I Am Not a Hacker

by mirrorshades

The media tells you that "hackers" are either unsupervised teenagers who break into computer systems and steal credit card numbers to use at pornographic websites, or scum-of-the-Earth anarchist rebels who write viruses designed to destroy ATM networks and shut down the "evil corporate system."

The truth is that "hacker," as a title, is dead.

The title conveys an eclectic sense of rugged nobility from a bygone era - to call someone a hacker is to call them a true old-school master, an IT professional before there was any such thing as an IT professional.  It simply doesn't make sense to refer to anyone as a hacker if they can't remember a time before desktop computers.  There is no Internet- era equivalent of "hacker" - or if there is, I can't think of it.  The PC Revolution is over, the dotcom bubble has burst.  Technology is no longer the final frontier.

All your ideas of who I am are wrong.  But I don't suspect you'll care enough to challenge yourself.

I don't wear a white, black, or gray hat.  I don't type my sentences using numbers and punctuation marks instead of letters.  I won't "teach you to hack," I don't "hack into computers," my goal is not to "hack the planet."

I am many things in many ways. I am young and old; I am male and female; I am Christian, Taoist and Atheist.  I am Black, White, and every color in between.  I am college educated and a high school dropout.  I work in a large corporation, part-time at the mall, and am unemployed.  I am everything you can think of, but nothing you can understand.

I do what I do because I love computers.  I believe that information is amoral on its own, and that what I do with it is my own decision.  "What I do" is whatever I find interesting at the moment; I don't worry about right or wrong, profit or loss, reputation or credibility.  There have been countless nights that I have stayed up past 3:00 am working on something that has no inherent value other than the knowledge I gain from doing it.  What I do goes beyond interest, beyond hobby, beyond obsession.  Can you say the same about anything, anything that you do?  If you can't, then you have gone through your life missing something.

I don't care what you think of me or what I do.  I don't care what I think of you or what you do.  I am not a zealot, bent on converting the world to my way of thinking - if I do something that interests you, I am happy to tell you about it if you ask.  If you do something that interests me, I will ask you about it.  My goal is to learn, which I will do with you but I can do just as well without you.

Call me a selfish bastard; call me a philosopher; call me a dreamer, an idealist; call me a criminal; call me a geek.  Call me whatever you like.

Just don't call me a hacker.