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No. Not those New Bohemians!

As part of my research, I’ve had to dig into the history of hackers. Real hackers, not the the criminals and vandals that the media refers to.

The fundamental reference for hacker history is Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, written in 1984, way before the media started using the word as a synonym for someone who breaks the law.

The book has been around for a while, so I will not bother to review it, other than to say that it still remains the most comprehensive resource for understanding the origins of a movement that has began as a small group of people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, what’s interesting about hackers, is that, in my opinion, they are somewhat unacknowledged heirs to the bohemian tradition.

“How can that be?” you might ask. After all bohemians are night creatures who sit around bars and paint stuff, while hackers (the real ones) are just computer nerds who have no girlfriends and use the terminal! If you get past the stereotypes, though, you can find many similarities between the archetypal bohemians from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and the hackers that emerged from the 1950s and after.

From bohemians to hackers: finding a common ground

I’m lucky. It turns out that one of my PhD supervisors (Americans call them advisors, I believe), Dr Tony Moore, is an authority when it comes to the bohemian tradition, particularly in Australia, so I had (still have) quite a large volume of work to review. So far, here are the common points I’ve been able to find between the two groups:

• Negation of the establishment. In the case of bohemians, it was disdain for all things bourgeois. In the case of hackers, it was a mistrust of authority and aversion towards some forms of capitalism. Such contempt was ironic in both cases, as both bohemians and hackers were a product of that establishment, and largely dependent on it.
• An element of nostalgia towards earlier incarnations of their own group. Tony Moore has an excellent analysis of this phenomenon in Australia’s bohemian scene, but essentially, every new generation that comes around causes the earlier ones to think that they do not embody the real essence of the movement. By calling Richard Stallman “the last of the real hackers”, Levy demonstrates that the same is true for hackers, particularly because younger hackers are thriving, as I’ve come to find out.
• Outsider perception of criminality. Bohemians were seen as outcasts who spent their time in slums and highly doubtful places, in the company of less-than-desirable individuals. Hackers, well, need I say more?
• Fondness of the gift economy. “…bohemians pushed at the limits of disinterested and gratuitous acts”, says Tony Moore, while at the same time being authors of commodities for bourgeois consumption. Likewise, hackers’ behaviour closely follows the academic gift tradition, while many have gone on to found successful corporations and businesses.

So there you have it, folks. This is a very quick summary of the common characteristics I’ve identified so far. Next post will focus on the differences and what makes each group unique.