Gender, power and technology

The masculine world of the hacker

   Hackers, as Roszak indicates, occupy a paradoxical role in technoculture and in popular culture. Hackers can be read both as 'information terrorists'-to be feared-and as evidence of the power of the individual against the system; and against the might of government, bureaucracy and international capital. For some hackers, beating the machine is the ultimate trial of human strength and ability, and they use their skills to demonstrate technological prowess, with a consequent increase in their social standing within hacker culture.

   This dynamic is evident in Sherry Turkle's exploration of hackers at MIT in the early 1980s.

   Turkle identified the MIT culture as one in which mastery and control was seen as core values. 'Though hackers would deny that theirs is a macho culture, the preoccupation with winning and of subjecting oneself to increasingly violent tests make their world particularly male in when he says: 'No doubt principled hackers, who are still with us, will continue to find valuable political applications for computers; their efforts deserve to be supported'. He goes on to sum up his concerns about computers in apocalyptic terms:

   No matter how high the promise of that age [the information age] is pitched, the price we pay for its benefits will never outweigh the costs. The violation of privacy is the loss of freedom. The degradation of electoral politics is the loss of democracy. The creation of the computerized war machine is a direct threat to the survival of our species. It would be some comfort to conclude that these liabilities result from the abuse of computer power. But these are the goals long since selected by those who invented information technology, who have guided it and financed it at every point along the way in its development. The computer is their machine; its mystique is their validation.

   Roszak here addresses the A, B and C elites identified earlier and in discussing the armed forces, bureaucracies (and political systems) and corporate power he has described a very masculine world. The 'principled hackers' praised by Roszak for continuing 'to find valuable political applications for computers' also constitute a very masculine group.

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