Decoding the History of Computer Hackers
How did you come to this work?
My work on the history of computer hackers stems from an interest in how technology and politics intersect in U.S. history. Before coming to Hopkins, I worked in journalism at USA Today, where I covered cybersecurity. These experiences solidified my intellectual interests surrounding how modern technology, culture, and politics inform present phenomena. I’m particularly interested in how large technological systems structure our lives – e.g. telephone, transportation networks, etc. — and how people adopt, adapt to, exploit, and resist those systems.
At Hopkins, these interests in hacking and hacker politics coalesce around what is often referred to as “hacktivism.” While this concept is used in contemporary mass and popular media, this concept has slightly deeper roots. makes the rounds in the news today, it has precedents in earlier periods. Consider the 1984 Hackers Conference. There, among leading technologists, engineers, entrepreneurs, programmers, hackers, journalists, and a steady humdrum of others enthused by the promises of networked technologies, debates raged about information’s patterns and peculiar significance in an “age” bearing its name. In an exchange between Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak and Stewart Brand (the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog), Brand quipped that information was not simply a commodity that could be bought and sold: “information,” Brand argued, “…wants to be free.”
Debates about the social, economic, political, usage, and ownership of information are clearly with us today. Then and now, the specter of telephone and computer hackers haunt these debates. In technoscientific communities, the hacker serves, paradoxically, as a badge of honor dispensed from within. While outside these communities, being labeled a hacker can draw scorn and skepticism from others. For some businesspeople, politicians, and futurists, hackers are heralded, paradoxically, as the pioneers charting out new ways of living in an unfolding electronic frontier and the highwaymen, cyber-cowboys, and digital bandits holding up the innocent as they shamble along in the information highway from their home computers, laptops, and cell phones. As the former Grateful Dead lyricist and cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow wrote in 1990, the hacker is simultaneously cast as the “one-eyed man in the Country of the Blind” and the “perfect bogeyman for Modern Times.” My dissertation explores these and other dynamics in hacker history.
What resonated with you as you conducted your research?
Drawing on materials gathered at the Computer History Museum and funds provided by the MSH Summer Research Fellowship, I completed a dissertation chapter and article draft titled “High Tech Hayekians: Phil Salin and the American Information Exchange.” The paper charts how libertarian economics shaped the computerized counterculture and rippled into the professions of computer science and engineering at the close of the 20th century. In the fall of 2023, I presented this paper at the MSH Summer Research Fellows symposium, the Markets & Society conference, and the American Historical Association in San Francisco.
With the MSH support, I spent a week in the early summer of 2023 working in the archives at the Computer History Museum in California’s beautiful Bay Area. While there, I consulted troves of boxes and folders from the Jim C. Warren collection, which holds valuable materials on the history of computer counterculture, computer hobbyists, and Silicon Valley in the 20th century.
Do you plan on continuing this work? If so, in what way?
One of the remarkable collections at the Computer History Museum is the “hardware archive,” pictured here. For me, this sight is a forceful reminder that history is not just recorded in words — but in tools, artifacts, and the technologies we tinker with throughout our lives. This makes for a rich and ever-expanding archive I hope to draw from as my research continues.
