Hacker Perspective: Annalee Newitz

Crime and Freedom

A few months after I turned fifteen, my friend Dave told me his summer school driver's ed class was going to show Red Asphalt, this legendary movie where supposedly you could see people ground into paste after really bad car crashes.

"You should sneak in with me and check it out!" he suggested.  I was pretty enthusiastic about blood and guts, so this seemed like a sensible idea.  Unfortunately, the movie did not deliver: There were no beheadings at all.  So I spent my afternoon in the back of an air-conditioned classroom watching the cops on the disappointingly bloodless screen talk about bad, law-breaking teenagers - and listening to Dave's friends talk about their computers.  It was the mid-1980s, and they were obsessed with cracking Apple software and getting access to The Pig Sty, the most elite BBS in our area.  I'd played around with my own computer, a Kaypro 2 running CP/M, but hadn't realized there was a whole community of kids doing the same thing.

I had found my people.  I spent the rest of the summer hanging out with those guys, and when school started again we met on a multi-user chat BBS called WizNet.  As I learned more about computers, I realized that the people who loved them weren't just united by a desire to understand networks and assembly.  We wanted to find out how complicated things worked - especially things designed to thwart our exploration with obfuscation or outright bullshit.  And for many of us, that exploration started with machines and radiated outward to touch everything in our lives.

My formative years were spent in the churchy suburbs of Orange County, California, during the Reagan Era.  Until I started hanging out with computer hackers, adulthood had been explained to me mostly by fashion magazines and my peers.  Apparently it would involve manicures, dying my hair blonde, wearing dresses, and waiting by the phone for boys to "ask me out."  In short, conformity to a repugnant ideal.  And yet, I found no alternative models for my future except in science fiction - which was, of course, an impractical template for adulthood unless I expected shortly to mutate or go into space.

It was among computer hackers that I began learning about a rogue form of adulthood that defied my community's expectations, and that was also possible in the real world.  Well, it was possible if you didn't get caught.  A year before I joined the computer scene, a bunch of guys my friends knew had gotten arrested for breaking into computers - I can't remember now whether they'd popped some school computers, government computers, or both.  Mostly what I recall is a vivid story my friend Jeff told about seeing the guys' computers being carted off by federal agents while their parents stood by in open-mouthed rage.

This had the effect of wedding forever in my mind the struggle to explore freely and the danger of being branded a criminal.  My friends considered it a great accomplishment to crack the copy protection on programs so you could share them with everybody; and we spent many lazy Sunday afternoons wardialing and phreaking our way into free long-distance calls.  If this was crime, I decided, then the law was obviously bullshit.

And if computer crime laws were bullshit, who knew what other rules were bullshit?

Once I'd asked that question, I stopped wearing pink, took on an alias, and made sure my mom never had to buy another copy of Mac Paint again.  I also stopped giving a crap about all those unwritten ruleson how girls are supposed to act.  I wore men's ties and read pornography.  I had a bunch of fantastically nerdy boyfriends, and I didn't care who knew about it.  The girls in school called me a slut, which I classified as yet another one of those so-called crimes that was actually no crime at all.  I started writing stories about heroic outlaw hackers and reading books about counter-culture and sex.

It was around this time that I decided my goal in life was to escape Orange County and live in San Francisco.  Up there, people were f*cking anybody they wanted, all the time.  Plus, they were making bizarre, amazing art and committing crimes way too awesome for a high school student to find out about.  At least, that's what I assumed, based on the books I'd read.

At last, I had a concrete notion of what I wanted to do as an adult.

These formative experiences left me with a definition of hacking that might seem surprisingly broad to people who think hackers are highly-technical people who tinker solely with computers and possibly a few other machines.  I think of hacking as any rational and concerted effort to explore a complex system and then customize it as you wish.  Only that definition explains why my familiarity with BBS systems inspired me to re-imagine, among other things, my gender identity and ethical life.

A lot of people struggle their whole lives to live up to the ideal of what it means to be male or female, and live in misery because they can't.  Men are told they have to be strong and aggressive; women, that they should be attractive and emotional.  There are hundreds of other such stereotypes, up to and including the one that says men are good at science and women aren't.  And all of them are bullshit.  They're like the glue that game companies used to pour over the chipsets in video games to prevent people from reverse-engineering them.  All they do is cover over a basic and discoverable truth, which is that gender is just a set of commands that your body can execute in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with what the instruction manual tells you.

I became a gender hacker because I couldn't act like a "girl" even when I wanted to.  I could have become a man, but I didn't want that either.  Instead I committed myself to tinkering with my identity to reflect who I am and how I want to be seen, which is as a person who doesn't fit into any known gender category.  Partly, this has meant customizing my body. I have short hair and usually wear men's clothes, though I love wearing vintage dresses and skirts sometimes.  I also used surgery to correct the one thing I hated about living in a female body: the possibility of getting pregnant.  I got a tubal ligation when I was in my twenties, and ever since then my reproductive system has behaved exactly the way I want it to.

Once you start hacking your gender, a lot of other fundamental rules become fungible too.  For example, most people think that family means getting married and having babies.  Since I had successfully eliminated the whole baby-making problem, I wondered if there were other things about family life that I could reconfigure too.  I dated people of different genders, dated several people at the same time, engaged in serial monogamy, went to a lot of great orgies, and was even celibate for a couple of years.  I knew I didn't want an off-the-shelf relationship, and eventually I figured out a configuration that works well for me.  And yes, it's the sort of setup that many people would consider a crime against nature and various gods.

Hackers learn at an early age to question what their communities define as "right" and "wrong."  It's not that we don't believe in truth and justice - it's just that we'd like to figure out for ourselves what those things are instead of adopting definitions supplied by teachers, governments, and corporations.  People who hack, who question conventional wisdom, are called crazy; but when they inspire other people to ask questions they are called subversives.

Looked at another way, subversion is a form of sharing.  And I've always found that computer networks are an excellent way to share.  All of my very best acts of subversion would not have been possible without computers.  In the 1990s I co-founded Bad Subjects, a publication devoted to radical politics and pop culture, which most people read on Gopher and then, later, on the web.  That experience was as transformative to me as an adult as meeting those computer hackers was when I was a kid.  I found a community of people online who were writing about how capitalism and other social institutions molded our lives and confined us.

I became aware of the political choices I was making every day.  I realized that even my ability to become "aware of political choices" was partly a result of having enough money to get a college education, buy a computer, and chat on mailing lists with other people who had the leisure time to join me.  I went from tinkering with my personal gender identity to forming connections with people who wanted to tinker with the vast fabric of society and history.  Of course, it's one thing to upgrade your machine from a proprietary OS to a free one, and quite another to upgrade your civilization.  Still, it's important to know what you'd like your society to be like when it grows up.

And so that's why, in writing for publications from Wired to my blog io9.com, I have tried to inspire people to hack, subvert, and reconfigure.  I hope that they'll start with computers and networks, and not stop there.  I want people to understand that we can ruthlessly hack everything that exists, from our religions to our economic systems.  What today people call crimes, the future will know in retrospect as the first stirrings of liberation.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, a blog about science and science fiction.  She has contributed to Wired, New Scientist, and the Washington Post, and is the co-editor of She's Such a Geek (Seal Press).