HACK: An Etymology 

Type ‘hack’ into Google and its first suggestion is ‘hack my life’, which I soon learn is a weekly American how-to series. IMDB informs me that, “TV personality Kevin Pereira and comic Brooke Van Poppelen explore the world of ‘life hacks’: procedures or actions that solve problems, simplify tasks or reduce frustrations.” Returning to the search bar I scan the prompted suggestions for the term ‘Life hacks’. Life hacks for kids, for girls or architects? Being neither a child nor an architect I select ‘for girls’, and end up on Buzzfeed reading ‘27 Life Hacks Every Girl Should Know’. Next time you spill red wine down your shirt, just spill some white over it and let it dry. Put clear nail polish on the inside of your rings to stop your fingers turning green.


See also: Hack, verb, to cut with heavy blows in an irregular or random fashion. A repetitive action followed through haphazardly, violently, with a lack of precision. To hack a path through the forest is to build something that was not there before. A repeated action with the potential to transform.


In 1963, The MIT student paper first cites the word in relation to computing. The article reports of hackers tying up the telephone lines between MIT and Harvard, making long-distance calls and charging them to a local radar installation. Not quite working, but playing with, tinkering. In a spirit of experimentation, ‘hacking’ could be understood as a liberation, overcoming weakness in systems, code. Thus, the hacker was born as a prankster, a skilled character with surplus curiosity who operates across a spectrum of ‘what if’’ to ‘just because’.


See also: Hack, verb, to cut with heavy blows in an irregular or random fashion. A repetitive action followed through haphazardly, violently, with a lack of precision. To hack a path through the forest is to damage something that was there before. A repeated action with the potential to mutilate and destroy.


The end of the Cold War and the rise of the internet left open a whole new territory open in need of antagonists. Over time, hacking has become synonymous with security breaking, trespassing, although, perhaps this darker connotation was always lurking in the belly of the word. In 1975 a glossary for computer programmers¹ lists eight definitions for ‘hacker’, all of them approving aside from the last “ “[deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is a cracker” Cracker, however, never caught on, and from the 1980s mainstream media employed ‘hack’ to describe everything from vandalism to burglary.


See also: Hack, To gain illegal access to a computer network, system.


Every system is susceptible to bugs, not least of all language, and the playful aspect of the hack was soon eclipsed, left in a loop of videogame cheat-codes as it slipped from mischief to criminality. The insertion of ‘illegal’ in the word’s official definition has been a point of contention amongst hackers who see their work as a benevolent practice, but, as OED has noted, no word is fixed, with meaning defined in terms of common usage.


See also: Hacker, noun, A person who uses computers to gain unauthorised access to data.  Bypassing limitations imposed for commercial or political reasons, the hacker can be simultaneously configured as a digital Robin Hood and a nefarious cybercriminal.


In 1995 Angelina Jolie starred alongside Jonny Lee Miller in the American crime drama ‘Hackers’. A group of mischievous but unmalicious teenagers break into the computers of a corporate oil company for fun, to show off and steal small money. When they discover a huge embezzling scheme, however, they end up in a battle against an evil corporate hacker – a turncoat ‘white hat’. The phrases ‘white/black hat’ were appropriated from Western films in an attempt to provide an ethical distinction between hackers. What is the hacker if not a cowboy, testing their skills against one another in some digital rodeo, a figure who is at once the hero and the lawless intruder? 


See also: Hacker, noun, (informal) an enthusiastic and skilful computer programmer or user.


The problem of ambiguity, however, isn’t just linguistic, it also holds real-life consequences². As Professor Biella Coleman observes in the Johns Hopkins Encyclopedia of Digital Textuality,  "Since the mid-1980s, the US government has tended to criminalize hacking under all circumstances, unwilling to differentiate between criminal activities, playful pursuits, and political causes." Coleman underscores the ideological tenor that has latched onto the word, apparent in cases like that of Aaron Schwartz, who faced a $1m fine and 35 years in jail for downloading large numbers of academic papers from JSTOR, a digital library behind a paywall.


See also: Hacker, noun, a person or thing that hacks or cuts roughly. As ‘hack writer’³, as with an axe - force can be sloppy like anything else.


Anonymous is an international collective of hackers and activists that, appositely, evolved from an online organisation looking for ‘lulz’ into a force for social change, or, ‘hacktivism’. There’s an echo of the roguish prankster in their activity, though weaponised as acts of protest. Denial of service attacks, for example, where a website is swamped with so many requests that it inevitably crashes. Hacktivism at its core suggests that the breaking is essential to the building. When does modification become destruction become creation?


Hack, noun, a strategy or technique for managing one's time or activities more efficiently.


Although the ‘black-hat’ connotations still prevail in popular culture, ‘hack’ has regained some neutrality in the form of the ‘lifehack’. This de-fanged version of the term has been harnessed to describe everything from inventive pieces of advice to thinly veiled advertisements and marketing ploys, such as ‘growth hacks’⁴. As the word and its offspring continue to morph and multiply, it’s the context of the hack that positions it along a spectrum of meaning. If the hack is the basic concept; the hacker is defined in terms of it. In his 2004 essay, The Word Hacker, Paul Graham points out that you cannot keep ‘good’ hackers and throw out the bad, rather, the two depend on each other, neutralising one another. Next time you spill red wine down your shirt, just spill some white over it, let it dry.






Notes

1.The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond also describes the hacker as: “A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.”

2.  Arguably the loaded connotations of “hacker” have added ammunition to the prosecution of such figures as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Aaron Swartz.

3.  A person, especially a writer, who does undistinguished or repetitive work, comes from “hackney,” as in a horse or car for hire.

4.  A growth hacker is someone who uses creative, low-cost strategies to help businesses acquire and retain customers.