Hacker Perspective: James Kracht
Meaning can be an ugly word. It generates pressure, and it's rarely clear in what context it is assigned. Yet we're all reading 2600 Magazine, and it's likely that each of us does so for a unique reason. So what does it mean to be a hacker? What is the meaning of the word? What is the meaning of the movement, or the way of life? I suspect, by default, that it will always be personal. Thinking about the true meaning of hacking, I could only look to my own life to form an answer, but the themes I encountered seem universal.
My first thought is that, ultimately, hacking is a way of life. It's a form of knowing things. It's a path we take in life that honors the millions of years it took to build our brains. There are contrasts in society, however, that make it clear that some people just aren't getting it. They're being led. They're being fed. They're being dragged in a societal whirlpool, living lives based on impulses and responses. Yet others hack. They ask questions. They figure out how things work, and they make choices accordingly.
This contrast isn't evil, however. I'm not making a point about stupid people living stupid lives while the rest of us have a deeper understanding of things. While a lot of that does exist, I can use a simple example to reinforce what I'm getting at.
My mom appears to be terrified of the television's remote control.
What to a hacker are simply a PCB, infrared transmitter, and a few batteries crammed in a plastic case, to my mother is a weapon. She actually believes she can damage the television if she presses the wrong button. I get calls late at night and I have to talk her down. Her nemesis appears to be the Input selector. I've resorted to educating her about the hacking movement, and she might one day work this out. I've told her repeatedly to press buttons randomly. See what happens. Get angry at her ignorance and discover something through experimentation. This apparently isn't easy for someone born in 1941.
I started hacking when I was ten, in 1977, though to be honest, I had no idea I was hacking. The first machine that caught my eye was the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS). The game cartridges were self-contained worlds to me. The switches on the game console were tools. Flip the power on and off rapidly enough, and sometimes really strange things manifested on screen: broken, glitching worlds, revealing arcane technological secrets begging for decipherment. The natural human penchant for hacking manifested strongly when I received a copy of Warren Robinette's video game masterpiece Adventure. Most gamers know this was the very first computer game to contain an extremely secret Easter egg that revealed a message from the programmer. The best part about this game is that the cartridge actually did contain a world - a kingdom - and it was randomized, different every time you played. This set my imagination on fire with possibilities. The Easter egg was spectacular, but not many people talk about another quirk in Adventure tied to the manipulation of the joystick. On the game select screen, if you pressed the controller in an array of random directions long enough, your "hero" would appear in the room on screen, and you could run around and attempt to interact with the game number at the center of the display. Nothing like the Easter egg, but I found it because I was convinced you could actually get into those "game select" rooms (they looked just like the rooms in the game), and I just brute-forced my way in by pressing different directions on the controller.
Yet it was these sorts of naturally occurring behaviors that a system like the Atari 2600 VCS seemed to bring out in me. When I first started reading 2600 Magazine in the eighties, I used to buy copies at the local Tower Records, and considering the unwarranted contraband-like reputation the magazine would later get branded with, this still is, in my view, the best way to buy it (though it requires time travel to locate a Tower Records). As an aside, can you guess why the magazine's title attracted me? I really did think - upon first glance - that it was a video game magazine!
After devouring my first copy of 2600 Magazine, I felt an instant attraction to it. It seemed like a direct extension of a way of life I had already been living. The deep-seated need to know how things worked was simply in my nature. It's shocking to me that some people just don't live life this way. It's almost incomprehensible, actually. But in one of those early issues of 2600 Magazine there was a great piece about US West Caller ID boxes and how to expand their capacity to store names and numbers (US West eventually became Qwest and is now calling themselves CenturyLink - which, no matter how hard you try, can't be turned into the name Qworst, which is what we had all started to refer to them as). The early marketing for these little devices was keyed around their capacity. When Caller ID hit and it became a new profit center for phone companies, they limited the box's ability to store numbers. The introductory offer got you the service plus a "free" Caller ID box that could hold a small amount of names and numbers (I think it was eight or 15 - it's been so long). If you paid quite a bit extra, however, you could get a box that held far more.
The article in 2600 Magazine pointed out that you could open your limited Caller ID unit and cut the solder on the PCB at just the right spot, thus enabling the full storage capacity. I saw no harm in this. In fact, I actually found US West's approach ridiculous, and so typical of a big corporation trying to maximize profits. I've often wondered whose idea it was to create the limited Caller ID box in the first place; it was a jerky thing to do to people, considering they shipped customers the same hardware, and charged them more for a unit missing a bit of solder. It seems ridiculous, even now. Anyway, the end result was that all of the "free" Caller ID boxes I ordered with the lower capacity were then instantly hacked and expanded the moment I got my hands on them. This is an example of the empowerment that hacking bestows. It's addictive and, human nature being what it is, I can easily see why some hackers have crossed the line and gotten in trouble.
When I purchased my first computer - an Atari 800 with a whopping 48k of RAM - there were only computer magazines to turn to for information, or local computer clubs if you were lucky. That didn't stop me from diving into BASIC and, with the help of program listings in COMPUTE! Magazine and Antic Magazine, I learned even more simply by replicating the work of others.
A curious byproduct of my early computer use manifested as a clash with the establishment. In my high school, they still taught Typing (note the case). Typing was serious business to the instructor; she was quite nasty and vocal - in front of us - about the changes she was seeing in young people at the time. She was convinced that the only way we'd succeed was if we possessed typing skills. She also actively believed computers wouldn't replace typewriters until long after the year 2000. She once told us that if we could type, we could earn a decent wage as a secretary in any office on the planet. I instantly ran into trouble in this class, and I actually ended up receiving an "F" in Typing.
The reason was simple: I had taught myself to type using my computer. Sure, when I unboxed the thing, all I could do was hunt and peck with two fingers, but soon I dropped the hunting. The computer keyboard became second nature for me. I still pecked with two fingers, but I could fly. I could really, flat out, fly on the keyboard with the Peck Method (if it has a real name, forgive me). So years later, in my Typing class - and despite actually being the fastest and most accurate typist in the classroom - I was failed because I refused to unlearn my method. Because I did not have my fingers poised on "home" keys, and didn't always use the Shift key closest to the letter I was typing, I was deemed a deviant failure.
Of course, there was so much wrong with this high school - it was the first half of the 1980s, and the teachers were dinosaurs and the technology movement was an asteroid, heading straight for them - that I don't hold much of a grudge. They were just terrified, ill-equipped people. I still find it astonishing that someone would hold on so tightly to an antiquated way of doing things, and impact a student's future because of it. I only took the Typing class because I knew I could type well. I figured it'd be an easy "A." Thus, a valuable life lesson concerning Authority was learned.
As I grew older, my ability to coexist with an increasingly technological world was on full display, but it wasn't a conscious thing. I was simply immersed in it, as most of us were at the time. You were either on the bleeding edge, thirsting for knowledge, exploring systems and devices, or you just weren't. I wasn't really paying attention to those who weren't, however.
Yet, one of the areas I naturally gravitated to was music. Synthesizers fascinated me, but they were, at best for most people, truly unknowable objects. The penchant for hacking took form here as knob twiddling (not what it sounds like), where rampant experimentation with cryptically labeled knobs, sliders, and buttons on the keyboard could result in spectacular discoveries - of sounds never heard before. The ability to show no fear when confronted by technology - especially technology you have no formal training in (e.g., music training) - is the core of hacking, and I believe that hacking is a form of short-circuiting what H. P. Lovecraft once characterized as humanity's greatest fear: the fear of the unknown. Lovecraft knew that what terrified us the most was something we had no understanding of. He called the unknown the "oldest and strongest" type of fear we, as animals on this planet, experience. My mom's inability to just press buttons on her remote control to see what happens is a good example. In that sense, we do a disservice to all our friends and relatives who look to us to install a new OS on their computer, or open their laptop to pop in a fancy new solid-state drive. We really should be forcing them to do it. I'm convinced three or four positive hacking experiences are all it takes to awaken the slumbering hacker in almost anyone.
I believe my own approach to music has been informed greatly by the hacking movement. When new types of devices started to appear on the market - sequencers combined with synthesizers and samplers - they really were a maze of knobs, flashing lights, and LCD screens, usually accompanied by a technical manual that was anything but easy to parse. The thing is, operating these devices seemed wholly natural to me, and I produced some really great music using loops performed live and recorded directly to MiniDisc (I miss the MiniDisc). Being able to think in abstract ways about the systems these buttons and keys were connected to allowed me to flourish, and the same held true when I moved to software-based loop creation tools (currently Logic Pro X) on the computer. It took me a few years to let go of the hardware - that lovely hardware - but the transition is more or less complete today.
I still possess these instruments, and most people I've shown them to are turned off by the plethora of knobs and sliders. Yet I look back along my personal timeline and I see all of the moments and steps I took which allowed me, ultimately, to question the technology, bypass my fears, and make it work for me.
I think if the hacker is awakened in someone, they begin to future-proof themselves. It's a way of arming yourself in a world driven by technological progress. Thus, 2600 Magazine is still one of the most valuable touchstones in society. You can't know everything (O.K., probably someone out there reading this can, and I hope they use their polymathic ability for the good of humanity), so we must share information. We exist in a web of shared knowledge, and I think that's what the hacking movement is continuing to build. This may seem naïve considering some of the nasty hacks out there claiming information war victims right and left, but I think the hacker eco-web is essentially benevolent. It isn't evil, no more than our natural environment is evil. It becomes a problem because everyone is at a different level of ethical development, and it takes self-reflection and a keen awareness to decode and apply a code of ethics to one's life.
But being a hacker means you have the tools to do just that: apply a code of ethics to your life. Most people never develop a code of ethics. Most people spend a majority of their lives "rationalizing their self interest." They do what they want because they want to, with no thought to how their behaviors, purchases, or actions as hackers affect others. If an ethically informed hacker movement were to ever truly take off (and I feel strongly that it already has within the pages of 2600 Magazine), the persistent labeling of the hacker movement as something to be feared would wither and die, replaced by the idea that being a hacker means you possess an indispensable life skill, essential in dealing with the complexities and challenges of a modern technological world.
James Kracht lives in Phoenix, Arizona. A love of video games drove him into technology at a very young age. He currently makes electronic music under the name Distance to Jupiter, and operates a small business that helps locally-owned restaurants with digital marketing. He published the science fiction novel The Rise and Fall of Shimmerism in 2004, and an illustrated short fiction sequel to that work called Hemegohm's Tendril via the iBooks platform in 2012.
