Computer Hacking: The Essential Hacking Guide for Beginners (2015)

Chapter 1. Hacking and the Influence of Cyberpunk

Michael Bruce Sterling, the American science fiction author, helped establish the popular genre of Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a subcategory of science fiction that focuses on the role of technology in a future setting. In this literary and cinematic genre, lower-class citizens are depicted, who have access to, and a great understanding of, advanced technology.

Cyberpunk often explores the role of technology during the breakdown of social order, in which there is an oppressive government restricting and damaging the lives of the general population. Furthermore, artificial intelligence (such as robots or intelligent computers) also plays a significant part in Cyberpunk stories, and the Earth is depicted in the near future in a post-industrial dystopia (the opposite of utopia, and therefore a bleak world characterized by oppression and often social unrest.)

The impact of Cyberpunk in the present-day understanding of hacking is considerable. Science fiction is particularly effective when we can recognize our own world within the fictional representation, and with Cyberpunk we can recognize many of the concerns of the contemporary technological age. Lawrence Person (editor of the science fiction magazine Nova Express) describes the typical characters in Cyberpunk:

“Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystropic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous data sphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.”

To a contemporary reader, this description of Cyberpunk characters is reminiscent of how hackers are thought of in the popular imagination, and depicted in books and in films. Therefore, the interplay between Cyberpunk characters and how we view real-life hackers is considerable: in many ways our understanding of what a hacker is like is based on how Cyberpunk characters are depicted in fiction. One example of this is how in Cyberpunk the characters often live in filthy conditions, work at night and sleep all day, and do not have any social life beyond chat rooms.

In the present-day imagination when we think of hackers we will often think of a lonely adolescent boy sitting in a darkened room behind a computer screen. In fact, Michael Bruce Sterling, who was one of the first science-fiction writers who dealt with Cyberpunk, has also shown the most interest in understanding the development of hacking.

Sterling has traced the emergence of hacking, and the associated underground computer network, to the Yippies, a counterculture group who were active in the 1960s and published Technological Assistance Program, a newsletter that taught its readership techniques for unauthorized access to telephones, known as phreaking.

Many of the individuals who were involved in the phreaking community are also an active part of the underground hacking community, suggesting that the relationship between the two groups.