_______ _______ __ / _____/ /__ __/ / / / /__ / / ____ __ __ __ ___ __ __ ____ / / / ___/ __ / / / __ \ / / / / / //__/ / //_ \ / __ \ / / / /____ / /_/ / / /_/ / / /_/ / / / / / / / / /_/ / / / \_____/ \____/ \____/ \____/ /_/ /_/ /_/ \__/_/ /_/ April, 1996 _EJournal_ Volume 6 Number 2 ISSN 1054-1055 There are 914 lines in this issue. An Electronic Journal concerned with the implications of electronic networks and texts. 760 Subscribers in 32 Countries University at Albany, State University of New York EJournal@Albany.edu CONTENTS: [This is line 20] HACKER FOLKLORE ON USENET: A RHETORICAL APPROACH TO HACKER SUBCULTURE by F. Sapienza [sapief@rpi.edu] Editorial Comment -- A Fifth-Anniversary Note [ at line 801 ] Information about _EJournal_ [ at line 826 ] About Subscriptions and Back Issues About Supplements to Previous Texts About _EJournal_ People [ at line 878 ] Board of Advisors Consulting Editors ********************************************************************* ***************************************************************** * This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright * * 1996 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away * * the journal and its contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and * * all financial interest is hereby assigned to the acknowledged * * authors of individual texts. This notification must accompany * * all distribution of _EJournal_. * ***************************************************************** ====================================================================== HACKER FOLKLORE ON USENET: [line 52] A RHETORICAL APPROACH TO HACKER SUBCULTURE by F. Sapienza Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Department of Language, Literature and Communication [sapief@rpi.edu] ABSTRACT Hacker subculture greatly affects computer mediated communication for all users. With the emergence of hacker influence comes increasing interest in the subculture's values, norms, and rules. Stories, and especially folk narratives, are often transmitters of cultural presumptions. This essay argues that hacker stories offer insight into the subculture, and it examines one hacker folk narrative with the goal of learning how hacker identity, conduct, and community are contested, negotiated, and reconstituted through storytelling. INTRODUCTION: THE HACKER INFLUENCE ON COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION The modern growth of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and various other online computer networks has given the "hacker subculture" an unprecedented position of influence over computer mediated communication. Connected to the nerve centers which make the whole net "tick," hacker subculture views itself as having tremendous control over the enterprise. As Martin Lea notes, hacker subculture "is a community of experts who see themselves at the forefront of social as well as technological change. This perception is strongly and repeatedly communicated to one another and largely defines the group in contradistinction from the rest of society" (Lea et al, 1992:93). No longer limited to clandestine programming circles, the influence of hacker norms and values is felt in most every instance of interaction with a computer. [line 89] Recent scholarship has contributed much information about the norms, values, politics and morals of this culture (see Turkle, 1984; Levy, 1984; Perrolle, 1987; Roszak, 1986). While this research approaches the hacker community from psychological, sociocultural and historical perspectives, the research does not fully examine hacker subculture from rhetorical perspectives. One important rhetorical component of any culture is the art of storytelling. Stories function as instruments which organize, store, and transmit knowledge of experience. As Walter Ong states, stories make up the bulk of what constitutes knowledge of human experience: Human knowledge comes out of time. Behind even the abstractions of science, there lies narrative of the observations on the basis of which the abstractions have been formulated. . . . All of this is to say that knowledge and discourse come out of human experience and that the elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it really comes into being and exists, embedded in the flow of time (1982:140). Narrative is an essential component of the construction and transmission of human knowledge. Furthermore, narrative plays an essential rhetorical role in persuading community members towards certain modes of response and action (see Abrahams, 1968; Fisher, 1989). For that reason, any full analysis of a culture requires an examination of its storytelling practices. [line 119] The aim of the present work is to enrich present scholarship about hacker subculture through analysis of the rhetorical practices of a "hacker" folk narrative. In particular, I will analyze one story which appeared on the Usenet newsgroup comp.society.folklore in October 1994. In the words of the group charter, Comp.society.folklore is dedicated to the discussion of "computer and Internet history and legends, both the truly legendary and 'urban legend' style legends" (Group Charter, 11/01/1994). Within this group, participants exchange stories, jests, tall tales and practical jokes. These stories typically involve interaction between hackers and non-hackers, a situation whose contrasts and confrontations bring the hacker identity into sharp focus. For this reason, the stories on this newsgroup are excellent cultural artifacts from which to observe this community. Through an analysis of one of these stories, we will gain a better sense of how language is valued by this community, of what elements, both formal and substantive, are required to construct a hacker story, and of the ways hacker identity, ideology and culture are represented and reconstructed rhetorically through narrative. HACKER ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM AND TRICKSTER STORIES The stories on comp.society.folklore, as David Sewell argues, serve as "vehicles for solidifying the folk culture" of the electronic frontier (1992). They are not poorly written anecdotes; they contain a rich diversity of sophisticated narrative devices. This fact reflects considerable rhetorical skill on the part of the writers -- a skill not always associated with hackers. The individual who relates the story is a frequent participant on Usenet and considers himself a hacker. In his words, a hacker "is a person who likes to get into the trenches, play around and see what they can get the computer to do" (Dan Newcombe, personal correspondence, 4/5/95). This hacker's story falls into a genre that Richard Bauman calls "trickster" stories, the kind built on "complex structures" involving "information management . . . backstage activity, frame manipulation, fabrication, concealment, and differential access to information about what is going on" (1986:35). The following discussion of the story will reveal that the trickster story not only entertains, but serves as moral discourse for the construction of hacker ideals and norms. [line 162] It is important to note that tricks, pranks and practical jokes have a long tradition within hacker subculture. The _New Hacker's Dictionary_ identifies jokes as one of most favored forms of hacker humor (Raymond, 1991:203). Dubrovsky notes, "Pranks, tricks and games are benignly tolerated when not actually encouraged. . . . Mild larceny, such as faking accounts, breaking codes, stealing time, and copying proprietary software, is admired if not regarded explicitly." (Dubrovsky, in Lea et al, 1992:93). The historical origin of these behaviors is quite complex. In part, it is rooted in the hacker ethic "Mistrust Authority -- Promote Decentralization" (Levy, 1984:30). Theodore Roszak states that these ethics have a connection with the "guerilla" hacker subculture of the late 1950s and 1960s, a group of individuals who harbored "anti-establishment, anti- war, pro- freedom, anti- discipline attitudes" (1986:142). Roszak credits these guerilla hackers as having most affected the political image and direction of the computer (138). The hacker subculture's approach toward computer mediated communication, and toward Usenet in particular, became the general public's perception of the Internet: It is a non- authoritarian, open system available for the free, uncensored exchange of ideas. This value is articulated in the hacker dictum: "All information should be free" (Levy, 1984:30). David Sewell outlines the dynamics of this norm: . . . information (both data and text) should flow freely; authority over information systems should be decentralized; the aesthetics of programming (or any other creation; a poem can be a "good hack") is more important than the material uses to which it may be put. . . . The core characteristic of Net governance is that conventions and rules emerge from community practice and consensus rather than being imposed from the top (Sewell, 1992). The spread of these norms has generated considerable debate both among popular media and legislative institutions. Recent obscenity cases on Usenet fueled the debate over the U.S. Communications Decency Act (S 314/HR 1004) in Congress, legislation whose prospect has prompted heated discussion on Usenet and a campaign to stop passage of the bill (see Campaign notice posted to comp.org.eff, 4/5/95). [line 205] Such heated debate about this issue is not surprising. Principal opposition to regulation comes from a culture which prefers "community practice" and "consensus" over hierarchical governance. Passage of such legislation is viewed as a major threat to the fundamental political philosophy of hacker subculture. Preference for a more horizontal versus vertical form of government also explains the importance of enacting tricks in the hacker subculture. While they may function to amuse perpetrators at the expense of victims, tricks also enforce hacker conduct. A community governed by consensus depends on these tricks and the stories about them not just for amusement but for its survival. The story that follows illustrates one narrator's attempt to do just that. A HACKER TRICKSTER NARRATIVE The story to be analyzed is called "USENET/Internet Revenge." It emerged in response to the following post which appeared on comp.society.folklore in October 1994: Strange question, but run with it: What's the best case of someone getting even/exacting revenge on someone else for something that happened on the Internet, or where the revenge took place over the Internet Petty shit like mailbombing someone into oblivion need not apply -- I'm curious what stories and accounts of truly imaginative revenge you can recall. Here is one respondent's revenge story: Lets see. Back in college... (running on a VMS/CMS and MUSIC system on an IBM 3090). There was one kid (freshman) who had planted himself in the computer center. He used two terminals and two accounts, one for telnet, which he used to connect to Muds, and the other for monitoring incoming e-mail, which was a tedious job, as he subscribed to both AD&D-L and STREK-L. It wouldn't have bothered a few of us that much, but he insisted on using the nice terminals, that had some extra keys, extra lines per screen, and did graphics (IBM 3179G terminals). [line 247] Also, the kid never went to classes, so we knew he must be failing. We (being about 3 - 6 people) decided to take it upon ourselves to help this kid pass for the semester (and get him the hell off the terminals.) Here are some of the things that we did that I can remember: 1. Subscribed his account which he used for MUD's to the AD&D, STREK-L, and FREETALK lists, plus a few other ones. We thought it might annoy him out of there...no such luck. 2. One of us self-proclaimed GPA saviours had access to an account that could look up passwords, so she gave us his password. We whipped up a program that looked exactly like the CMS Telnet. It captured his MUD characters name and password, sent that information to another account for out later viewing, wiped out all traces of itself, and caused the terminal to reset itself, as if there was a really odd situation. He then logged back in, telneted and all was fine. 3) Now, armed with this new info, we waited til he left for dinner, which gave us a bit of time. We logged into the MUD he used, and had his character go around attacking random other players, who would fight back and beat the living daylights out of him...or we'd have his character "donate" all of his possessions to other people. Anyway, we destroyed his character. After he went through the shock of seeing what happened, he actually found out who ran the mud, and BEGGED them to restore his character, which they did. It seems we can not win with him. [line 283] 4) Once again getting into his account, we fixed it (using CMS/CP commands) so he couldn't connect to his MUD's. What we did is defined the TAB character [sic] to be . This way, everytime the system sees a . it thinks it's a TAB. This is a major problem for entering IP numbers or hostnames, as they translate to 127001 It would come back saying that the address was not found. He filed a problem report on this one. The sys. admin's response to this report, after doing some poking around was : "Works for me...he must have pissed someone off on the Internet who has cut him off." Not the most correct, but she didn't care if he couldn't get to his precious games. Anyway, this brought us to the end of the first semester. He failed out. He wrote an appeal letter, which was accepted, and came back. Turns out he failed all course, except one, which he got a D- in. He had something like a .3 GPA. The second semester, we had pretty much given up on him, but came up with a few interesting things. 5) You were not allowed to have food or drinks in the computer center. He always did (can't break from mudding to eat/drink, now can we?). We would send him e-mail from some of the student adminstrative accounts we had (I worked there, as well as being a student.) saying no food or drink allowed. He would look around to see if he could see anyone watching him, but he didn't see us (we were good at this.) He wouldn't leave, so we'd send him a second warning, this time threatining [sic] to call security. Sometimes he'd stand right outside the door eating. Once he actually threw his food away. 6) The best thing I remember. Nature called one night, and he had gotten upto take a leak. It was about 8:30, and most people were in class, in dinner, or just plain inebriated. So he would run down the hall to the bathroom. We walked over to his terminal and typed 'kill guard with sword'. Now, in MUDs, when you attack automatic characters, they, and any other automatiac [sic] characters usually attack back - very fierce. When he got back, it told him that he had been killed. He looked around frantically, and then logged off and left (to cry?) He returned a couple hours later though. [line 332] A few other odds and ends: 1) the kid had the palest skin I've ever see 2) along with the greasiest hair 3) Once, the power had gone out in a big way (someone fell into a transformer or something like that.) Anyway, power was out for about 4 hours. Right after it went out, he went running downstairs to where operations was, and asked the operations manager if the 3090 was going to be OK. When she told me about it, she was still laughing. Well, that's as best as I can remember. This was a few years ago. Hmm...reminds me of a roommate I had once that failed out. Spent most of his time playing nintendo/c-128 games. Skipped his Sociology final to solve "Super Mario Brothers." For a 5 page final paper in Creative Writing, he wrote a 43-page definition for a programming language, which he pretty much copied right out of the Turbo Pascal books. Boy, does this stuff bring back memories. Makes me wish I was back in school again. (Dan Newcombe, posted 10/11/94 comp.society.folklore) THE NARRATOR AS CONDUIT OF THE COLLECTIVE TRADITION The narrator's first accomplishment is the construction of his "voice" as a legitimate, responsible and trustworthy member of this discourse community. His choice of certain vocabulary words index his legitimate standing within the "hacker subculture." Terms such as "IBM 3090," "VM/CMS," "CMS/CP" and "MUSIC," unfamiliar to most novice users, are one means by which he constructs his identity as a person who knows what he is talking about. The narrator also implements what might be called a looking- back- with- an- air- of- nostalgia motif, indicated by "Let's see . . . Back in college . . ." and "Boy, does this stuff bring back memories." This technique is part of a time-honored tradition in hacker subculture. As privileged members of the computer elite, they often wax nostalgic about such things as the "old Arpanet days" (posted to comp.society.folklore, 10/16/94). Finally, the narrator adopts the "voice" of the person who originally requested the submission of stories by dropping subjects from sentences, a device called the "pro-drop" parameter (Ferrara et al, 1991:19). Thus we have sentences which begin like, "Subscribed his account..." and "Skipped his sociology final..." [line 381] The borrowing of the requester's voice points out how community rules emerge as the result of discursive interaction between participants. When the narrator drops the subject, he adopts what he perceives is a legitimate way to articulate this kind of story. That legitimacy is reinforced, if not called forth, by the previous poster to the newsgroup. The fluidity of electronic discourse is amenable to the kind of rule-sharing that goes on here. Electronic texts emerge as the collective product of the entire discourse community rather than of one individual. As David Sewell points out, the development of Usenet stories "resembles the evolution of epic in an oral culture: any individual participant is free to alter, supplement, or redirect the narrative, but only those innovations that are accepted by the community survive" (Sewell, 1992:603). Usenet is one arena of computer mediated communication in which this kind of participatory process fosters the creation of new texts. The proper rules for discursive interaction and, to some extent, the direction of a particular narrative, emerge from the more fluid aspects of the medium. The text is not a "closed system" in the sense that it alone relates a single-minded authorial voice whose meaning is necessarily "immanent" upon its completion. Rather, as Douglas Brent argues, the "sliding together of texts in the electronic writing space... [calls for] significantly more effort to keep the ownership of the ideas separate" (1991). The text is owned and sanctioned by the community, and the meaning of that text is shared as it is reinterpreted and reconstituted. In this sense, one can, as Richard Bauman argues, view "the item of folklore as the collective product and possession of society at large, the performer ...[in] the role of passive and anonymous mouthpiece or conduit for the collective tradition" (1986:8). FOLKLORIC NARRATIVE AS MORAL DISCOURSE [line 414] Let us now turn to a structural analysis of the story. As mentioned earlier, the story falls into a genre of narratives called "trickster" stories. The formal structure of trickster stories is comprised of these elements: 1) A description of some user who is misusing the system. 2) A description of the backstage machinations of constructing the trick(s). 3) The implementation of the trick(s). 4) Result of the trick(s). 5) An "evaluative statement" (Bauman, 1986:35; Labov, 1972:363). This story is composed of many shorter trick stories that fit within the larger trickster structure. The description phase occurs in the second and third clauses (the "freshman," "planted himself in the computer center," etc). Next comes the description of several tricks (subscribing to the multiple lists, resetting the terminal and then destroying his character, etc.). Occasionally, the narrator fuses the backstage and implementation elements when the trick fails (e.g., "no such luck," "all was fine"), while in the more successful tricks, the narrator describes the result in greater detail ("BEGGED," filing the report," looking around "frantically"). Interestingly enough, none of the tricks succeed in getting the "kid" "off the terminals," or in helping him to "pass for the semester." Thus the evaluative statements ("It seems we cannot win with him," "pretty much given up on him") function not so much to glorify the success of the tricksters but rather to heighten the impossibility of the task involved. The story does not diminish the effectiveness of the tricks or the craftiness of the tricksters, but rather suggests that their ineffectiveness is due more to the unusual obsession of the "kid." [line 458] Indeed, the physical and behavioral labels cast the narrator's fellow student as an "Other." The casting as other is also accomplished through paralinguistic means. The use of brackets to distance the "(freshman)" from the narrator is a device that prompts readers to recall cultural stereotypes about the ineptitude and immaturity of college freshman. The "freshman" is not equal to the narrator and therefore deserves less humane treatment. The line is now drawn between the heroes and villains: The greasy-haired pale-skinned computer nerd battles the "self-proclaimed GPA saviors" on the battlefield called university computing lab X. Casting the "kid" as a "greasy haired" Other is ironic in light of the fact that most hackers, as Sherry Turkle's work suggests, are conceived as "ugly" men: "Dress, personal appearance, personal hygiene, when you sleep and when you wake, what you eat, where you live, whom you frequent -- there are no rules [for hackers]. At MIT, that community is known as 'computer hackers.' Elsewhere, they are known as 'computer wizards,' 'computer wheels,' 'computer freaks,' or 'computer addicts'" (Turkle, 1984:213). Turkle points out that this indexes a greater social narrative which identifies the mechanical with ugliness, with the unaesthetic. Thus, "In the case of seeing computation as ugly, as perversion, it is carried by taking a special community within the computer-science world and constructing the image of the 'computer person' around it" (1984:200). Turkle notes that at MIT, for instance, this cultural narrative is parodied through the yearly ritual of the Ugliest Man on Campus Contest. The freshman eats, breathes, and lives the computer. For him, as for many hackers, the computer is not just a tool for the accomplishment of an end. The interaction with that tool is the end in itself (Turkle, 200). The "computer hacker" of this story sits in contradistinction from the hacker who is narrating the story. Like the self-mocking parody instigated by the MIT Ugliest Man Contest, this narrative parodies hacker conduct at the risk of mocking the hacker narrator himself. The narrative thus becomes the focal point of tension, the battleground on which hacker identity is contested, negotiated, and reconstructed. [line 493] The trickster story also functions rhetorically to convey values about conduct. It conveys these values in part through entertaining its audience. Thus, the playful dimensions of the story are not mere embellishments but integral to the success in conveying the morals involved. It is in this sense that folkloric narratives like this one can be seen as rhetorical. As Abrahams notes, the narrative: "demands a recognition of an intimate sympathetic relation between a proposed solution of a recurrent societal problem and the movement involved in the artistic projection of that problem. [This linkage is made] not at the expense of the play element of culture, but rather by insisting on the essential utility of the 'playing-out'" (1968:168). Playfulness serves not as an additive but as an essential ingredient in the moral import of this passage. Because of the playful portrayal of these problems, and the moral advice proposed through their rhetorical enactment, audience members are moved towards certain modes of response. THE NARRATIVE AS A CREDIBLE INSTRUMENT FOR MORALIZING For the story to be a credible conveyer of its message, its audience needs to perceive that the elements and events hang together coherently. To accomplish this, the narrator has to organize and present his narrative within a framework of values his audience recognizes -- in this case, values regarding the proper rhetorical construction of such a narrative. In other words, the "true" story in this case will emerge from the effective mixing of its "play" elements and its "literal" elements. This in turn calls for good "performance," a characteristic associated with oral narration but relevant to the fluidity of electronic discourse. Richard Bauman explains: Performance [line 529] represents a transformation of the basic referential... uses of language. In other words, in artistic performance of this kind, there is something going on in the communicative interchange which says to the auditor, "interpret what I say in some special sense; do not take it to mean what the words alone, taken literally, would convey."(1977:9) Good narratives arise from the effective mixture of aesthetic and literal elements, so as to create a coherent and recognizable, and thus credible, set of relationships. But the creation of these relationships and the events depicted depends on how well the story is performed. Thus, again, as Bauman states: the narrated event, as one dimension of a story's meaning, evoked by formal verbal means in the narrative text, is in this respect emergent in performance, whatever the external status of the narrated event may be, whether it in some sense 'actually occurred' or is narratively constructed by participants out of cultural knowledge of how events are -- or are not, or may be -- constituted in social life (1986:6). The author of this story recognizes the relationship between "performing" a good narrative and the actual, "literal" nature of the events. In a private communication, he indicated that he shifted events and embellished characters. He mentioned that the kid who got a D- was perhaps his roommate. Furthermore, the freshman had not "BEGGED them to restore his character" but "just sent an e-mail." And for event "3" of his narrative, when the group destroyed the freshman's MUD character while he was at dinner, the author indicated that the episode might have occurred at a different time: "There were various times we were on as his character, so I may have something listed here that we did at a later time" (4/5/95). [line 565] Despite these embellishments, the author told me that for the most part he considered the events as "true," that he preferred "to remain factual about most things" (4/5/95). His response indicates that his narrative, while true "in spirit," is not necessarily an absolutely accurate account of the event. The author felt free to shift temporal elements and embellish his descriptions of the "kid." These choices were intended to enhance the aesthetic value of the work; they recognize that the "truth" is a function of the interplay of aesthetic and literal elements. A "new" event was reorganized by and emerged from the performance of the narrative, and it then became the "true" event. The credibility of the events in the narrative affects its rhetorical effectiveness. For instance, if audience members are to properly place the "freshman" as the villain and the "GPA saviors" as the heroes, events must hang together in a recognizable, coherent way. This is because the primary aim of the story is to present an allegorical problem situation that calls forth "sympathetic" -- to borrow Abraham's term -- responses from the audience, not to didactically prescribe a set of behaviors. When it is easy to recognize and associate itself with the story's principal characters and events, the audience is likely to accept and adopt the conduct that the story validates. MAKING A CASE FOR ANTINORMATIVE CONDUCT A buried irony in this story is that the tricks are viewed positively even though they did not succeed. The narrator told me in a private e-mail message that the purpose of the tricks was "one of saving this kid." The "save" motive raises an important issue with respect to hacker tricks. Earlier, I mentioned that tricks are traditionally regarded as important cultural artifacts of hacker subculture. But such tricks have been identified as "adolescent" and linked to forms of antinormative conduct ranging from flaming (Lea et al, 1992:93) to computer crime (Perrolle, 1987:97; Stoll, 1991). But the association with criminal and antinormative conduct does not sit well with most hackers. Those interviewed by Sherry Turkle expressed dismay "that their vocation has been tainted with the image of 'computer crime'" (Turkle, 1984:233). The author of the narrative we are considering bristles at the association of criminality with hacking: [line 609] The media seems to think that a hacker is someone who steals creditc [sic] cards, breaks into computers, etc... I guess in a sense that is hacking as it is pushing the limits of what can be done, but personally I tend to think of them as assholes. Hacking should be non-destructive, except perhaps to your own stuff (ie. you shouldn't cancel someones [sic] credit cards just to see if you could do it, but if you happen to fry you [sic] video card while playing around, that really doesn't hurt anyone else (Dan Newcombe, personal correspondence, 4/5/95). This declaration strongly implies that hackers by and large are aware of and able to function within accepted social boundaries. But inside their own, smaller community they want to enforce their own norms by their own methods -- including the kinds of "tricks" narrated above. I have already discussed the linkage to guerilla hacker norms informed by the anti- establishment atmosphere of the 1960s. Other relatively "horizontal" organizing constructs include Usenet and the Unix operating system. Usenet was created to let the developers of Unix share programming ideas, problems, and solutions. Both Usenet and Unix were to serve as environments "around which a fellowship could form" (Unsworth, 1995:6). The desire for fellowship mirrors the technical organization of the Unix system itself. Unix does not need rigid, hierarchical operating structures like those found in the MS-DOS system. It is much more "open," permitting users a wide range of alternatives for modification and customization of the operating environment. As one of the original developers of Unix noted, Unix grew from the ground up rather than "by some major management figure sitting at his desk" (Unsworth 1995:5). [line 644] The absence of hierarchical rigidity is clearly a valued characteristic of hacker subculture. And flexible, "horizontal" social organization requires a set of self- governed procedures for policing improper hacker behavior. Such procedures are illustrated in the Hacker Narrative. Casting the freshman as an Other indicates that he is the transgressor of proper computer behavior, and that the narrator is justified in trying to "save" him. Moving the transgressor outside the sphere of hacker fellowship is the equivalent of putting the dunce cap on him and sending him to the front of the room. He is placed in a "liminal" -- an in-between -- state, separated from the good hackers (i.e., the GPA-saviors). Because he is no longer a fellow hacker colleague, tricking him with the hope of "reaggregating" him into normal hacker conduct is appropriate behavior. (The terms "liminal" and "reaggregating" are borrowed from Victor Turner's _The Ritual Process_ (1969).) Coming to the defense of these pranks implies awareness that they might be perceived by outsiders as wrong, even though the hacker subculture may be tolerant of them. The trickster element of hacker subculture must be understood in terms of the sociocultural need to preserve their community. The stories about such tricks, with their implications about who is Out and whose behavior deserves applause, are a gentle but powerful part of the "enforcement" structure of the "horizontal" hacker subculture. The fact that the story is narrated within a kind of "playground" frame of language (delimited by the "USENET/Revenge" thread) further suggests that the narrator and audience recognize that such trickery is appropriate only in certain special contexts. But if someone violates the context, then, Who knows? -- perhaps that person too will become the next Outsider in a USENET/Revenge narrative. CONCLUSION [line 677] This paper argues that stories like the Hacker Narrative are essential artifacts for examining the hacker subculture. Through examination of these stories, one comes to a fuller understanding of how hacker identity, conduct, and community are contested, negotiated, and reconstituted. Such understanding is important because the hacker subculture greatly affects network environments for all of us, not just hackers. Even though there has been much attention to the psychological and historical dimensions of hacker subculture, there is a need for more analysis of the linguistic norms of this culture, and especially its storytelling. This particular narrative shows that "pranks" need to be understood within the larger sociocultural ethos of proper computer-using behavior, as defined by the hacker subculture. Rather than as immature jokesters, the "guardians of the enterprise" see themselves as members of a horizontally governed community and therefore both responsible and authorized to correct misbehavior. In this sense, the story's "mild larceny" is far from illegal within the hacker subculture. Such trickery, and the stories about it, are necessary for its survival. REFERENCES Abrahams, Roger D. "Introductory Remarks to a Rhetorical Theory of Folklore." _Journal of American Folklore_. 81:143-58, 1968. Babcock, Barbara. "The Story in the Story: Metanarrative in Folk Narrative." Richard Bauman, ed. _Verbal Art as Performance_. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1977. Bauman, Richard. _Story, performance, and event: contextual studies of oral narrative_. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1986. ---------------------. "Verbal Art as Performance." _American Anthropologist_. 75:300-21, 1977. Bolter, David Jay. _Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing_. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Brent, Doug. "Oral Knowledge, Typographic Knowledge, Electronic Knowledge: Speculations on the History of Ownership." _EJournal_. V1N3, University at Albany: New York, 1991. (http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/ejournal.html) Burke, Kenneth. _Counter-Statement_. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1953. Ferrara, Kathleen, Hans Brunner and Greg Whittemore. "Interactive Written Discourse as an Emergent Register." _Written Communication_. 8:1:8-34, 1991. Fisher, Walter R. _Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action_. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Herring, S. "Politeness in Computer Culture: Why Women Thank and Men Flame." Forthcoming. Bucholtz, Mary, Anita Liang and Laurel Sutton, eds. _Communicating In, Through, and Across Cultures: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley Women and Language Group_. Labov, William. "The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax." _Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular_. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1972. Lea, Martin, Tim O'Shea, Pat Fung and Russell Spears. "'Flaming' in computer-mediated communication: observations, explanations, implications." Martin Lea, ed. _Contexts of Computer-Mediated Communication_. New York: Harvester Wheatleaf, 1992. Levy, Steven. _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Newcombe, Dan. Personal Correspondence, 4/5/1995. Ong, Walter, S.J. _Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word_. London: Methuen, 1982. Perrolle, Judith. _Computers and Social Change: Information, Property, and Power_. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1987. Raymond, Eric S, ed. _The New Hacker's Dictionary_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Roszak, Theodore. _The Cult of Information_. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Sewell, David. "The Usenet Oracle: Virtual Authors and Network Community." _EJournal_. V2N5, University at Albany: New York, 1992. (http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/home.html) Stoll, Cliff. _The Cuckoo's Egg_. New York: Pocket Books, 1990. Turkle, Sherry. _The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit_. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Turner, Victor. "Liminality and Communitas: Form and Attributes of Rites of Passage." _The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Unsworth, John. "Living Inside the (Operating) System: Community in Virtual Reality." T. Harrison and T. Stephen, eds. _Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century University_. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, in press. -------------------------------------------------------------------- F. Sapienza Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Department of Language, Literature and Communication [sapief@rpi.edu] [line 789] -------------------------------------------------------------------- [ This essay in Volume 6, Number 2 of _EJournal_ (April, ] [ 1996) is (c) copyright _EJournal_. Permission is hereby ] [ granted to give it away. _EJournal_ hereby assigns any and ] [ all financial interest to F. Sapienza. This note must ] [ accompany all copies of this text. ] ===================================================================== EDITORIAL COMMENT -- A Fifth-Anniversary Note [line 801] When _EJournal_ was getting organized, starting in 1989, we had a list of things we wanted to try. Some of them, like e-mailing our texts in ASCII and only ASCII, look old fashioned. Others, like questioning the ways copyright law restricts dissemination of "intellectual property," are still pertinent. Now, in our sixth year of actual publication, we are still committed to pondering the habits, like copyright, that our culture has been chained to by the technology of paper-based memory. Because _EJournal_'s "field" does not exist on paper, has no conventional history, we cannot be "academic" in quite the same ways as traditional journals. It will be interesting to comment on and participate in the changes in Research and Scholarship and Criticism that we will watch as societies move beyond paper for some of their recording. The traditional criteria of academic worth -- Truth, Originality and Importance -- may dwindle in significance, the way literary concordances have stopped looking like formidable accomplishments. =================================================================== [line 824] ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------ I N F O R M A T I O N --------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- About Subscribing and Sending for Back Issues: In order to: Address: With this message: Subscribe to _EJournal_: LISTSERV@albany.edu SUB EJRNL YourName Get Contents/Abstracts of previous issues: LISTSERV@albany.edu GET EJRNL CONTENTS Get Volume 5 Number 1: LISTSERV@albany.edu GET EJRNL V5N1 Send mail to our "office": EJOURNAL@albany.edu Your message... --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- http://www.hanover.edu/philos/ejournal/home.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- About "Supplements": [line 845] _EJournal_ continues to experiment with ways of revising, responding to, reworking, or even retracting the texts we publish. Authors who want to address a subject already broached --by others or by themselves-- may send texts for us to consider publishing as a Supplement issue. Proposed supplements will not go through as thorough an editorial review process as the essays they annotate. ------------------------------------------------------------------- About _EJournal_: _EJournal_ is an all-electronic, e-mail delivered, peer-reviewed, academic periodical. We are particularly interested in theory and practice surrounding the creation, transmission, storage, interpretation, alteration and replication of electronic "text" - and "display" - broadly defined. We are also interested in the broader social, psychological, literary, economic and pedagogical implications of computer- mediated networks. The journal's essays are delivered free to Internet addressees. Recipients may make paper copies; _EJournal_ will provide authenticated paper copy from our read-only archive for use by academic deans or others. Writers who think their texts might be appreciated by _EJournal_'s audience are invited to forward files to ejournal@albany.edu . If you are wondering about starting to write a piece for to us, feel free to ask if it sounds appropriate. There are no "styling" guidelines; we try to be a little more direct and lively than many paper publications, and considerably less hasty and ephemeral than most postings to unreviewed electronic spaces. Essays in the vicinity of 5000 words fit our format well. We read ASCII; we continue to experiment with other transmission and display formats and protocols. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Board of Advisors: Stevan Harnad University of Southampton Ann Okerson Association of Research Libraries Joe Raben City University of New York Bob Scholes Brown University Harry Whitaker University of Quebec at Montreal --------------------------------------------------------------------- SENIOR EDITORS - April, 1996 [line 886] ahrens@alpha.hanover.edu John Ahrens Hanover dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary kahnas@jmu.edu Arnie Kahn James Madison richardj@bond.edu.au Joanna Richardson Bond ryle@urvax.urich.edu Martin Ryle Richmond ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Consulting Editors - April, 1996 bcondon@umich.edu Bill Condon Michigan djb85@albany Don Byrd Albany folger@watson.ibm.com Davis Foulger IBM - Watson gms@psu.edu Gerry Santoro Penn State nakaplan@ubmail.ubalt.edu Nancy Kaplan Baltimore nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs RIT r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State ray_wheeler@dsu1.dsu.nodak.edu Ray Wheeler North Dakota srlclark@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool twbatson@gallua.gallaudet.edu Trent Batson Gallaudet wcooper@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta -------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Ted Jennings, emeritus, English, Albany Editorial Asssociate: Jerry Hanley, emeritus, Theater, Albany -------------------------------------------------------------------- University at Albany Computing and Network Services --------------------------------------------------------------------- University at Albany, SUNY. Albany, New York 12222 USA