He began with a rambling discourse in English about the phone system in the former Soviet Union, information gleaned on an earlier visit there. Their phone network, the Captain reported, was old, of mixed origin, and, he suspected, had been continuously monitored by the KGB. He then began the slow process of demonstrating the newly established Sov-Am Teleport Union, a telephone link that connected San Francisco to Moscow via satel lite. Using a phone on the stage the Captain first dialed San Francisco, where he linked to the Teleport, and then jumped via satellite to Moscow. Unusually for the Captain, he had a purpose to his call. He dialed a number in Moscow, where a group of ten hackers were waiting to address the conference about the underground in Russia.
The Russians then joined a multilingual babble of hackers on the line from a number of other countries, including Germany, France, Kenya, New Zealand, and the U.S. The Captain, reveling in his role as prophet for the whole movement, fielded calls about technology and the ethics of hacking--one caller wanted to know if it would be right to hack into South African computers at the behest of the African National Congress--and then related his own phreaking experiences.
The Captain was in Amsterdam representing what has been called the second generation of hackers. The kids he was talking to, the visitors to the Galactic Hacker Party, were dubbed the fourth generation. Though they had been separated by more than a decade in time and by thousands of miles in geography, the Hacker Party was their meeting place.
The concept of hacker generations was first suggested by Steven Levy, the man who also outlined the philosophy of "hacker ethics." In his book Hackers, he argued that the first generation of hackers was a group of students at MIT in the 1960s who had access to big, expensive mainframes; worked together to produce useful, new software; and, in doing so, bent the rules of the university. More than anything, they believed in freedom of information and unfettered access to technology. They abhorred security to the extent that they made sure they could pick every lock in the building they worked in.
The second generation of hackers, according to Levy, were people like Captain Crunch and Steve Wozniak, as well as the other members of the Bay Area's Personal Computer Company and its successor, the Homebrew Computer Club. These were the people who intuitively believed that the way to drive technology forward was to make the specifications for their machines freely available, a concept known as open architecture. They were hardware hackers, and their achievement can now be seen everywhere in the generality of the ubiquitous PC standard.
Each decade has brought a different twist of geography and motivation to the various generations of hackers: the 1960s hackers, the first generation, were based on the East Coast, developing software; the second-generation, 1970s hackers were on the West Coast, developing hardware.
The next generation, the third, was based both in North America and Europe. These were the kids who had inherited the gift of the personal computer and were copying and selling the first computer games. Their motivation was often a fast buck, and their instincts entirely commercial.
The Captain's audience, the fourth generation, had inherited a world in which technology was rapidly converging around the new standard-bearer, the IBM PC. This new generation shared the same obsessions as their predecessors, but now that they had everything that technology could offer, they hacked merely for the sake of hacking. Hacking had become an end in itself.
For many of the fourth generation, technology was merely a relief from boredom and monotony. Hacking was a pastime that varied the routine of school or university, or a dead-end job. To become proficient, they would typically devote most of their waking hours--80 to 100 hours a week was not uncommon, more time than most people give to their jobs--to working on PCs and combing the international information networks. Hackers, for the most part, are not those with rich and rewarding careers or personal lives.
Of course, hacking is also a form of rebellion--against parents, schools, authority, the state, against adults and adult regulations in general. The rebellion is often pointless and unfocused, often simply for the sake of defying the system. Ultimately there may be no point at all; it has simply become a gesture to ward off boredom or, perhaps, the banality of ordinary life in a structured society.
