by Morgan G. Ames · 19 Nov 2019 · 426pp · 117,775 words

, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1145/2460296.2460332. Coleman, E. Gabriella. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. ———. “The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld.” Anthropological Quarterly 83, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 47–72. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.0.0112

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words

call from Stewart Brand, and once a week for seven weeks we drove up to Sausalito. There were like seven hackers he got to design the Hackers Conference. Stewart Brand: We got a pretty good influx of folks. There was Ted Nelson, obviously. Lee Felsenstein, the sort-of master of ceremonies for the

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. It wasn’t new people coming anymore. There was the same old faces. I called it “the old farts society.” We had the meetings for the Hackers Conference at the tugboat that Stewart Brand lived on in Sausalito. The meetings were mostly where we threw out names of who else ought to be

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all hackers to varying degrees. I think there was only one or two women. Maybe three or four. All the rest were guys. David Levitt: The Hackers Conference tried not to be a boys’ club, but they did not try that hard. Steven Levy: When I got out there my spirits soared. All

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something he had hacked up the night before. Andy Hertzfeld: Switcher was written the day before. Fabrice Florin: He had done a hack just for the Hackers Conference. Andy Hertzfeld: I said that, but that was a lie. I wrote Switcher because there was a 512K Mac, not because there was a Hackers

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breakfast, now’s the time!” So you had all these droopy figures heading out to the little cafeteria. That next day, the conference portion of the Hackers Conference started in earnest. There were no featured speakers: The whole point was to get the hackers talking to each other. Fabrice Florin: We had different

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. Because it was so participatory. People were chafed and they all wanted to talk. Everyone wanted to get in on it there. Doug Carlson (at the Hackers Conference): The dissemination of information as a free object is a worthy goal. It’s the way most of us learned in the first place. But

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or not they want to give it away or sell it. It’s their product and it should be a personal decision. Robert Woodhead (at the Hackers Conference): Tools I will give away to anybody. But the product? That’s my soul that’s in the product. I don’t want anyone fooling

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with that. I don’t want anyone hacking into that product and changing it—because then it won’t be mine. Steve Wozniak (at the Hackers Conference): Hackers frequently want to look at code, like operating systems, listings, and the like, to learn how it was done before them. Source should be

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point that there’s a whole bunch of work creating a piece of software that does something useful and actually works well. Steve Wozniak (at the Hackers Conference): Information should be free—but your time should not. Stewart Brand: So, putting these things out for free is kind of nuts. And, I said

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frontier. That the Valley circa 1985 was also a bohemian frontier was no coincidence: The Well was Silicon Valley online. The Well attracted hackers from the Hackers Conference as well as Brand’s many high-flying friends from the disparate worlds of journalism, ecology, philanthropy, and business. Almost immediately The Well became the

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bring the power to the people by having really cheap telecommunications. And that I think in some ways, that idea came from the hacker community, the Hackers Conference. Stewart Brand: We made it easy to make conferences, and people would invent conferences. Anybody could start a conference. Kevin Kelly: It was kind of

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a hack: The software was buggy, but sort of open and easy to modify. Lee Felsenstein: All the people who had been at the Hackers Conference were offered memberships. Stewart Brand: I wanted hackers inside the system, so we invited them in and writers, journalists, all got free accounts and that

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contribute to art, your technique isn’t what matters. What matters is originality. It’s an emotional value. Bruce Sterling, Brenda Laurel, and Steven Levy: The Hackers Conference, which was first held in 1984, is where Silicon Valley technical types started to recognize themselves as a culture 9 Left to right: Bruce Sterling

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an August 2012 Berkeley Cybersalon event on the creation and legacy of Hypercard. Doug Carlson’s, Robert Woodhead’s, and Steve Wozniak’s quotes from the Hackers Conference are as reported in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link Ram Dass’s quotes are from two Seva Foundation videos

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat

by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff · 15 Oct 2018 · 568pp · 164,014 words

, showed up at his ranch asking about the “New Prosthesis League,” which was actually a hacking group known as Nu Prometheus League. Barlow had attended the Hackers Conference with phone phreakers like Steve Wozniak, and the FBI figured someone who had attended that conference might be able to help them track down the

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner · 31 Aug 2006 · 339pp · 57,031 words

agree on proper hacker business practice, they could agree that being a hacker—in this case, being the sort of person who was invited to the Hackers’ Conference—was valuable in its own right. Lee Felsenstein explained, “That little bit of cultural identity [was] extremely important.” In the popular press, hackers had been

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toward the emerging challenges of the software industry. But they had begun to reformulate their own identities, partially in terms of Whole Earth ideals. In the Hackers’ Conference, Brand and company provided computer workers with a venue in which to develop and live a group identity around the idea of hacking and to

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heard within the events’ various forums with the principles along which those forums were organized and with the experience of unity within the forums. At the Hackers’ Conference, Brand and his colleagues translated the individual experiences of three generations of hackers into a shared experience, an experience organized by Whole Earth people according

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the Software Catalog, the WELL’s several hundred users in its earliest years comprised a large number of computer technologists (most of them drawn from the Hackers’ Conference).5 There were also staff writers and editors for the New York Times, Business Week, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Rolling Stone, Byte, Harper’s

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contributors, such as Lee Felsenstein and John Draper, who were in fact accomplished hackers. Many of these participants had migrated to the WELL after attending the Hackers’ Conference at Fort Cronkhite in 1984. Tough also selected many participants who could not have been described as hackers but who had been longtime, high-visibility

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conﬂict could be seen clearly in the edited version of the forum eventually printed in Harper’s. Like the online forum, and like its predecessor, the Hackers’ Conference of 1984, the conversation opened with a discussion of the hacker ethic. WELL regulars described the ethic in cybernetic and countercultural terms familiar to their

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list of attendees at a recent Hackers’ Conference (by that time there were annual conferences descended from the 1984 event). According to Barlow, Baxter believed the Hackers’ Conference was a collection of computer criminals, likely with links to the NuPrometheus League.81 Baxter also harbored numerous varied misconceptions about the computer industry and

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that increasingly spanned countercultural and technical communities. Kelly soon began to publish writers who had ﬁrst appeared on the WELL or in connection with either the Hackers’ Conference or the Software Catalog, such as Steven Levy and Howard Rheingold. As Kelly began to travel in the Bay area’s digital circles, and especially

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. T. Barnum, he gathered performers from a variety of traditions into a series of multi-ring circuses. At the Whole Earth Catalog, as later at the Hackers Conference and on the WELL, these performers included technologists and counterculturalists, businessmen and journalists. Like Barnum, Brand not only hosted these multiple rings of activity, but

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actively collaborated with what traditional journalism theory might [ 254 ] Chapter 8 call “newsmakers” in the construction of rhetoric, symbols, and narratives. In the case of the Hackers’ Conference, for example, Brand created a forum within which hackers and former New Communalists could gather and imagine their individual projects as elements of a shared

Howard Rheingold

by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993) · 26 Apr 2012

True Confessions conference. . . . Suddenly our future looked assured. . . ." Kevin Kelly had been editor of Whole Earth Review for several years when the WELL was founded. The Hackers' Conference had been his idea. Kelly recalled the original design goals that the WELL's founders had in mind when they opened for business in 1985

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that Barlow had been contacted by the FBI because his name was on the roster of an annual private gathering called the Hackers' Conference. Baxter reported that he had been informed that the Hackers' Conference was an 26-04-2012 21:46 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 15 de 36 http://www.rheingold.com/vc

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, but that was as close to being the CEO of Autodesk that he ever got; the real CEO of Autodesk, John Walker, definitely was on the Hackers' Conference list of attendees himself. Autodesk makes computer-aided design software for personal computers and was in the process of developing a cyberspace toolkit for architects

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point was that if everybody in law enforcement was acting on completely erroneous information about cyberspace technology, travesties of justice were inevitable. Another person on the Hackers' Conference roster, who had actually received some of the purloined ROM code, unsolicited, and properly reported it to the authorities, was Mitchell Kapor. Kapor had cofounded

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex

by Yasha Levine · 6 Feb 2018 · 474pp · 130,575 words

world.” He added, “The quietest of the ’60s sub- subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and most powerful—and most suspicious of power.”35 The Hackers’ Conference was a big moment in the cultural history of Silicon Valley. It helped introduce computer programmers to the public in a totally different way. These

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff · 22 Mar 2022 · 573pp · 142,376 words

of hackers. Let’s bring them together.” Brand loved the idea and he persuaded Kelly and Phelan to help organize an event to be called the Hackers Conference. They began assembling a group of elite computer programmers and hardware designers from around the Bay Area, crowding them into the Mirene for weekly evening

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had accused Brand of “cleaving” to power. When Brand had read the quote in a generally flattering Washington Post profile,[25] the words had stung. The Hackers Conference would become an annual event, drawing together a digital subculture that was passionate about the machines and programs they designed. The first gathering was marked

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his family, but there was another concern as well. In November when he discussed the Clock Library during an impromptu session with Kevin Kelly at the Hackers Conference (still an annual event a decade after they’d founded it), the Long Clock idea proved to be a hard sell. Many of the hackers

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition

by Steven Levy · 18 May 2010 · 598pp · 183,531 words

index sulked, and to this day whenever they encounter me, in person or in the ether of cyberspace, they complain. Ultimately, the experience was exhilarating. The Hacker Conference, which would become an annual event, turned out to be the kickoff for a spirited and public debate, continued to this day, about the future

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia

by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris and Christopher Scally · 26 Jul 2011 · 171pp · 54,334 words

1984, the same year of the inaugural Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, Brand convened the US’s first Hacker Con, in Marin County, California. “Organising the Hackers Conference was like some of the early hacking at MIT, so collaborative and rapid you couldnt keep track of who did what…” he wrote at the