At Hopkins, these interests in hacking and hacker politics coalesce around what is often referred to as \u201chacktivism.\u201d 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\u2019s patterns and peculiar significance in an \u201cage\u201d bearing its name. In an exchange between Apple\u2019s co-founder Steve Wozniak and Stewart Brand (the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog<\/em><\/a>), <\/em>Brand quipped that information was not simply a commodity that could be bought and sold: \u201cinformation,\u201d Brand argued, \u201c…wants to be free.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.\u00a0 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 \u201cone-eyed man in the Country of the Blind\u201d and the \u201cperfect bogeyman for Modern Times.\u201d My dissertation explores these and other dynamics in hacker history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cHigh Tech Hayekians: Phil Salin and the American Information Exchange.\u201d 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<\/sup> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the remarkable collections at the Computer History Museum is the \u201chardware archive,\u201d pictured here. For me, this sight is a forceful reminder that history is not just recorded in words \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat resonated with you as you conducted your research?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Do you plan on continuing this work? If so, in what way?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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