The Organisation of the Sydney Computer Underground
or Virtually Grounded

A neo-institutionalist study of the computer hackers of Sydney, Australia.

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for an
Honours Degree in Bachelor of Arts

The Department of Social Work, 	    University of Sydney	                         
Social Policy & Sociology 

Jennifer Ogilvie

October 1999

Chapter 1  The Art of Mistrust 			
It is a rare story of a hacker's education that does not include being trained by more experienced hackers or drawing on the collective wisdom of the hacking community through online information. (Jordon & Taylor 1998: 6)

   Social theory of the Internet is in its early stages. The existing theoretical foci is fairly restricted but has born impressive results. There is some literature using the work of Bourdieu on cultural capital (Lawley 1994, 1995b). There has been use of Foucault’s technologies of the self (Aycock 1995) and discipline and the docile body (Wahl 1993), his work on punishment (Reid 1994) and technologies of domination (Poster, 1990). Most indepth use of sociology respecting the Inet uses Goffman’s theory on presentation of self (Mukerij & Simon 1998; Chandler 1998; Epperson n.d.; Giese n.d.; Simon 1991; Galimberti & Riva 1997). This thesis investigates what kinds of applications neoinstitutionalist organisation theory (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, 1991) might have for virtual communities. 

  There is extremely little social research that deals with the social organisation of hacking that is not totally superficial theoretically. Most work on hackers is written by journalists, or middle-level sociology of law and the Internet (Ludlow 1996; Spafford 1997; Denning 1996; Simons 1985; Platt 1996; Negroponte 1995), or unsociological hacker personality profiles by psychologists of computer science (Turkle 1984, 1996; Lupton 1995; Sofia 1993 Giuseppe & Galimberti 1997). There is just one criminological study (Goldpac n.d.). There are a handful of honours theses on hacker subculture (Rasmussen & Hapnes 1991; Denning 1997; Meyer 1988) and two analysing media representations of hackers (Chandler 1996; Blake 1994). There is a real need for a sociological understanding of hacker collective identity. Applying institutionalist organisation theory to the study of hacker collective identity promises to yield profitable research. 

  This thesis investigates the uses of DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983, 1991) work on institutional isomorphism to help analyse aspects of the organisation of Sydney hacker subculture. The neoinstitutionalist approach might go some way to understanding the lack of variation in the international hacking culture, as well as the relationship of the Sydney computer underground to their overseas counterparts.  Normative and mimetic pressures towards homogeneity and the process of institutional structuration of a mature organisational field might help explain the similarity between Sydney computer underground and Russian hacking subculture or American hackers, etc. DiMaggio and Powell are interested in the absence of variety in organisational models. That the Sydney hacker scene resembles its brethren in places are different as Finland, Bulgaria, Israel, Germany, Britain, etc., is nothing remarkable according to Subculture Theory (Cohen 1955; Clark et al 1975, Hebdige 1988) which takes style as an a priori condition for subcultures, but using neoinstitutionalism, the homogeneity becomes the object of investigation. Interviews with Sydney hackers attended to the ways hacker collective identity can be understood in terms of legitimacy – resulting in normative homogenisation - and field uncertainty - resulting in mimetic modeling after communities or groups that are perceived to be successful. 

  There are, of course, many other ways to approach the study of hacking communities. The hacking culture could be studied using Social Movements theory; Rosteck’s (1994) thesis maintains that hacking can clearly be considered a social movement according to Stewart, Smith,
and Denton’s (1984) criteria. But the reality is much more ambiguous, according to Jordon & Taylor (1998). As there are no formal ceremonies to pass or ruling bodies to satisfy to become a hacker, hacking shares the characteristics ascribed to many social movements of being an informal network rather than a formally constituted organization and, as such, its boundaries are highly permeable, they observe. However, hackers may form groups within the overall loose structure of the hacking community and these may aspire to be more formally organised; Jordan and Taylor suppose their fluidity and high turnover is a result of the pressures of law enforcement; any successful hacking group is likely to attract sustained attention at some point (1998: 9). A contention of this paper is that computers hackers stand halfway between a subculture and a social movement. Hackers are especially deserving of the attention of sociologists of social movements because they regard themselves part of a “local scene” and as part of “an international community”, thereby occupying that moment between subculture and social movement. Hackers offer an opportunity to study the tension between local community and belonging to a global movement: “The `hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures” (The Jargon File); “we view ourselves as part of a community and that community being the Internet” (AntiOnline FAQ).

   Resource Mobilisation Theory (RMT) focuses on the structure of professional social movements organisations, while New Social Movements theory focuses on the processes of collective identity and symbols. It is possible neoinstitutionalism potentially possesses both focuses, as an integrated theory. When RM social movements approaches are not theoretically self-sufficient (Kitschelt 1991: 324), and RM analysis would add a strong, concrete descriptive base to New Social Movements (NSM) studies which often seem to float on air (Mayer & Zald 1991: 351-352), DiMaggio and Powell’s methodology recognises the need to rectify the split between more interpretative actor–focused micro approach and more macro structural institution focused theory, neoinstitutionalism may promise to approach a more coherent methodology. Although existing social movements literature provides numerous typologies, they have not been placed in theoretical program to link actor oriented, organisational, and structural approaches (Kitschelt 1991: 344). A potential solution to the problematic in combining the quantitative research of RM and qualitative methods of NSM theory is presented by DiMaggio and Powell’s integrated model. Neoinstitutionalism provides a definition of collective identity for social movements that is not caught in the structure/agency divide which is proposed by defining the appropriate level of abstraction (Jordan 1995: 675). 
What is needed is more systematic, qualitative fieldwork into the dynamics of collective action at the intermediate meso level. We remain convinced that it is the level at which most movement action occurs and of which we know the least. (McAdam, McCarthy, & Zald 1998: 729, my italics)

Studying institutions which are an analytic bridge between society and the individual promises to integrate the structuralist RM focus and constructivist NSM studies’ focus, heading towards the potential of a truly multidimensional theory (cf. Alexander 1988). 

   Yet hackers are a sub-culture with a difference. Does the fact this group interacts via electronic media mean that their structure radically differ from traditional sub-cultures? Does going digital change the organising principle of a collective in a way that alters group identity in some novel fashion? There is much to be gained by understanding the ramifications for organisation when this group straddles both the real world in the suburbs of Sydney and virtual non-place. This hybrid virtual subculture offers a research chance to observe emergent social structures in the making. This thesis investigates firstly how the structure of hacker subculture is changed by interacting electronically and second, how this group as a virtual community is affected by interaction in the paved Sydney streets. The interest of the interviews was discovering how online behaviour is affected by socialising off-line. The research demonstrates the way  virtual communities are situated imaginatively is affected by their physical geography. The extant literature on cyberspace is confident that the Internet represents a totally new form of society and self-hood. However, it seems to me that virtual reality exhibits the same constraints of normal social interaction, therefore online collectives are subject to regular array of cultural institutions, including nationality. In the modern era, cultural and social structural factors have converged to create and disseminate the notion of national identity and make it central as well as a major genus of identity claim and source of political mobilisation (Calhoun 1993: 315-317). I believe that these institutions would make the local structure of hacker virtual community differentiated from Yugoslavia hacker subculture or the computer underground in Detroit. But dwarfing these processes of diversification  are two opposite forces at play.

  According to theorists of electronic communication (e.g. Kiesley,  Siegel & McGuire 1991; Jones  1995; We 1993; McRae 1995; Quittner 1994; Lundmark & Kraut n.d.; Condon Claude 1996; Perrolle 1991; Sproull & Faraj 1996), we should predict the homogeneity of virtual communities but for reasons other than institutional isomorphism. CMC sociology maintains that the structuring of behaviour of narrow-bandwidth interaction are inbuilt in teleconferencing software design. Hence CMC sociologists provide a particular type of explanation for why we would observe conformity in hacking communities across national borders. The question then becomes whether CMC theory contradicts or supplements organisational analysis. In order to understand how this semi-virtual collective operates, we will need to synthesize literature on virtual communities and neoinstitutionalism. 

  The consensus in the literature on the Net is that the individual is somehow “liberated” from the restriction of embodiment so that users experience multiple selves unique to hypertext reality and somehow discontinuous with the fleshy self (Kroker & Kroker n.d.;  Mazur 1994; Maranda 1994; Hamman 1996; Harris 1994). Virtual Reality may be a disembodied, medium but CMC still conforms to the constraints of social interaction as a negotiated order and the presentation of self (cf. Goffman 1956/1973). Grasping the persistence of embodied identity online means that the effect of culture on interaction alters the construction of a virtual organisation. If, for example, nationality is one of the most important institutions for identity, then being Australian should make the Sydney computer underground look quite different to the development of hacker subcultures of U.S. cities or Eastern Europe. Therefore the location of a hacking underground should have a determining role to play in the form of local hacker social organisation.   

  The other force homogenising hacker culture is globalisation, especially those feature organised around the mass media and telecommunications. Hackers are an excellent case-study to observe the twin forces of localism and globalism at work in the electronic environment. They use completely unregulated community/pirate media that is at one time extremely localised - local call BBSs – and, at the same time, an unparalleled version of international non-broadcast forum on the Net. As BBSs are used for both learning and socialising this should intensify the influence of (national) culture institutions. However, the larger significance of this research on hackers from their role in predicting future international relations. Telecommunications and Information Technology have conspired in world globalisation, and hackers have full run of its networked global playgrounds. Yet BBSs represent fully interactive regional/community media that embody globalisation’s reactive force, localism. International Relations studies might also benefit from neo-institutionalism’s concern with symbolic systems and the legitimacy functions of organisational form, as well as its sensitivity toward cause-and-affect relationships between macro politics and the micro group behaviour. For our purposes, the consideration of large scale mode of politics which the field of International Relations supports the growing trend in neoinstitutionalism for the expansion of analysis to include the national polity (Jepperson & Meyer 1991; Orru, Biggart & Hamilton 1991) as well as very much smaller group dynamics (Jones, Moore & Snyder 1988; Friedland & Alford 1991; DiMaggio 1988). 

  Hackers reflect, then, broader developments in the modes of social organisation with the introduction of electronic communications. The way the computer underground has evolved echoes the changing character of authority on the Internet. This case-study suggests that institutional regulation has moved from coercive State administration to “soft” institutions of legitimacy and distributed networks of affiliation. The developments of the electronic groups organising into interpretive communities might then serve as an indicator of a future of form of politics. I argue that the observed changing structure of computer underground illustrates the more general move from centralised formal government towards diffuse normative epistemological communities and possibly civil society on the Net. Processing incredible amounts of information and accelerating learning - because of the culture of competition – means that hackers are short on time. They need systems of collating and interpreting the data. The hacker ethos of sharing knowledge generates hacking knowledge economies that are very efficient at gathering and filtering hacking information. These resource centres, along with hacker peer networks, systematise and order massive amounts of data and hacking software, and news collects in a virtual gift-economy (Kollock 1998) that deals in data. The overwhelming quantities of data need to be translated by local sensemaking systems, which evolve into electronically localised regimes/cultures of information management. Being a heavily policed deviant community, these databases form institutions of counter-cultural knowledge. 

  Additionally, these electronic hubs of hacker epistemological communities are also affected by another dimension of computer mediated communication that makes them integrate with physically localised communities. Narrow bandwidth means that hackers are without conventional indictors of credibility. The absence online of multi-dimensional interaction catalysed by the dangers of hacking and evading online policing, as well as subcultural competitiveness (due to distinction, cf. Bourdieu 1984) means that hackers are short on trust. Starved in CMC of “signal depth”, hackers need alternative trust strategies. The importance of trust in this virtual community has resulted in a confirming reliance on proximity. Contradicting the decorporalisation argument of cyberspace literature, hackers in fact value personal connections and face-to-face meetings in a new way, there is in fact a heightened sense of the importance of presentation of self. All hacker interaction is highly reflexive. The significance within hacker culture of conferences, of home-pages, and on-site visits, indicates a surprising by-product of virtual communities not accounted for by the computer-mediation communication literature. The significance of this is that hackers may be a fast-track modeling of new forms of sociality developing with the growth of Internet. A subculture that trades in information may prefigures a world future when electronic communications have been thoroughly integrated, in the same way tele-communications have transfigured modern society.
 
  Space is completely obliterated in the literature on cyberspace, only present as an absence. The sociological literature on hackers is the very last place geography seems to matter. The whole thrust of the field is that this is a phenomenon beyond place: the disembodiment of virtual reality is symbolised by the icon of the hacker. My contention is that virtual communities are situated within and interacts with real space and in new ways that strongly affects virtual organisation. The role of physical locations as index/points of reference - the importance in hacker media of conventions like HOPE (see Appendix H), DEFCON, Hacking-in-Progress in Holland, and in Sydney, SECCON, 2600 meetings (see Appendix E), BBS parties, hacker groups - goes unexplained by the existing writing on virtual communities. The contention of this thesis is that these offline interaction possibly serve three functions for hackers. One, the significance of the cities or countries of origin of hackers and hacker groups in hacker print: most famously, MOD from Queens, New York, Legion of Doom from Texas, Boston group, L0pht, the British group 8lgm suggests the use as a point of reference, a way to create scale in the undifferentiated non-space of the Internet hacking community. Two, for all-important networking for information and friends. Three, for managing risk: hackers meet with one another to establish trust. 

   Chapter 2 reviews the literature on virtual communities to argue contrary to postmodernist accounts of the Net (Kroker & Weinstein 1994; Jamison 1994; Kellner 1992; Avillez & Sondheim 1997; Dery, 1996; O'Donnell 1999; Wolmark 1999; Slouka 1995; Jones, 1997), that cyberspace environments exhibit largely the same social processes that ground traditional interaction and social organisation. It then goes on to examine the relevance of DiMaggio and Powell’s model of institutional isomorphism for studying computer hackers. Chapter 3 investigates the consequences of applying neoinstitutionalist methodology to the computer underground as well as the research problems involved in researching a “deviant” subculture. The product of this analysis is presented with the interview material in Chapter 4.  While the outcomes of this approach support the utility of DiMaggio and Powell’s isomorphism model to subcultural institutional fields, there were a set of results that remain unexplained by this analysis. In the Discussion, it is suggested that neoinstitutionalism’s insights can be developed further by supplementing DiMaggio and Powell’s work with theory pertaining to organisation and electronic communications. Nigel Thrift’s 1996) observations of developments in the digitalised stockmarket strongly parallel the organising tendencies observed among hackers in the research. Using Thrift’s discussion of the formation of interpretive communities, the analysis using neoinstitutionalist methodology can be pushed further, enough to account for the transformation of organising practices on becoming a purely digital economy. 

Chapter 2 Towards Neoinstitutionalism; From
   Anarchy to Theorising Hackers

Perhaps the World Wide Web will be like really good crack: cheap and affordable until you’re thoroughly addicted, then you wake up one day to discover the meter ticking and you’ve got an insatiable hunger for online infomercials. (Jay Kiney in Cyberfutures: 9)

2.1	 Far From the Madding Crowd: Community Online

Hard-wired to the speed-backbone of the universal BBS and addicted to a diet of fibre-optics, the "windowed" body would become that which it always thought it was only using: a file-transfer function, … high-performance editing studios. (Kroker & Weinstein 1994: 7)

   The one study of hacking settings on the Net (Serpentelli n.d), found only that hackersheavenMOO and #hack were “intimidating, and hostile in atmosphere and unfriendly toward newcomers” (21).  If we want to understand what socialising on BBSs and IRC means for hacker subcultures we need to look at the broader Computer Mediated Communications (CMC) literature which examines how technology structures social interaction in virtual communities. 

  Conferencing groupware commits to text the ephemeral oral culture (Lawley 1992; Ziv 1996). Using BBSs and message lists turns casual social exchanges into a retrievable text, a public record that can be re-read and examined. Text-based communication seems to lend a focus on the message instead of authority, so that CMC is often believed to facilitate democratic communication (Ogden 1994, Bollier n.d., Stivale 1996). However other CMC studies show otherwise (Zuboff 1988; Mantovai 1994; Kling 1993), suggesting that we should conceive the computer-human interface as occurring in a context of power and status relationships (Perrolle 1991: 360). These studies found that CMC accentuated the influence of hierarchy in decision-making, computer-mediated groups had trouble reaching consensus, took longer to make decisions, there was greater choice shift, opinions became polarised and aggressiveness was exacerbated and others were perceived more negatively (Kiesley et al. 1991: 336-9). The impersonality of the exchange which depersonalises negotiations and the absence of immediate social feedback produces weak normative regulation; hackers are understood to be “a simplified social scene, a ‘boys club’ characterised by low self-reflexivity” (Sofia 1993: 77) 

   Another effect is the omission of unnecessary linguistic material, participants preferring for statements that accomplish both orientation and turn-management functions, which make what they do and say more efficient (Cech & Condon 1996). Like the dialogue in a radio play, conversationalists must include many more references in their ordinary talk to the current status of objects and the presence or absence of people in order to maintain orientation and sustain a convincing sense of as-if-reality (Lindlof & Shatzer 1998: 178). How MUD participants develop a intelligible cooperative narrative is thought to be possible because of the real-time feedback loop of CMC (Giese n.d.; Clodius 1994). A greater sense of virtual co-presence (cf Goffman 1967) in chat rooms is created by the use of back channels through paged dialogue, people paging are not felt to “idle together” (Cherny 1995). There is collaborative play with imaginary objects evoked by contextual statements, often for humorous effect, which creates a feeling of interactional presence. 

  Opinion is mixed on how strongly software determines interaction. But in studies of cross-cultural CMC software, the American-biased management culture assumed in teleconferencing programmes is very noticeable when used by Japanese corporations (Aoki 1994; Ishii 1995; other cultures: Meagher et al 1996; Ma 1996). However, individuals behaving in physical or mediated environments still have a wide range of behavioral choices within the overall constraints. With a group,  “the situation is even less deterministic” (Lawley 1993: 6). 

  The significance of CMC really concerns group dynamics. For the adept, the text environment is not a hindrance; rather, mastery of manipulating minimal cues for greatest effect is half the fun, the other half is managing it with other people: the appeal of participatory culture (Bruckman 1992). Studies of MUD sex show that beyond convenience, the attraction lies in the fact that virtual reality becomes – exactly because it is text (linguistically) based – often more intimate than real-time sex (Gilber 1995: 11), the collaborative work in “overcoming and fighting bandwidth” (Hamman 1996):
the absence of actual bodies and the anonymity makes it more intense … Rather than a sensory void, the split can be described as a highly charged space, the delirious, lacerating edge of experience between the pleasure of the text and the point at which all language fails. (Gilber 1995:  20-21)

CMC, originally cold and alienating (Walther 1992), has become considered, in McLuhan's (1964) terms, a "cool" medium, one which is high in participation or completion by the audience; 
People become highly emotionally involved in their online interactions. Some people meet and fall in love online. Participants in "flame wars" report, anecdotally, that their adrenaline levels increase as if they're preparing for a physical battle. (We 1993: 14)

CMC induced behaviour in laboratory conditions crystallise into nettiquette conventions on the Net. Hackers are most familiar with the use of CMC technology – spamming, e-mail bombing, viruses -as a range of expression. The to-and-fro of email has spawned the ‘rant’
demented soliloquies that elevate soapbox demagoguery to a guerilla art form, characterised by fist-banging punctuation, emphatic capitals, and kill-‘em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out rhetoric patented by Hunter S. Thompson, (5) 

encouraged by the anonymity, the polarisations of opinion, the depersonalisation of the exchange, which means that hacker message writing especially takes on these characteristics and they get elevated to the status of hacker subculture style (see Appendix D for examples  of “warez-speak,” especially the hacked New York Times site). CMC vitriol becomes embodied as a hacker speech affectation, and hacker e-mail writing has been noted to be “strongly worded, and often insulting” (Taylor 1997), with the effects of CMC entering the “hackish” lexicon. `The usual flamage' describes high-noise, low-signal statements, for example, given in The Jargon File, which notes elsewhere, “the jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one.” The development of hacker virtual communities must be somehow affected when disembodied, sometimes pseudonymous combatants tend to feel that they can hurl insults with impunity (or at least without fear of bodily harm) (Dery 1994: 1).

  Do CMC groups even qualify as a community? Pro-virtual community pundits are basically arguing that over time online population relationships becomes complex and a community memory develops, kinships form and that sometimes, MUDs, IRC groups and mailing lists can display  the for conditions ‘community’; civility, self-regulation and reciprocity (Kollock 1998; Kollock & Smith 1996; Rheingold 1992; Mukerij & Simon 1998). The other claim central to the VC subscribers is that the online selfhood is an extension of the embodied self; 
 
Yet for hackers that spend most of their waking hours interacting in electronically generated environments, the distinction between "real life" and "a game" is uncomfortably loose. One has only to witness the inflamed political battles between wizards to realize that power, prestige, and friendship in virtual communities are just as real as in the terrestrial plane. (Ito n.d.: 8) 

The theory is that although such communities may well be formed in novel ways, they are not somehow ‘unreal’ because of that. What makes a community vital to its members is their treatment of the communications as meaningful and important (Poster 1995a: 36).

  However many believe it is an aimless connectedness (Jones 1997: 17). Clifford Stoll (1990) wondered about the hacker he was tracking over a year when “bit by bit, my days dribble way, trickling out my modem,” a comment, Jones has written, “summed up the backlash”. Ultimately, VC critics argue a real difference is made by non-presence. The absence of long-term consequences qualitatively changes behaviour. When people are bound together in physical communities, they are subject to the norms related to proximity: 
communities tend to be self-regulating, because of the shame and guilt one will feel, and often be made to feel of one acts irresponsibly to another member of the community. This is a function of proximity to others and that one cannot get away quickly enough to avoid the real or imagined disapprobation of others. (McBeath & Webb 1995: 8)

The key difference in cyberspace is that interaction is anonymous and disembodied. The famed political participation of the Net may lend itself more to voyeurism than activism, “we think, and sometimes feel, we belong to internet communities, but we are not quite sure how or in what ways, or whether belonging matters” (Jones 1997: 30). Non-presence has drastic ramifications for responsibility:

Individuals can now visit sites and jack into spaces that satisfy some shifting urge – then instantly jack out if confronted with unwelcome demands. Grabbing frames and moving on, one’s identity becomes a collection of elective affinities – of choice from a menu of options – an agglomeration of individualities ultimately built on unmodulated desire. (Brown 1997: 155) 

The enthusiasm for cyberspace is thought to indicate more nostalgic anxiety about the loss of communities in the real world that has followed the disintegration of traditional communities around the world (Rheingold 1992: 8). There is a general feeling in writing on VC that the widespread use of CMC is unsettling, the public is more likely to forget what it means to form a true community (Fernback & Thompson 1995: 13). The prevalent idea that some people are trying to fill the gap with neighborhoods in cyberspace is central concern, 
it is sobering that the personal computer revolution, once conceptualized as a tool to rebuild community, now tends to concentrate on building community inside a machine. (Turkle 1996: 14)

   Much of this VC criticism uses anthropologist Ray Oldenberg’s idea of the "great good place" - the local bar, the bistro, the coffee shop - where members of a community can gather for easy company, conversation, and a sense of belonging (Turkle 1996: 1) which clearly involves face-to-face interaction, being present. Some theorists differentiate between community and communion. A contention is that the feeling of communion arises only when a group faces a challenge, “although technology's ability to hook us up with people around the globe at any time we want is seductive, the best way to feel a sense of communion is face to face” (Michalski 1995: 3-4). Similarly with many commentators’ use of Toennies’ (1965) distinction between society and community (Foster 1997; Gimenez 1997). Gemeinschaft is a natural grouping of people based on kinship and proxemic relationships or neighbourhood, shared culture, and folkways – a classic example would be a tribe or peasant village: 
 
I know people in rural communities who hear wishful thinking in the phrase ‘virtual community,’ it sticks in their craw. For many, the "as-if community" lacks the rough interdependence of life shared. Real community means a difficult, never-resolved struggle. It's a sharing that cannot be virtual because its reality arises from the public places that people share - not the artificial lots you choose but the spaces that fate allots, complete with local weather and a mixed bag of family, neighbors, and neighborhoods. (Heim 1995: 1)

Clearly the idea running all through this criticism is that proximity counts. It comes down to the recurring theme that in physical communities, living in a common place with others makes a great difference to reciprocity. Apparently, communion with others involves private, personal feelings, such as trust and commitment, feelings of connectedness, shared purpose and responsibility which stimulate a community's members to take care of other members in need (Michalski 1995: 3; my emphasis). This suggests the role of altruism in the organic society versus mechanical solidarity distinction (cf. Durkheim 1933) showing further this discussion is based in criteria of strong-interpersonal contact and a comparison with contemporary anomie.

  This discrimination between society and community means many CMC essayists conclude that the development of VC is an outcome of late capitalism 

To speak of virtual community to engage in "cyberbabble"; it is a projection, the product of wishful thinking and desire for the sense of belonging, fellowship, solidarity, nurture and safety that the daily living in modern capitalist societies routinely denies to most of its citizens. (Gimenez 1997: 3)

This idea is extended by the prevalent conception of cyberspace as a city space pace Simmel et al. (McBeath & Webb 1995), connecting VC with late-industrial urbanisation (situating the computer underground in the context of the disaffection of city living). However whether VCs replace existent groups remains unclear, 
As you say, these commitments take away from other activities, though I suspect mostly from television watching. Nonetheless Internet associations are competitive with all forms of sociability. We need to study the interweaving of electronic associations with older forms of community to see if the effects are complementary, antagonistic or non-relational. (Poster in Heroux 1994: 2) 

When VCs are indeed interconnected with a physical subcultural community the interplay between a face-to-face collective and CMC might have organisational effects.  

  However, perhaps virtual communities are not nearly as discontinuous with the external social world as this debate suggests. If we consider the experience of virtual community through the individual, the idea that interaction online is separate from the ‘real’ communities outside becomes untenable. Postmodernists believe selfhood in cyberspace involves “multiple identities” and “distributed being” (Jamison 1994; Powell 1997; McBeath & Webb 1995; Mazur 1994), so the Internet presents a utopia where users float free of biological and sociocultural determinants (Dery 1994: 2). This would mean that hackers spend most of their time experiencing the Net from a secondary virtual ego-center, a decentred self that is fragmented and multilayered (Cartwright 1994: 25; Powell 1997). However, there is a strong case that online identity and the embodied self are far more continuous, and that a person’s background and culture follows them into CMC. 

  Electronic media is often used to extend material life and real life friendships; it supplements other forms of interaction uniting personality online and off. Likewise members of virtual communities often become real-world friends; 
nowhere is this continuity more evident than in the monthly gatherings their electronically extended community calls "GeekFests" and the "Illuminati fest" (Kaplan & Farrell 1994: 14). 

It’s often observed that the people who know one another in real life are those who don't switch gender (Cherny 1994: 1-2) or create fictitious MUD characters unlike themselves. Identity persistence is  very important element in encouraging contributions based on reciprocity (Kollock 1998). Hacking working groups or partnerships are easily formed,  as the structure of mutual association in hacker subculture creates a means where "talent" can be judged on the basis of past interactions, longevity in the field, and mutual interests (Meyer 1989: 68). Furthermore regarding the anonymity of CMC, the fact that hacker communication is not face-to-face requires a consistent means of identifying oneself to others. The adoption of “handles” to protect identities is defeated by the consistent use of the same handle over time; in order to obtain and maintain status and prestige in the computer underground one must keep the same pseudonym in order to (literally) "make a name for oneself." Hacking community access rituals are contingent on being a "known" pirate or phreak/hacker, making changing handles unproductive (Meyer 1989: 58). Hacking group sites often keep extensive archives of jpegs, complete with handles and captions. The purpose of the photos is to “identify” members of the group, document escapades, showing the group on holidays or relaxing (see below left). Group members will be shown in location shots, outside the house, around the suburb, but there is particular emphasis for interior shots inside the home (see below right). However most pictures will be from conferences. Also, most conference “pics” will be either crowd scenes to show numbers, of the group in the hotel/camp-site, or the big names; also most gifs/jpegs/mpegs will picture purely social “backstage” activity (see Appendix H).

 Despite the disembodied nature of MUDs, the use of code emotes is strongly gendered (Cherny 1994), and people’s real world selves strongly affect online play at a linguistic level. Linguistic analyses have observed significant differences in language style between the sexes on mailing lists (Herring 1993; Mulvaney 1994 Werry 1996; We 1994). In spite of the fact that computer networking systems obscure physical characteristics, 
many women find that gender follows them into the online community, and sets a tone for their public and private interactions there - to such an extent that some women purposefully choose gender neutral identities, or refrain from expressing their opinions. (Truong 1993: 2)

Gender discrimination is extreme in the hacking community: hacker/industry site AntiOnline surveyed 100 top hackers, with a ratio of 93% Male: 4% Female.  With respect to the decorporealisation idea, the cyberpunk “beating the meat” (Sobchack 1995) archetype is the hacker’s ‘sportdeath’ (Turkle 1984) repudiation of the body. The hacker ethos of escaping the bio-ware (Kroker 1994):
The electronic alchemy makes time fall away ... both his diet and his sleeping patterns go to hell. So does his body.  He's sucked into a multihour computer confrontation that hackers call sportdeath, as he pushes his body to the limits in his mind duel with the machine. (Jennings 1990: 71)

This transcendent VR rhetoric (eg. Schroeder 1994; Sempsey 1995; Wahl 1993 Wark 1994; Yeaman 1994) is completely naïve: even in text-based exchanges, bodies are invoked constantly, even if as a “flickering signifier” of identity (Hayles 1993) (see Appendix H, article on the HOPE conference to see how much bodies and physical activity are apart of hacker print culture). If bodies are indeed left behind, why then would gender-sleuthing (Oughton n.d) be such an online preoccupation: 
Most unsettling was my unease about my unease: why should this matter? I am having a casual conversation with a random stranger; why should I feel a need to know his or her gender? (Bruckman 1993: 1)

While the common MUD antic of “gender-bending” is mentioned by many (O'Brien; 1997; McRae 1995; Maranda 1994; Stone  1991), the exact ways people sense identity online – both conscious and unconscious strategies - are always left in the too hard basket.

  Wynn and Katz’ (1997) ambitious study scrutinises why a salesman posing as a naive user was felt to be a breach of trust and then how he went about reestablishing trustworthiness. They note that the response of the messages poster to restore his authenticity as a sincere person, wanting to comply with social codes, involved him re-establishing his trustworthiness as a locatable human being, 
the offer to have a telephone conversation, and giving out both home and work telephone numbers, are ways to add physicality to his electronic person by offering voice interaction and clues even to his home's location as validators of his sincerity. He places himself fully at the mercy of the list, and significantly, he situates himself in space, time and social context. These are the dimensions of his authenticity. (31)

It is a key point in the context of the discussion about disembodiment as a departure from physical selfhood (Balsamo 1993; Bartle 1990; Besser n.d., Penley & Ross 1991; Penny 1993), that Wynn & Katz notice that many of the tokens of validity offered to the list are both historical in nature and lead to the location of him as a physical person (32). Their position is that, 
the Internet does not radically alter the social bases of identity or conventional constraints on social interaction, although it certainly will provide openings for variations based in the new opportunities made available. The issues that arise can be addressed as questions of emerging structures of interaction and reorganization of social boundaries that can occur in any medium of communication. (1) 

They maintain that theories of talk as co-constructed, situated interaction (cf. Berger & Luckmann 1967; Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1959, 1971) as well as of technology as a social artifact (Bijker 1987; Bloomfield & Vurdubakis 1994; Hess 1994; Latour 1987) imply more continuity of Internet behavior with the embodied world than the postmodern view would argue. This conception of CMC interaction as a ‘negotiated order’ allows an understanding of the ways Internet is novel, but constrained by inherently social processes through the very orderliness of talk itself and constraints on its production originating in shared understandings, social goals, and accountability (3).

 The functions of personal home pages move in the opposite direction to what cyberspace postmodernists claim: rather than fragmenting the self (Brockman 1996; Cartwright 1994), personal home pages are attempts to integrate the individual, make a personal statement of identity, and show in a stable, replicable way what the individual stands for and what is deemed important, (Wynn & Katz; 1997: 38). Although this medium of self-presentation offers a unique context for experimentation with identity, home–pages should not be regarded as a practice of unconstrained creativity (Erickson n.d.; Chandler 1998), there are social conventions and technical limits to web-page building (see Appendix D for examples of hacker conventions regarding rebuilding other people’s home-pages). Even seemingly technical discussion in programming lists conforms to the convention of self-fashioning, and technology statements are used as social depth cues (Aycock 1995; Rachel & Woolgar 1995); (for an example of a technical text file, see Appendix F: 2600.org.au’s AUSNET “phile”). We reduce and encode our identities as words on a screen, decode and unpack the identities of others (Rheingold 1992; Ito n.d.); many IRCers will argue that real personalities only emerge over time (Shaw 1994: 140).  While the technology is new, the same technologies of the self are seen.

     USENETers stratify themselves according to knowledge with netiquette (Epperson n.d.). If newbies soon learn that the social vs. technical is a false distinction, on the MOO, socialization and technical expertise go hand in (typing) hand (Doheny-Farina 1995: 1), hackers are savage snobs regarding expertise with IRC technology on a completely different level. The use of net-knowledge as a device of distinction (Lawley 1994) is evidence that virtual communities retain the social logic of face-to-face interaction. If we apply Lawley’s understanding of net lexicon as a technology of field regulation as well as her idea of “affiliation with a high status systems” as a status marker, we can apply it to the understanding of normal social conventions operating in the membership to hacker organisations and the significance of the ferocity of flaming ‘loosers’, and ‘wannabes’. The grammar flames assume a universalist-netiquette presumption that the errant poster is simply stupid:
Those who believe that posters can freely speak their mind on the Net neglect to mention that there are preconceived notions of what is acceptable on the Net, and that these ideas have been largely predetermined by a fairly homogenous group of users. Further, the fact that these ways of ‘speaking’ are denoted as normal and natural, even while being ‘logically’ unrelated to ‘external’ factors, is a fairly insidious and  effective way of limiting discussion on the Net … the language and diction that are approved of, unsurprisingly, are those of the middle class (Palmer 1994: 21) 

The hacker catch-all denunciation of stupidity – an unsuccessful staging of the hacker character – as ‘lamer’ suggests that operation of technics of distinction in the offline hacker realm is much more vicious than for normal users. of  because of In defiance than the idealisation of hackers as a virtual elite (Kroker 1994), iconic of disembodied living, the role of subcultural capital (see Thorton 1997) means that  hackers’ interactions exaggerate the ordinary way MUDs and IRC have been realised by some theorists to reflect many aspects of Goffman's face-work. The observation of instances of gendered voice; the use of innuendo, gossip, and consolation; the continual definition of identity; the sense that real-world definitions and "personalities" causing researchers to suggest these face-to-face principles have been imported into the computer-mediated social world (Kenneth 1991: 15) is therefore doubly so for hackers. 

  Mukerij and Simon (1998) use Goffman’s notions of frontstage and backstage in their study of two discredited scientific groups. They used electronic lists “to negotiate and plan how to define and reestablish their standing as a group” (271) because they did not have access to conventional scientific media. In both cases, the groups engaged in the kind of facework or impression management described by Goffman (1959, 1963) as part of everyday, backstage social interaction – simply using computer networks to do it. During crises, embarrassed participants sidestepped the main list discussion, engaging in more private communication among subgroups, working to knit subgroups into more cohesive teams, particularly at the moment when the community seemed to be at risk (266). Hackers, phreakers, and pirates face practical problems, in order to pursue their activities they require equipment and knowledge and use BBSs, voice mail boxes, bridges, loops, e-mail, and telephone conversations, as "back stage" areas of the computer underground where threats to the community are managed, organisational issues resolved, providing an vital support network for a deviant community (Meyer 1989). Mukerij and Simon found the computer did not, in the instances they observed, transform the dynamics of group life, destabilising traditional identity and social networks. Instead, they argue, the groups folded their social processes into the new technology, where they found new tools for doing familiar and necessary kinds of social “work” (260). 

 The assertions in CMC literature that Internet communication alters cultural processes by changing the basis of social identity, and that it provides alternate realities that displace the socially grounded ones of everyday synchronous discourse (Wynn & Katz 1997: 7) are clearly problematic. If we believe the “cyberspace as decorporalisation” theorem, how are we to understand the function of a BBS personal registries (appearance, hobbies, city, favourite foods, sports), the common practice of exchanging GIFs (Shaw 1994), the unavoidable request for a/s/l, and the ubiquitous IRC stories of disappointment on meeting online partners? A hacker’s upbringing and nationality does not stop at the modem, culture/institutions follow into inter relay chat and the communities that abide there. Although the net is hypertext instantaneous global travel anywhere, from where a hacker connects to the Net matters in interaction. Through the effect of institutional logics the individuals bring to the virtual (hacker) organisations, virtual communities clearly operate according to institutional dynamics very similar to those that inform real world organisations. 

2.2	Neoinstitutionalism: Hackers’ Concern With Legitimacy 				

alt.2600  ‘How To Hack For Newbies’ FAQ:
… anyway, for those of you who are wondering "what do the letters "LOA" under his handle stand for?" Well, LOA stands for Legion Of the Apocalypse, which is a group of elite hackers and phreakers in my area. The current members of LOA are: Revelation, Phreaked Out, Hack Attack, Electric Jaguar, and Phreak Show. I started LOA when I discovered that there were many good hackers and phreakers in my area. I thought that an organized group of hackers and
phreakers would accomplish much more than an individual could by himself. 

  Paul J. DiMaggio & Walter W. Powell (1983) suggest that the causes of bureaucratisation and rationalisation have shifted in the eighty years since Weber was writing. Instead, forms of organisational change occur as the result of processes that make organisations more similar without necessarily making them more efficient. They contend bureaucratisation and other forms of homogenisation emerge out of the structuration (Giddens 1979) of organisational fields (DiMaggio & Powell 1983: 147). 

  By “organisational field,” DiMaggio and Powell mean those organisations that, in aggregate, constitute a recognised area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organisations that produce similar services or products. Organisational fields only exist to the extent that they are institutionally defined. The process of institutional definition, or “structuration,” has four parts:

an increase in the extent of interaction among organisations in the field; the emergence of sharply defined interorganisational structures of domination and patterns of coalition; an increase in the information load with which organisations in a field must contend; and the development of a mutual awareness among participants in a set of organisations that they are involved in a common enterprise. (148)

Once disparate organisations in the same line of business are structured into an actual field (by competition, the state, the professions), powerful forces emerge that lead them to become more similar to one another (148). If we translate Lawley’s (1995b) understanding of the Net as a set of fields that comply to the same organising logic as the professions and academia (Bourdieu, 1984), business and the Arts (Bourdieu 1993) - especially when we consider hacking subculture an economy of symbolic goods - we can treat the computer underground as corollary to DiMaggio & Powell’s notion of field. In fact, there has been a strong argument in neoinstitutionalism for the enlargement of organisation studies to include the non-profit sector (DiMaggio 1988; Scott & Meyer 1984; Powell 1987). Neoinstitutionalism is premised on enlarging the parameters of models to encompass organisations outside the formal marketplace because  
where bureaucracy is organised around the calculus of formal rationality, collectivist-democracy turns on the logic of substansive rationality Organisation theory has for the most part considered only the right half of this spectrum …By approaching the polar opposites of bureaucracy, they allow us to establish the limits of organisational reality.  (Rothschild-Whitt 1979: 525)

Neoinstitutionist theorists have studied collectivist organisations, community projects, neighbourhood organisations. If we conceive of institutions as both supraorganisational patterns of activity through which humans conduct their material life in time and space, and symbolic systems through which they categorise that activity and infuse it with meaning (Friedland & Alford 1991: 232), we should be able consider hacker subculture as operating within the same principles of institutional interaction, and the computer underground can be treated as an organisational field (indeed, link lists of hacking organisations give a sense of a field, see Appendix K). 

  Previous organisational theory has posited a diverse and differentiated world of organisations and sought to explain variations among organisations in structure and behaviour, asking “Why are there so many kinds of organisations?”, (Hannan & Freeman 1977). DiMaggio and Powell ask, instead, why there is such a startling homogeneity of organisational forms and practices. Likewise, we need to understand why hacker subcultures so physically far apart still otherwise so similar. 

  According to DiMaggio & Powell, initially organisational fields display considerable diversity in approach and form. Once a field becomes established, however, there is an inexorable push towards homogenisation (148). Functionalism explain this process as some version of natural selection which eliminates those organisational forms that are less fit. Population ecology models maintain that distribution or organisational forms have the same principle as the distribution of animals in nature (Hannan & Freeman 140). This competition model means that the weakest forms disappear, and the most technically efficient become dominant. Such arguments, argue DiMaggio and Powell, are difficult to mesh with organisational realities. Less efficient organisational forms do exist, and in some contexts efficiency or productivity cannot even be measured (157). Formal structures 

… may be created quite independently of the activities they index. Organisations must have the confidence of their environments, … That is, organisations must be legitimate, and they must contain legitimate accounts or explanations for their internal order and external products. The formal structure of an organisation is in good part a social myth and functions as a myth whatever its actual implementation. (Scott 1980: 107)

From an institutionalist perspective, organisations which adopt the appropriate forms perform well not because they are the most efficient, but because these forms are most effective at eliciting resources from other organisations which take them to be legitimate. Conformism may secure access to resources, but not because of superior efficiency. (154). 

  Early adopters of organisational innovations are commonly driven by a desire to improve performance. But new practices can become “infused with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand” (Selznick 1957: 17). As an innovation spreads, a threshold is reached beyond which adoption provides legitimacy rather than improves performance (Meyer & Rowan 1977). The books on hackers show that the computer underground was originally quite diverse, with highly segmented (C. Meyer 1988) with local variations (see Slatalla & Quittner 1995), and became increasingly homogenous (Platt 1996; Sterling 1992). This was especially the case early in Australia, with the vast distances between Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Sydney, (biggest hacking centres in that order) the differences between the city scenes gradually dissolved. The very fact an organsiational model is normatively sanctioned increases the likelihood of its adoption so while individual organisations may change seeking success and competitive advantage but after a certain point in the structuration of an organisational field, the aggregate effect of individual change is to lessen the extent of diversity within the field (148). Subcultural scenes are very competitive because of the driving dynamic of ‘being cool’ yet this constant accretion of changes, because the successful ‘scenes’ are copied, means the overall style becomes more and more unified, recognisable and detached from place. 

  DiMaggio and Powell maintain that there are two types of isomorphism: competitive (following Fennell 1980) and institutional (Karl Meyer 1979). Organisations compete not just for resources and customers, but for political power and institutional legitimacy, for social as well as economic fitness. Hacker “working groups,” too, compete for the best members, and they can compete for territory – computer networks, ISPs, - and resources – information, hacking programmes, security exploits, access (backdoors or passwords), working net accounts, “cards” and “codez” (for elaboration see Freedman & Mann 1997) and in some things, the size of their resources archives are public (Appendix A). 

  DiMaggio and Powell identity three mechanisms through which institutional isomorphic change occurs, each with its own antecedents: 

1) coercive isomorphism that stems from political influence and the problem with legitimacy; 2) mimetic isomorphism resulting from standard responses to uncertainty; and 3) normative isomorphism, associated with professionalisation. This typology is an analytic one: the types are not always empirically distinct. (150)

Coercive isomorphism results from both formal and informal pressures exerted on organisations by other organisations upon which they are dependent, and by cultural expectations in the society within which organisations function; the requirements for trust all force an organisation to adopt certain common models of practices or “ceremonies and rituals”. Their examples of a common legal environment, state regulation and mandates, clearly has only restricted application to deviant communities. However, coercive isomorphism might be useful to include the constraints of the technology, and the effect on subcultural practices of the change from a BBS common environment to the Net. 

  DiMaggio and Powell argue that as bureaucratic states and other large rational organisations expand their dominance over more areas of social life, organisational structures increasingly come to reflect rules institutionalised and legitimated by and within the state (in accord with Meyer & Rowan 1977). As a result, organisations are increasingly homogenous within a given domains and increasingly organised around rituals of conformity to wider institutions; 

at the same time, organisations are decreasingly structurally determined by the constraints posed by technical activities, and decreasingly held together by output controls. Under such circumstances, organisations employ ritualised controls of credentials and group solidarity. (150) 

The need for common accounting practices, budgetary plans, and standardised reporting mechanisms means that the supplier has to conform to be compatible with parent corporations. Thus, the expansion of the central state, the centralisation of capital, and the coordination of philanthropy all support the homogenisation of organisational models through direct authority relationships (151). In relation to the hacker community, the all-important circulation of “hacking tools,” the common operating system environments, and parent sources of hacking software (see Appendix A for examples of download sites) would lend hacking organisations to conform with each other.  DiMaggio and Powell add, coercive isomorphism, however, may be more subtle and less explicit and enacted through indirect relationships.

  Not all institutional isomorphism, however, derives from coercive authority, and with a subculture, mimetic processes are the most influential. Uncertainty is also a powerful force that encourages imitation. When organisational technologies are poorly understood (March and Olsen 1976), when goals are ambiguous, or when the environment creates symbolic uncertainty, organisations may model themselves on other organisations (151). The advantages of mimetic behaviour in the economy of human action are considerable; when an organisation faces a problem or unclear solutions, problematistic search may yield a viable solution with little expense (Cyert & March 1963). The modeled organisations may be unaware of the modeling or may have no desire to be copied; they merely serves as a convenient source of practices that the borrowing organisation may use. 

  Hacker scenes experience uncertainty in a variety of ways: the policing of hacking means every hack is an uncertain risk; the fast-moving IT security industry and private and state “tiger teams” quickly discover hacking devices, illicit accounts are detected, call-tracing and data-tapping mean that every hack is vulnerable to disclosure. Also, there is risk from within the community: hackers targets are often other hackers, retribution for injury or insults is common; the 1980s “Hacker Wars” saw rival groups MOD, (Masters of Downloading), and LOD, (Legion of Doom), engage in very serious conflict.   LexLuthor comments, “the underground today is not fun. It is very power hungry, almost feral in its actions.  People are grouped off: you like me or you like him, you cannot like both” (cited in Taylor 1997). 

  DiMaggio and Powell stipulate that with mimetic isomorphism, models may be diffused unintentionally and indirectly through employee transfer or turnover, or explicitly by organisations such as consulting firms or industry trade associations (151). Organisations tend to model themselves after similar organisations in their field that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful. Publications like PHRACK and TAP Magazine, Blacklisted!411, and The Hacker Quarterly 2600 (see Appendix I, for excerpts from PHRACK), files on organisations’ sites like Cult of the Dead Cow, have been most influential in this effect, acting like the professional journals of industry and management (see Appendix A, to see how warez sites all provide links to zines and copies of magazine articles). Knowledge of legitimate models of a proper hacking scene or organisational structures described by C. Meyer (1989) would also be disseminated though books like Levy’s Hackers and Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, as well as movies 

Right after "War Games" came out there must have been hundreds of hacker bulletin boards spring up. But 99% of those were lame. Just a bunch of dumb kids that saw the movie and spent all their time asking "anyone got any k00l numberz?" But for a while there were maybe ten systems worth calling … where you could actually learn something and talk to people who knew what was going Nowadays there are maybe three that I consider good … and about four or five others that are okay. 
(an interview log in C. Meyer 1989)

The homology between the Sydney computer underground and the scenes overseas can be linked to this institutional process of legitimation. That this would be the most influential dynamic is recognised DiMaggio and Powell; certainly the ubiquity of certain kinds of structural arrangements can be more likely be credited to the universality of mimetic processes than to any concrete evidence that the adopted models enhance efficiency or effectiveness (152).

  A third source of organisational change is normative and stems primarily from professionalisation (cf. Larson 1977; Collins 1979). Two aspects of professionalisation are important sources of isomorphism. One is the resting of formal education and legitimation or a cognitive base produced by university specialists; the second is the growth and elaboration of professional networks that span organisations and across which new models diffuse rapidly. Obviously the computer underground does not have formal institutions for official qualification; however, the hierarchy of “credentialed hackers” (Sterling 1992) might refer to a number of informal subculture institutions, most notably the affiliation with prestigious “.orgs” (Appendix K). At a lower level,
The life blood and center of the computer underground is the bulletin board network. Acting as both the main trade center of performance related tools and innovations and as a means of socialization, the underground could not exist without the BBS network. They serve to ‘recruit’ and educate newcomers and provide a way to traffic in information and software. (C. Meyer 1989: 58) 

Also, C. Meyer connects the “collegial organisation of the computer underground” with status definition:
the subcultural adaptation of language, expectations of normative conduct, and status stratification based on mastery of cultural knowledge and skill, all indicate that the computer underground is, at the very least, a social organization of colleagues (1989: 76)

As with the professions, the screening mechanisms, socialisation, and the presentation of self for appearing as hacker means that those who make it to the top echelons of “hackerdom” (Sterling 1992) become alike in politics, speech, bodily comportment, and dress. 
Following Perrow (1974), DiMaggio and Powell say of such mechanisms of professionalisation that they create a pool of almost interchangeable individuals who occupy similar positions across a range of organisations and possess a similarity of orientation and disposition that may override variations in tradition and control that might otherwise shape organisational behaviour (152). One important mechanism for encouraging normative isomorphism is the filtering of personnel. Many professional career racks are closely guarded, both at entry level and throughout career progression, so that individuals that make it to the top are virtually indistinguishable (152-3) they are so alike in background and orientation (the best available information on hacker demographics is AntiOnline.com survey, Appendix L). In addition, individuals in an organisational field undergo anticipatory socialisation to common expectations about their personal behaviour, appropriate style of dress, organisational vocabularies (Cicourel 1970; Williamson 1975) and standard methods of speaking and joking, or addressing others (Ouchi 1980) (Appendix A: warez sites provide links to essays on hacker lexicon, culture, even food, attitudes to sports, and usually have a copy/link to the Jargon File).  Particularly in industries with a service or financial orientation (Collins 1979, argues that the importance of credentials is strongest in these areas), the filtering of personnel approaches what Kanter (1977) refers to as the “homosexual reproduction of management” (153). The importance of self-presentation in finance is significant because like hackers, stock brokerage is a risky business and the importance of character and trustworthiness is correspondingly heightened.  
 
  DiMaggio and Powell also mention how aspiring managers may undergo anticipatory socialisation into the norms and mores of the organisations they hope to join (153). Proto-hackers aspiring to friendships with respected groups will become proficient in their area of expertise - hacker groups recruit members with a wide variety of 'specialisations' (Meyer 1989: 72) - and doubtless assimilate their ideals and manner. Apparently, since organisational prestige and resources are key elements in attracting professionals, this process encourages homogenisation as organisations seek to ensure that they can provide the same benefits and services as their competitors (154). DiMaggio and Powell explain that organisations then model themselves after successful organisations to attract the same calibre of professionals who pursue status jobs to further their own careers. They mention that the exchange of information among professionals helps contribute to a commonly recognised hierarchy of status, of center and periphery, that becomes a matrix for information flows and personnel movement across organisations. The high turnover rate of the computer underground, the fact boundaries are highly permeable (Taylor & Jordon 1998) and its fluidity in terms of participant mobility and interchange of members in networks or groups or IRC populations, subscription to hacking mailing lists and so forth, means that there is a great circulation of ideas and expectations. A primary focus of the interviews I conducted is, then, to understand how these ideas get distributed. 

  Using a neoinstitutionalist framework will allow us to try to understand the hacking community in terms of its dynamics as an organisational field, responsive to whether the outcomes of this application change when considering a subculture. DiMaggio and Powell’s concern with organising at the level of participant interaction and sense-making, should make us attentive to how individual’s discover the symbolic and social material to stylise themselves after, as well as attend to the social activity constituting the subculture so we can learn how the participants come to perceive what is scene legitimacy.  In the interviews, this concern with symbolic systems and mimesis should mean we look out for sources of lexicon and hacker ideal images, and the function of role models and contact with other hackers. The research might therefore concentrate on the learning histories of the subjects, to discover how hacker socialisation is acquired; additionally, discerning how hacking communities’ systems of informal education operate. Analysis should heed how models of successful hacking organisation are received, and then observe what conditions surround the adoption of models. If coercive isomorphism is absent, and normative and mimetic processes are indeed dominant, we should be attentive to perceptions of risk for participants and community uncertainty. We take care to notice the exchanges between hacking organisations and the kinds of inter-dependence between organisations subjects have experienced. We will be looking for signs of organisation at a higher level – if there are any instances of deliberate structuration of the field. The investigation shall be especially focused on the relationship of influence between hacking scenes overseas and the Sydney computer underground. DiMaggio and Powell provide a means to conceive of how the structure of Sydney hacking virtual community is shaped by ceremonial concerns, its form shaped by institutional legitimacy, perhaps above the affects of CMC constraints. Consequently, employing DiMaggio and Powell’s ideal types, we will be interested to see if institutional work changes in cyberspace, and how hacking organisations are effected by existing on the Internet. 

 Chapter 3  Loosing Nothing in Translation 
Invention has become a duty, and the desire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child’s bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided by critical discernment: people agreed that inventions were good, just as they agreed that child-bearing was good, whether the off-spring proved a blessing to society or a nuisance. (Mumford, 1934: 53)

3.1	Research Problems

  The neoinstitutionalist understanding that organisational form is not determined simply by technical necessity but the structure’s value in signaling legitimacy to “internal participants and external constituents alike” (DiMaggio & Powell 1991: 55) has certain consequences for research. Explaining the “startling homogeneity of organisational forms and practices” (64) in terms of participants meanings means giving explanatory primacy to agents’ cognitions. Yet studying institutions needs to combine cognitive/cultural explanations with macro-structuralist analysis. The theory’s greatest attraction is this potential explanatory link between structure and agency; making it possible to bypass the material-idealist split: “the institutional level provides a critical bridge … institutions must be recognised as simultaneously material and ideal, systems of signs and symbols, rational and transrational” (242-3).  

  However, surprisingly, the re-entry of analytic focus on socially constructed meaning has meant the individual more invisible than ever. In an unexpected way, the individual gets written out of the research and replaced by the organisation-actor; a sense of agency was often missing, actors were often invisible and if present were assumed to be slavishly following their social scripts (Scott & Christensen 1995: xx). The agent that is given a voice in the theory does not in fact survive in the research data. While in neoinstitutionalism is supposed to represent a return to Weberian inquiry, in practice it finds individuals wholly identified with organisations in the results. 

  Without actors there is no way to account for change. The substitution of institutions for individuals neglects the possibility of contradictory institutional logics and fails to consider the neo-institutionalist premise of the ‘indeterminacy of meaning’, that “there is no one-to-one relationship between an institution and the meanings carried by the practices associated with it” (Friedland & Alford 1991: 255). This substitution also eliminates the complex social interaction: “institutional effects were often observed, but the processes or mechanisms by which they were achieved were not uncovered” (Scott & Christensen 1995: xx).

  These limitations are the outcome of the difficulty involved in recognising the actor’s interpretations as primary, but still needing to perform analysis at a macro level. The converse problem is that when society is brought back into organisational studies, the study of organisations is left out (Donaldson 1985). When there is too great an emphasis on cultural explanations, the organisational fields’ structural patterns are subsumed by the micro-focus. As Jepperson notes
institutionalism has tended to ‘defocalise’ actors purposefully, because undue focus on actors seemed to impair the production of sociology … Institutionalism, like any set of causal arguments, must be capable of providing ‘microtranslation’ … of its propositions, that is, samples of the lower-level processes embodied in higher-order effects.” (1991: 158-9) 
 
The source of the problem is suggested when he notices that, in the catchphrases employed, institutionalism thus tends to be both ‘phenomenological’ and ‘structural’ (153). Explaining institutional isomorphism involves studying beliefs and social relationships, requiring cultural analysis in terms of the symbolic meaningfulness of that participation (Friedland & Alford 1991: 250). However, this cultural analysis must be somehow converted into a structural causal relationship between the large organisational actors. The question for using neoinstitutionalism is whether qualitative and quantitative methodologies are compatible at that deep level. The diversity in the field’s empirical work demonstrates that theoretically linking one method to another is more difficult than simply including both types of analysis. 

  Different theorists resolve the problem in diverse ways. Often it is decided that analysis can deduce lower-order “causal connections” by studying “high or macro-order effects” (Jepperson 1991: 156-7). Simplifying data to organisational actors is commonly justified because it is so difficult to observe an organisation’s actual decision-making processes over long periods of time. Gathering evidence must require simplification of the theory and the assumption of certain processes (Fligstein 1991: 324).  However, according to the presuppositions of the neo-institutionalist approach, this is a mistake. Representing these lower level behaviours as an aggregate or average is misrepresentative, because those variables change at those lower levels (interaction) and because actors’ meanings do not simply add together like a simple arithmetic. Many theorists do use algebraic formulas, manipulating a few variables to provide an attractive graph (Singh, Tucker & Meinhard 1991; Orru, Biggart & Hamilton 1991). Reducing the role of institutions to one variable conflates conflicting institutions into just one category – a category that is devoid of context – and it conveniently converts a whole social process involving many actors, into the one actor, the organisation. Redding (1994) would dismiss Singh, Tucker & Meinhard’s mathematical formula of the constant exponential relationship of organisation birth and death rates and institutionalisation, as erroneous “physics envy” (1994: 324). These expedient equations, used throughout the field, are valueless if we take seriously the theory’s understanding of agency, that,
meanings can change, so therefore do phenomena, and predictive laws cannot remain valid … nor will social groups exhibit consensus over meanings, and this makes empirical evidence contestable. (Redding 1994: 345) 

Redding argues that the foremost misapplication of the positivist framework is that organisation theorists unproblematically use principles of causation. The neoinstitutionalist premise that social phenomena are internally related and vary with each other precludes easy causal analysis and “prevents a priori functionalist or consensual interpretations” (Friedland & Alford 1991: 256). As neo-institutionalism acknowledges that meaning is contingent, that organisational phenomena are internally related and vary with each other, it would seem disingenuous to work as though cause and effect can be separated from each other.

   Buying into the interpretativist turn comes at a scientific price, and costs Neoinstitutionalist organisation theorists in particular very dearly. These theorists need to describe systematic large-scale relationships along with an understanding of the historical specificity and contingency of symbolic work; 
the embrace of history's insistence on particularism, context, and contingency has some drawbacks. It calls into question the enterprise of systematic comparison. Determinations of causality are questionable if not out-and-out hubristic. (Immergut 1998: 254) 

Analysis of institutional scripts that are ‘taken-for-granteds’ – going unrecognised by actors themselves,  
can never logically be verified. Thus the concept of taken-for-granteds in institutional theory is similar in logic to that of unconscious motives in Freudian theory; both are incapable of empirical test. (Donaldson 1995: 114) 

Not only is there the problem of falsifiability, but by theorising the their real ‘legitimating functions’ of ‘myths and ceremonies’, of which participants are themselves unaware, neoinstitutionalism makes a use of realist notions of ideology. Consequently, ‘a representationalist mentality’ still pervades organisational studies (Chia 1996). Therefore despite the phenomenological premises of the neo-institutionalism, the research maintains a positivist model of reality available to be apprehended by scientific method. 

  The error with simple causal explanations really lies in the arbitrariness of the units of analysis involved in studying organisations and the theorists’ definition of variables. Hojn N. Freeman (1995) argues that there are research problems specific to organisation studies, that empirical units must be artificially defined: 
Organisations with highly permeable boundaries are more deeply and extensively penetrated by other organisations, and it becomes difficult to decide where one ends and another starts (337) 
They are Chinese boxes, systems within systems, and this gives them a partly decomposable quality that in turn creates a fundamental unit problem. Many of the ‘organisations’ commonly studied are parts of larger organisations (338). 

The definition of unit boundaries also affects the independence of observations made on those units. With organisations, the results of a study using analytical units of national polity as the variable (Jepperson & Meyer 1991) are very different to a study using ‘societal sector’ units (Scott & Meyer 1981). Research into organisations is especially prone to theoretical bias. Peter Worsely’s lament that over-systematized analyses are 'an occupational disease of intellectuals, for their job is to bring order to complex masses of data in which order is not readily evident' (1997: 50) is a disease that institutionalist organisational theorists suffer particularly badly. Ethnomethodological organisation researchers, Hamad and Sibley (1994) resist this compulsion to order: “the world is much too clear as seen through the eyes of social scientist” (63). Their study of workplace practices reveals corporate meetings to be “delicate achievements” (65); 
When we look behind social forms (like meetings) everything seems so clear, because we see what we want to see – our structures, values, categories, variables, etc. … When we look at meetings we begin to see with our informants and what we see is the ambiguity, confusion and contrast interpretations that make up the “stuff” of everyday life. (86)

Neoinstitutional analysis is exceptionally vulnerable to over-determination of observations by theory:
Such theorising hides or deflects inconsistencies and contradictions behind a wall of rhetorical and textual practices and it is this strategy of deception that creates a logic of organisation (Chia 1996: 218). 

Burrell too understands that “the notion of ‘organisations’ itself falsely reduces differences and spuriously elevates similarities” (1998: 231). Performing social research of this kind is a “process of normalising the field’ and “imposes homogeneity” on disordered relations. This he sees as a necessary “professional compromise to the twin difficulties of universalism and particularism” (ibid.). 

  The reductionism originates in using a phenomenological argument, but then neglecting the micro-level research involved. Despite Neo-institutionalist theory’s understanding of “the microfoundations of macrostructure” (242), ethnographic methodologies are usually eschewed for respectable quantitative methods: a bias which simplifies complex social relations to a set of statistics to manipulate neatly.  The problem is clearly that agency is not undertheorised but it is simply understudied. Possibly the way to avoid the categorical reductionalism that characterises the empirical work is to let the data lead analysis. With such theoretically driven outcomes, perhaps if the research is given primacy in constructing analysis, actors’ understandings must be given precedence.

  There are additional problems involved with particular research endeavors like studying computer hackers. Beginning with higher-level organisational analysis with this example is impossible; there are no statistics available. Neoinstitutionalist researchers make use of figures such as the number of employees, the birth and death of the organisation, profits, products, suppliers, etc. Statistics on hacking are admitted by Jordan & Taylor to be so misrepresentative as to be totally useless, “analysing any intentionally illicit community poses difficulties for the researcher” (1998: 1). Secondly, over-determination by theoretical analytic units and the neglect of inter-unit influence are also ruled out; hackers do not present a set of bounded organisations. The social organisation of computer subculture along lines of peer networks, however, confounds the simple application of DiMaggio and Powell’s predictive criteria. Lastly, the absence of comparative studies of hacker organisation overseas makes mapping field isomorphism grim. However there are a number of books on hacker history in the United States and Gordon Meyer’s (1989) thesis which we can use.

 Yet the Sydney computer underground can nevertheless be understood as organised in some way. It is exactly this kind of complexity of influence that makes it an interesting challenge to work with  neoinstitutionalism in studying a subculture. The “information poverty” forces this study to build up a picture of the local computer underground mediated at the level of the participant’s understandings. The analysis simply has to be focused on agent’s perceptions of the Sydney hacking scene and other hacker communities. The problem of legitimacy can only be received mediated by individual’s contact with these other models - through IRC, electronic mailing lists, networks, bridges, and through hacker magazines. Lacking secondary information will keep the data historically specific, and will allow contradiction between subjects. The absence of statistics means that the institutional beliefs are given prominence; at any rate, interviewing is necessary to obtain the local history. 

The degree of obvious “fit” with neo-institutionalist organisations theory’s concerns will, then, be variable, especially as the sample groups are not homogenous. Hacking is a broad term. Every subject was completely different in skills, involvement in the subculture, politics, and practices. But this is also a strength of the study. Themes in the empirical data were not immediately obvious, preventing readily fitting the research with the theoretical starting points. The data’s variety made certain that the uneven texture of the reality of Sydney hacker subculture ended up in the final analysis. This means that the study results cannot be translated into easily comprehended tables or statistics. Instead of following the alternative neoinstitutionalist presentation of results as a social history (Scott 1987; DiMaggio 1988), the interview material will be arranged in the themes that arose in the subjects’ responses. 

   Subculture studies present their own particular research problems. The decision to let the preoccupations in the research structure the results was prompted by the Polsky’s (1969) observation that the fear with qualitative research of subcultures is that a theory can only, ultimately, demonstrate its own assumptions (146). The concern is to minimise ‘distortion of the field’, with the underlying fear that the object may be contaminated with the subjectivity of the researcher (247). The Participant Observation school directed its followers towards a profoundly important methodological possibility – that of being surprised, of reaching knowledge not prefigured in one’s starting paradigm (248). Humphreys (1970) too argues against neatness in favour of accuracy. He stresses that research strategies do not develop ex nihilo, they are in part the outgrowth of the researcher’s basic assumptions. Hypotheses must develop out of ethnographic work, rather than provide restrictions and distortions from its inception (232). 

3.2  The Interview Process 

  The interviews were semi-structured and in-depth, conducted face-to-face despite the convenience of (and the preference of some subjects) for interviewing online. The interviews were done in person to help build trust which was important with many subjects. Many were nervous about the purpose of research and it was made clear that the study is meant to be a disinterested sociological investigation. Also, with so much technical detail, nuances of sarcasm and doubt made it important to present. 

  Clearly with a study regarding computer hacking there is a serious concern that subjects might incriminate themselves. Before interviews commenced, every subject was told that there is a possibility that research data could be subpoenaed and that I could not guarantee complete confidentiality. However, the focus of the interviews was not hacking but the hackers themselves. The questions focused on the social aspects of the subculture and the subjects learning histories. The interview schedule was designed to encourage general and abstract answers. 

  Despite precautions, naturally, subjects did fall to discussing crimes in the course of the interview, needing to refer to events and other hackers. At the end of interviews, subjects sometimes reviewed their answers. The main concern in reporting the results was to preserve the anonymity of subjects. Therefore, the interview logs are not identified, and references to crimes, acquaintances, attributable quotes and personal information has been omitted. Also interview transcripts have not been included in the Appendices. Subjects used their aliases but because handles can be attached to individuals they were also excluded. 

  In order to represent the diversity of the community and overcome the problem of the definition of term ‘hacking’, candidates were selected  if they considered themselves a “hacker/coder interested in computer security” (see Appendices for flyer). Respondents varied in orientation from being “compulsive programmers” (white-hat hackers), the majority of respondents were programmers interested in security and involved in the HPAC scene (grey legality), to virri writers and systems crackers (black-hat or darkside hackers). The sample parameters were simply if subjects (1) self-identified as a computer hacker, and (2) that they live in Sydney. There were two channels of recruitment. Some responded to flyers advertising the study in university computer science labs or messages on Sydney BBSs. But the greatest source of respondents was the nomination of previous subjects, both because of the difficulty finding hackers and the gaining of trust: 
In my experience the most feasible technique for building one’s sample is ‘snowballing’: get an introduction to [someone] who will vouch for you with others, who in turn will vouch for you with still others. It is of course best to start at the top If possible, with an introduction to the most prestigious person in the group you want to study. (Polsky 1969: 222)

All up there were 18 interviews. The estimated small size of the Sydney hacker population deems this sample large enough to draw inferences from the population being studied. Anyone considering this research should know that after little success, I begun contacting the sysops of BBSs in Sydney. They suggested who I should approach. This was a really efficient, otherwise I would not have found many hackers at all. This introduction also held the advantage of mentioning that the subject had been recommended for the research.

  This number of interviews was fairly good considering the obstructions gaining access to a deviant community. Finding hackers was hard but convincing them to agree to an interview was harder. Jordan & Taylor (1998) detail problems with access to hackers and with misrepresentativeness of statistics (4-6); “analysing any intentionally illicit community poses difficulties for the researcher” (2) It is necessary to avoid subjective judgements about crimes(see Roberts, 1975, and studying a covert deviant community is time-consuming (see Humphreys 1970).

  An unexpected problem was learning how to establish closure of the interview. The interviews dealt with a greater part of the subject’s lives, interviewing hackers about hacking was very involving and animated. However anyone considering research on hackers needs to know this was a strenuous introduction to the difficult art of interviewing. Overcoming subjects’ reservations was especially hard, particularly as a programming-illiterate girl. Subjects tended to be alarmingly unruly and headstrong: the interviews were chaotic. Care must be taken. 

Chapter 4  You talk to them, they talk to you and 
	they’ll know whether you’re trying to
	cheat on them or anything, whether 
you’re trying to rip them off. No 
matter how sweet you talk to them.

But the burgeoning of access, the low cost, instant transferability of data stand in the same relation to privacy as does the semi-automatic weapon to mass murder. It doesn’t make it happen, but it certainly makes it a whole lot easier. (Nieuwenhuizen 1997: 64

Style 

  Every respondent refused to the stereotypes of hackers, 
there are no stereotypes. People don’t exist that are like that. I’m telling you there aren’t people that are that bad. 

Every respondent also joked that they were geeks, they also told stories about geek acquaintances, “Now, that’s the stereotype right there!” All the subject brought up ‘image’ and most did seem uncomfortable about uncritically subscribing to hacker culture: 
You look at the stereotypical geek and they’ve got bad social skills and all that sort of stuff. I sort of hope I don’t completely fit that stereotype.

Appearing like a hacker was an awkward mix of embarrassment and pride. Successfully ‘being a hacker’ was a continuing doubt for each one. They were inquisitive about the other respondents. 

  Asked about their introduction to computing, many mentioned books. Especially the HPAP hackers enthused about books they had come across when young:
the text I did all the learning off was 11th al 624 language but the one that got me into the concept, the one that showed me the culture was by a guy called Bill Landreth, Outside the inner Circle it really got me into the culture. 

Reading was important throughout participation in the subculture. The distinction between learning to programme and introduction to the culture was blurred:

I read a lot. I’ve ordered way too many books from the US. … [shows me book on encryption] It’s about wiretaps but its about the politics of censorship, I’m getting into the politics of it.

Many reported coming across key text files or articles in their learning:
Spent about half a day reading The Jargon File straight through, the whole lexicon from a to z. I was impressed with the contents. And after that I started stylising myself after the archetypal hacker. 

The thrill of sudden access to a store of knowledge an underground scene - usually on getting a modem and dialing BBSs - was common in all the interviews: 
I’d used to just go through all the different newsgroups and things and see what people had written, like programming and hacking and phreaking. It just set my mind off. I’d just collect all this information and save it away and read through it all and try [laughs] and learn to become hacker! 

Understanding of legitimate hacker character was received from movies, zines, BBSs, (more recently) hacker sites and mailing lists but mainly  through observation of peers.

Learning  

  Hacking and being a hacker are linked. The activities acquiring learning is part of hacker style:
Mainly self-taught. The text files were very useful. It was written by people who actually gone and done it.

The importance of the tutorials being provided by other hackers experimenting was accentuated by everyone. Everyone said they preferred learning through trial and error themselves:
Just sitting there and mucking around with things. You can’t learn any other way. Anyone else that tells you can is lying. It’s all hands on. 

Self-dependence in learning was crucial, “I usually think everybody’s wrong and I’m right, it’s purely through self-exploration.” 

Many mentioned libraries, buying manuals, but mostly knowledge was collected through downloading utilities and text files. Many mentioned tutorials in magazines like PHRACK (see Appendices). Younger subjects valued the access on the Net to “other people’s code, it’s just easier to get.” Access and connection was all important:
Soon as I got a modem, the learning curve just went woosh. I don’t even consider my life before my modem, life, it was just a precursor.

Respondents agonized over not getting a modem earlier, “I consider I was deprived of time.” Although programming was learnt alone, first calling a BBS or the Net dramatically changed their acquisition of hacking learning:
I learnt heaps of text-files both BBSs and the net. TAFE libraries, websites on the net and connections (e-mail), people I know - never use websites that are popular and are on search engines - through friends I know around the world who I talk to in voice and writing.

Help  

  Others’ input was not only passive. Real-time conversations are mainly motivational and can suggest new techniques or projects. But there was another kind interaction that was critical in their learning: 
If I needed some information, I’d go and write a message, ‘Can someone help me, I need to do so and so, or get this.’ [smiles] Maybe 1 in 100 would reply. 

This expectation of cooperation was said by every one to be fairly reliable. The hacker ethos is “share what you know, learn what you don’t”: 
And if you want to know about something, for interests sake, even the big famous people will just – or some random person that knows more than you do – they’ll often come up to you and help you with stuff.

The information quality demanded skepticism but most said it was a dependable network:  
There were people around to ask. The Bulletin board systems originally had generally quite a cluey group of people in them

Help was universal respecting coding, but security exploits were not contributed rashly:  
It depends on if it something really good. If its something really new and never seen before then yeah, I keep it to myself. If its something like spoofing onto LINUX without using superuser access, that what I keep to myself because no one else can do that. 

towards the cracker end of the spectrum the more ambivalent subjects were about sharing information heedlessly: 
Like people help me so just return it to other people as well. 
If a find something new I tell people that have helped me before and anyone new getting into it, I’d help them out. I do it because of who they are. If it was someone I didn’t know, I’d just tell them to fuck off. 

With all the darkside hackers there was this tension between sharing information and distrust or even fatigue:
I probably know something that this guy doesn’t so I’m not going to tell him, you know? So I’m not going to talk to him and tell him anything

I’m afraid that it’s gotten to a point that I don’t bother helping the people that really need my help because basically I don’t know them.

With the increased risk of cr/hacking, and the value of information hard won, there were concerns about helping equals. So with hacker virtual commons, unlike the public Usenet, there was anxiety about contributing and yet greater value placed on help when it does occur. 

Groups  

  Did Meyer’s (1989) description of the US computer underground hold for Sydney? Most had never observed any “visible groups,” “not really, not that I was aware of,” but they were also unsure that this meant they hadn’t existed. Only the teenage crackers amongst the respondents reported they got together in “groups of friends,” almost everyone said that their learning was “at first solitary and then I was with others that do the same,” When they would “head over to someone’s place in the afternoon” it was “usually lots of computer talk” but “not much actual hacking,” “people talk about what they’ve done and others try to learn.”  Participating in groups was not essential for learning, but many said that without friends, “I might not know some obscure facts but I learnt mostly myself,” that a partner had “taught me the more esoteric aspects of UNIX that I wouldn’t know about otherwise.” Some older respondents had a group that would use a BBS as a “head-quarters.” This core of a BBS admin would meet regularly. Group “Security experiments” make use of the professional skills of the each member - biochemistry, hardware engineering, pyrotechnics, networking – which I was told allowed the others to specialise.
 
  The more programming oriented, the less social they were and the less friends had contributed to their learning. The more darkside oriented, the greater part groups played, but only up to a point. At the end of the scale, the reaction was very different:
never in a group.. if its in a group your always gonna get interrupt by law! I’ve never been to a group … for safety reasons again! It's the same where ever you go … but its these dumbcunt ones that get too cocky! … okay like I was saying no one hacks in groups.. cause if one cunt makes a mistake your fucked! 

The further involved in the illicit subculture, the greater importance the number of virtual “contacts” becomes. Virus writers were fairly isolated and careful with only a few RL friends in the underground. “With coding, you don’t need a group;” coding-oriented hackers only used social knowledge in terms of subscribing to lists, and meeting and the issue of CMC was unimportant for them while it was a main concern for cracking. Even with databases, many hacking e-lists “are invitation only.” 

Net Filters

 Lacking standard criteria, information can be poor quality or dubious currency:
It varies widely. It’s not peer reviewed and you have to rely fairly heavily on your own, uhm, sifting algorithm. You can tell what sort of agendas people are trying to push often by the language they use, … 

Was the subject proficient at doing that, I asked;
 
I like to think so. But as evolved as my meme filters are, there’s always some new thing out there to infect my brain and I’ve got to continuously be on watch.

The need for systems of interpreting the quality of massive amounts of data was omnipresent. Data interpretation was often linked to the difficulty on the Net in discerning another hacker’s ability:
You know straight away whether someone knows his stuff and as soon as he knows his stuff, he’s above you already, that’s it. He’s going to receive access, power over other people straight away.

When talking about how to apprehend the skill of another, the opaqueness of CMC was a constant preoccupation:
Or I might pick right away that you’re not as good as me. And I don’t really feel like starting from scratch and explain this itty bitty detail that I’ve spent months on. I can’t do that for you, sorry. 

The crowding of the computer underground with the inexperienced and novices “whose parents took them to Hackers” evidently makes finding the legitimate hackers hard;
Script-kiddies. You know as soon as - you know it within 5 minutes you start talking to some one. The problem is that the loudest people are the people you don’t want to talk to. 

Digitalised Living  

Many related that the Net was confusing. They were also concerned with the problem of confusing others, 
You’ve got problems if you type slowly. Human bandwidth is all larger, you’re picking up stuff that you don’t even know about.

Subjects described surprise on meeting hacker friends but usually it didn’t matter, it simply completed their “personal profile” of them. Many offered views on the long-term effects on Net underground friendships. One subject commented on the idea VR is conducive to intimacy, “I think it’s a lot more hatred, it either jealously, hatred or anger.” He said friendship are not found on the Net. I asked if there were collegial relationships:
Perhaps. But its more likely they’ll end up back-stabbing you. Because its easy to do that. You could easily do that and not know that person anymore. And they wouldn’t be able to et you back or anything. You could just disappear. …. this other guy who shut down some other guy’s archives of all his hacking skills and stuff. It’s a very strange society. In real life you don’t see that sort of stuff. They were supposed to be friends or whatever. It’s much easier to do. 

Clearly, CMC effect the environment for hacker relationships and possibly the general structure of the social system. How might the or the character of a collegial network when CMC effects have people spending the greater parts of their lives in adversarial exchanges: Would the social logistics of a VC be influenced when a hacker is
loyal to some, I am complete adversaries to others. I fight them all the way, I don’t give a shit if they’re right or wrong.

With a large group the opacity of CMC is exaggerated. Two subjects were sysadmins for CatAlyst (see Appendices) and another subject the sysadmin for 2600.org.au - the Sydney chapter of the 2600 (see Appendices), many were BBS sysops. These respondents commented the difficulty of administration of VCs. Cat.org introduced a voting-by-default email system, which made decision making much more efficient. But it had another effect:
I think meeting is really important. We have less meetings now, which is really good because meetings take up a lot of time. A lot of the time you sit around and people spew forth information and you can do that a lot better in email – so what the meeting is them much more concentrated decisions, and much more concentrated, a motivational meeting, you know, hi comrades. And also because some people are really shy in their email and you talk to them at meetings and some people are shy at meetings and you talk to them through email. And there are some things you’d rather say in person. Like if it’s a tricky issue, it’s probably easier to do it face-to-face than online. … And finally after a lot of email flying around, and people were getting confused, we had a meeting and it all just got sorted out.

Being a changed the organisational model in more ways that simply translating communiqués to digital media. Size changed; both groups were able to sustain a larger sector of peripheral members because of the convenience. CMC for organisations had an unexpected consequence: the distinction between the peripheral members and the core group was that the group met. Meetings assumed a heightened role – mostly devoid of actual information exchange, even if activist agendas are attended to at Cat meeting and hacking occurs at 2600 nights. The reasoning in meeting becomes social interaction. The importance of supplementing electronic communication with interpersonal contact became apparent with every interview. Particularly for HPA hackers, and not programmer hackers, because “you can’t fool people about what you know when you are right there.” 

Friends In Need   

 Friendship is very important for hacking. A 2600 member said that, he has to keep up to date, working as a security consultant; 
You have very knowledgeable people, very well connected people hang out in those channels. I don’t waste time on computers. That’s why we are paid as much as we are, at such a young age. [20 years old]

Another well-paid white-hat hacker explained his attendance at 2600,
there’s people here I find interesting and we’re talking about things I find interesting. The social side of things translates into what I do at work, it translates into a lot of things.

All agreed that it was a matter of effectiveness. A systems cracker justified getting a special international calls account to maintain his “connections” that it was a matter of productivity” 
you learn off one guy and then you learn off another guy, you can choose so many ways of learning. You can learn off all books, that’s all right. I prefer learning off people. It’s easier, it’s faster, it’s more efficient. 

Semi-legitimate knowledge collection is hard work alone:
maybe half of it comes from the outside. From interaction with other people and from information I get from reports that I get from what’s been happening around – I don’t know how some people manage. You can’t manage it all on your own. You going to have specific in something and help someone else filling their voids that they need.

Many older hackers underlined the need to specialise to master one facet of hacking. Efficiency is not far away from mercenary utility: 
Coding is boring. You do it to get somewhere. But, it’s very easy to find some low-life that has nothing else to do but code and say, ‘hey, wouldn’t it be cool if someone coded - ” and then insert what you were going to code but never really bothered to learn the languages to get accomplished. If you spend 8 hours here [at 2600] you save doing the 16 hours every time you want to do it. You just go, “hey you can like code this, can’t you?” “Yeah I could if I wanted” “Well, would it be cool, everyone would think you were famous.” But you only do that digitally. Because otherwise they know that you’re not being serious. [they laugh]

Personal anecdotes and person-to-person information is the main source of illicit data, “I value any interaction with anybody that can bring me new knowledge about anything really.” Knowledge accumulation occurs at low-level first-hand experience that is shared in a very efficient system of databases and tutoring. Hacking data is not summarised by a standardised formal education system so it is very diverse and uneven, collecting in different concentrations of knowledge cultures. Without standardisation, the immediate feed-back loop is highly responsive to local changes. Unlike formal institutions or the professional journal system, this system progresses very quickly.  However, regulation of quality is impossible. This makes vetting of contacts critical. One subject depends on his friend who
gets all his knowledge from word of mouth other a lot of people. In my opinion I would rely on his, ah, connection’s because I trust him. I trust that his sources aren’t just 15, 16 yr. olds just trying to show off. As long as trust somebody who knows what they’re talking about, fine. 

The problem with this black-market economy of information is “garbage-in, garbage out.” 2600 Sydney convenor explained why he started the group:
Its fun. Sitting at home till odd hours in the morning, its not always fun. Its fun up to a point. It takes on a whole different dimension when you walk into somewhere like here where you’ve got the person who does something that you use everyday in front of you. Or you know the person that runs the network that you use. That guy, I did some favours for him and he did some favours … You know that’s my only association with him, and the only way I would have known him was through the 2600 thing. … But I wouldn’t have met any of these guys without this organisation. And you get the impression I’m using it for my own ends, if you’re not using anything for your own ends you’re getting ripped off. … If you gain something out of it and someone else gains something else as a result, no problem. 

This co-operation sentiment of mutual benefits was unanimous for dark-side hackers and coders. Yet whereas trading code and open-source community was “altruistic”, HPA hackers made no bones made about making good on the hacker sharing ethic:
to be completely honest, usually I know someone in real life for about 6 months and then I just stop talking to them because I’ve learnt everything they can teach me and I just find someone else to talk to. But I reckon 2600 is a bit different because there’s actually people that know a significant amount in different directions, which I’d like to learn more of. So it will take a very long time before I leave this … 

Almost everyone depended on a social network to gather information at speed. But the crackers had networks of friends and contacts, whereas with coding, the cooperation was largely anonymous. Friends were differentiated from “sources” by either relationship duration or meeting (which seemed to hasten the description as a friend by many years): “if I actually speak to someone a lot, generally they either know more than me or I’m temporarily speaking to them a lot.”

Time 

  The necessity for knowledge acquisition networks is speed. The IT Security industry moves fast. Discovering new vulnerabilities, new patches, the status of old techniques, needs to be a.s.a.p. to keep abreast of developments and beat the system. Effort required is as much as is humanly possible; “I sleep about 5 hours a night, just keeping up to date”; “Probably 50 hours a week”; “All day unless I’m sleeping”; “I would estimate, probably about 350 maybe hours per months. Average on a school day about 8 hours a day”; “I don’t sleep unless I get something done. I sometimes can’t see myself avoiding it. You loose track of time.” All subjects had been computing for ten years or more and hacking at “pretty much the same rate of intensity” from their early teens.  This level of commitment is an imperative;
The web – well, the stat's are that if you spent 30 seconds on every single web page on the Internet now, you wont read all of it, if you lived 120 years you wont cover it all. Next year it would be that amount again. More. More. Exponential I’d say.

Specialisation is not merely efficient but unavoidable:

I want to have something definite I want to do before I work out how to do it. There’s too much too learn. Otherwise you could spend ten times as much time learning all the stuff. 

Not only is it mastering the information, but it is the fact other people are that committed; “I figure you can’t really spend any less than that and achieve much because you spend all you time just catching up.” Conflict with other priorities (like the HSC) meant subjects half-regretted the deprivation of other areas in life – school grades, sport, girlfriends – but they also regretted not committing more: 
‘I want to be the best coder in the world.’ Literally, that’s what you think. And you’re going to put the hours in to do it. But I have to find a way to do it, without ruining my life. The problem is that if you don’t put in that amount of time you’re going to be competing against people who do.

While dissatisfied with “having no life,” most had plans of improvement: 
I reckon I could be so good given the time. I mean, I don’t need to go out, have fun with friends, I don’t need to go overseas or anything.

Admitting to pausing due to “burnout” and “overload” was common. Loosing your edge affects coding/hacking ability and many subjects reminisced about periods when they committed “100%”:
I know I was absolutely brilliant when I was younger and I want to be that again. You’re quick of mind and you’re can just do anything at the time and I’m certain I could get it back.

Many subjects were exasperated with a failure of memory; 
That’s the other problem with this sort of shit, I’ve got no memory. No seriously, there’s just so much information coming through, remembering it … Urgh.

Competition was with the IT industry but even more with the speed of the subculture’s turn-over rate of new data:
So they [in the U.S.] might get fast connections and do whatever they want. If was to match then I’d need to be out there working all the time just to get enough cash to do it. It’s a competitive advantage.

Competition 

  Competition with the current hacking expertise in general is complemented by competition with friends and the competition generated by participating in a subculture of computing: 

Well, yeah, it kind of drives everything. You know, it’s called kudos, you do something for the kudos; for, you know, the cheers from everyone else. Coding was just a showing off thing. I loved just doing things and impressing people and they’d be happy and it’s almost like a comedian really, you know. Not everyone would understand it though, that was the problem. So you couldn’t impress everyone with it. Not many people at all. 

Female hacker, 19, was “learning” before she meet her boyfriend, 16, said that meeting him “didn't affect my interest a big way” as she was already committed, “but it made me read more,”

 He knew more than me! it was strange because I had been going it for a year more and still he knew more than me

With other subjects learning histories, older brother played a large part, as did knowledgeable friends:
 He used to know things that I don’t and it used to really shit me.

It was Initiative. I had to know. I had to get ahead. I didn’t feel satisfied not knowing anything about programming because other people knew it and I had to know it too.

More experienced friends produce ambition in hackers, as well as admiration: 
I reckon Mad Dog is gifted, I want to be like him. He’s on eof the things a want to be. He would know a lot.

Many subjects mentioned acquaintances who they had wanted to emulate when they had been younger, “he could touch-type. ‘I want to do that!’ A role model.” Subjects also mentioned reading about legendary hackers overseas during their introduction,
The cool people were the ones that were coding demos, really hard-core demos. But they were all in Europe, you know. Their names would definitely get around. There were – like there was this guy called Tram. He was – he coded an extension to DOS for 32 bit coding, which was the big thing. He was an absolute legend for that and yeah, he’s  definitely a legendary coder, there’s no doubt. There’s things like that: people you’d look up to because they were just technically brilliant. So it could be anywhere in the world and you’d know about this person. Not many local ones, I’d have to think about that, I’m sure there were a couple.
 
In relating how they became involved in coding outside school, many reported having been a part of coding games. Online interactive games compete with their own programmes was a common background for many of the more experienced respondents:

I got into Corewars, a kind of fake Assembler and you’d write kind of programmes in memory to basically destroy the other, to stop it working. That’s a pretty  complex thing, I’m still keeping up with it, but uhm. That’s another, anything like that would just keep you inspired …  It still is quite a big coding scene It’s got to be fast, it’s got to be impressive, you know.

Competing and coding are basic elements in hacking. Competition both abstract and real was a major part of all the subject’s learning, and many attributed this coding sport to learning how to programme well and also learning the hacking style of programming:

The game was that you’d write a programme that was s running this virtual robots and you’d pit it against other people's coded robots so it was a sort of battle between who could code the best … proving a good code this better than anyone else. It all comes back to the satisfaction in writing good code. It’s craftpersonship.

Competition with the abstract Other is intrinsic to wanting expertise as well as assimilating of the craft of “hacking code” which is different to regular programmers.

I had to be better than anybody else. That’s the whole point. You basically try to out-do each other. All the time. 

Much more so than with the professions, being a skilled hacker is an unending uncertainty because of the rate of change of technology and techniques. But competition the mechanism of socialisation, like with mangers’ ambition but magnified because of the time factor; 
I think it’s still the competition that drives me to want to be a good programmer. But life’s getting in the way, I don’t know why I lost my edge. I think its just lack of sleep.

This respondent left his job to retreat to outback with his programming manuals to “recharge”. 

Risk 

   Competition results in excellence but it has nasty side-effects. As with all subcultures, hacking is regulated by distinction, but it takes it to new heights. Retribution in the hacking community is rife, “in Australia for sure!”  Coders spoke about prestige being the motivating dynamic to the scene. Dark-sider hackers felt very differently about reputation. The one girl hacker I found explained why no-one knows her gender exclaiming, “I don't want to be well-known, then they start harassing you. No!” Another subject relating the expertise of a friend, said no-one knew of the author of the programme:
because if they somehow track it back, other hacker wannabe's fuck you up. A friend of mine … 28 years old and married, lost his job and everything because of it!

Whereas rivalry in the professions can frustrate employment chances, HPAP subculture antagonism can have serious consequences:
… after PrimalRage was shut down, literally two days later he called his BBS PrimalRage … That pissed people off, heaps of people. [Dangerous move?] Exactly. Fuck yeah! Calling himself PrimalRage? Oh, big time! I know some heavy duty people: there are some heavy duty people underground who do – they’re doing some good stuff with like tesla coils and things like that like one of them’s making a fusion thing … some of them are working with biological poisons.

The risk posed by other hackers online – both in terms of punishment and exposure – deeply effects the character of social interaction in this virtual community. It affects presentation of self more than any other aspect, and more than the fear of policing:
Until recently there’d be no information about me on the board. I don’t own a credit card. I use cash. I don’t have anything that’s easily trackable to me … I used to be vulnerable, I used to be a target but now I’m not, I figure. Back in those days when BBS were big, there was a fair bit of inter-BBS rivalry. I ran [a BBS] which had an underground area that was pretty good in my humble opinion. As a result we attracted good and bad attention from good and bad people. It was entertaining. No one actually threw bombs through the windows so it didn’t actually eventuate in anything. A couple things did happen as far as bombs going off, but none around me so it didn’t bother me.

Caution is a constant. The more involved in the HPAP underground, also the more accomplished you become, the greater care is necessary:
I get annoying phone calls all the time, that’s fine. That’s part of the reason why I’ve disconnected the phone … I told you my box is wired to the hilt, I see it when they attack me … I’m averaging about one attack a day for the last few months. I’ve got them every time … I don’t bother anymore. I used to hack them straight back. If I saw someone come on, I’d go, ‘Oh fuck you, boy!’ We just used to sit it out and shoot. Because most are doing it from a windows box. They’re sitting on a house of cards shooting at my house of bricks. 

Firewalls were a fixation especially for those involved in the criminal scene. Recent news about the Echelon line tapping expose preoccupied many. Estimating computation of data transfers was a major concern; “I haven’t seen the word ‘hacking’ in an e-mail in along time.” Regarding his own phone line, “I listen carefully.” 

Many thought the scene intrigue was a result of CMC. Conducting a subculture through the Net/BBSs exasperated friction, the ease of attacking someone digitally, the unlikelihood of being charged and the irresistibility of putting skills to use, means that participation in the computer underground is risky business. One subject explained why he left early on. A member of a group disliked him and executed the  oldest prank in the book. He telephoned posing as the police:
I just grabbed all my print-outs, anything I had. Ripped them up, took them down the back-yard, burnt them. Wiped all the stuff off my computer, all the disks. I was just so scared. You can’t believe how paranoid I was for the next couple of months. So I just stopped doing stuff then. So then I decided coding’s the way to go. I got a rush out of hacking, all the technical details in it, that’s all it was. Coding you could do the same thing but you could go public with it

Another subject doesn’t associate with anyone from the scene, “I never hang out with people that have the same interests … for safety reasons!” This wariness contradicted the pursuit of notoriety as a good hacker:  
I send it in straight away, man! That’s just me. I’m just so egocentric. This is my code! That’s the most stupidest thing to do! But I send it in straight away. I publish it under my nick name. Definitely for sure someone’s going to pick it up and trace back all the way to me. It hasn’t happened yet.

The frustration was evident that it matters not how much care is taken. Detection is unpredictable and undiscriminating. The hit-and-miss nature of policing computer crime means that the consequences of actions are never certain; “part of it is your effort and part of it is your good chance.” Judging what is a reasonable risk elicits constant insecurity.

Trust 

  CMC makes the environment of social exchanges totally blind. Existing on the Net 
can contribute to hostility because contact is through data communication so you could be anyone you want, any at all, any age and they can’t tell. Too many of them.

CMC sightlessness is alarming for a deviant community.  The compulsion to exchange and acquire knowledge through others is a source of  constant doubt in a unlawful VC. How does a hacker establish the sincerity of others and their own conscientious? 
You’d have to be next to them. You’d have to be at their level to understand what they’re trying to express through words. Most of the time people try to send me bits and pieces of code. 

But meeting is a double-bind:

I do meet but once only, never more then once. I don't tell anybody what I do. But I do save up and go see people overseas once every year. You could say for business and friendship. They offer me the connections. I went to them to meet them  and for advise most likely.

Many subject mentioned their own techniques for establishing hacking  credentials. Trick-questions can be used to verify another’s skill. Hackers will be very aware of this verification poker when introducing themselves to another. Many respondents had rough rubrics of authentication strategies:
Generally when you hit the ten years make you’re credible. This guy’s been using computers – okay what the next question you should ask him? “What operating systems do you use?” “What systems have you hacked into?” Methods and stuff like that come after. You pick up on their experience from low level things and whether they’re telling the truth or not. Otherwise they’re just bullshitting you, ego-tripping. Tapping you on like a lead that wont lead you anywhere. You ask how long have they been using computers, casually. If they say ten years, eight years, right, let’s get down to some business.

The abundance of incompetents and the prevalence of exaggeration that comes with the competition makes networking in cyberspace an artful practice: 
This is a thing I use to distinguish between a good guy - a serious guy - and an egocentric maniac, a showoff … you ask them, “Microsoft has this and this good.” …  You keep on challenging them, they’ll know that this guy knows something about the operating system. It’s a reverse sort of thing.

Overcoming bandwidth is for dark-sider hackers a nervous occupation. There are ways to establish status without rank, titles or pay differentials;  
they’d be able to pick up on how secure my connection is when I talk to them, its just a prerequisite … you pick an even more insidious method that they’re using, and at the end you gradually expose their tactics to them to show them that I’ve got a secure system – “who do you think I am! That’s bullshit!” and you get trust from them that way. I don’t think trust exists by word of mouth, I think trust exists by skill. 

In fact, knowing someone by repute is a mark against you because 

as soon as you know about him how good can he be? It’s kind of like a rule of thumb. Anyone who comes out professing that they’re good and they can do all this stuff either are complete idiots or morons or just they’re talking out their arse. 

This CMC induced anxiety over establishing proficiency mentions that informal institutions – ceremonies, rituals, affectations – develop to stratify knowledgeable users from the inexperienced. Personal manner in speech/typing is given the utmost importance. Therefore subculture stylisation is given greater weight, thereby catalysing fashions and style change to aid distinction explaining the unnaturally comical posturing in warez-speak (see Appendices). But this is too is fraught with doubt because better hackers must distinguish themselves from warez-d00ds as serious hackers:
How would you know? He could quiet, he could reel off flashy terms. As soon as someone reveals to you that they know a fuck load about computers, well, there are certain personality traits. 

This magnification of manner and stress on self-presentation means for establishing impportant friendships, meeting becomes indispensable. Further, meeting others is a pressure situation; 

I attended one on one meetings at L.A , and Mexico. They know how much you know as soon as you open your mouth and the questions you ask them.

What deserves tutelage by a more experienced hacker? “Just dedication, initiative, motivation, responsibility: you have to show that you’re mature.” And a long-term association. 

  Despite these strategies, trust is thin on the ground. What then occurs in IRC to encourage information exchange? 
Nothing personal. I don’t keep anything personal with people over the Internet. Even with my friends. I’d be insane to go on the net without amazing encryption, securing myself against everything possible. People breaking into the middle of your line, eaves-dropping on all the packets you’re sending around the world. Ahhhh. 

Risk is overbearing. Even relationships with sustained colleagues are skewed by CMC:
Some of them are in France, most of them are in America. Most of the time I don’t ask for their age, I don’t ask them for any personal information like that. We just talk. We don’t need to know a/s/l, that sort of protocol. So you enter a channel and you have to be cautious of who you’re talking to. Nup, too dodgy, too dodgy to even consider. Unless you go in there and you just going to be hanging around and giving very mediocre remarks about modern day politics and shit like that. You could be talking to a federal agent, they could be tracing you right now. They’re no such thing as untraceable unless you want to go out one bit a second. 

How difficult is it gaining entry to hacking groups or desirable organisations? If promotion isn’t formally institutionalised, what does that mean for hacker upward mobility? 
There’s no way that they would trust me. They just wont. They just wont, there’s no way. One, I don’t know enough. They’re not going to show me the ropes. Uhm, they’re not going to waste time doing that. I’m going to have to get to where they are, get up to speed as fast as possible, mingle with them, show them that I know my stuff and then maybe we can do some business.

Advancement can not be gained automatically by virtue of achievements or by seniority. Progression – leading to better resources for the individual – hinges only on direct liaison. For those in desirable situations, judgement of character is everything. 

  Regarding whether IRC is useful for information, the reaction was that it is not at all for programming, and it certainly is for beginner cr/hackers but as a hacker improves it is less so. IT could be for experienced hackers but it gets increasingly difficult. IRC is good 
for a while. But it’s really hard to find a channel; where you actually know less than the people or the people aren’t so up themselves that they don’t let you stay in the channel. Generally, if the people know that you know less than them they say “Fuck off!” and you can’t sit around and learn. Because there’s so many little dickheads with absolutely no clue that just stand around and go, “I’m going to be a hacker.” They’re ten years old.

Respecting the necessity for stable identities in VCs, hacker’s  inability to identify credible users on CMC is added to the confusion of multiple-accounts:
They might use different accounts, different ISPs, different routing methods. They’re there so that they can monitor who are the back-stabbers, you know, who are cops and who are likely to be the cops.

Ideas Economies 

  Being driven by subcultural distinction, the hacking community is very proficient at amassing knowledge. But it isn’t merely the aptitude that results. Due to the peculiar means of data compilation – processed through friend networks, at a community level – the information comes with ideology attached. The methods of generating this epistemology influence the character of knowledge,
Some things you can learn just by sitting on Internet for long enough that are just worthwhile, as you’re just wandering around and then you see all these things that quantify them. It’s scary. 

The unregulated hacking information economy is a counter-ideology and many institutions of culture develop around these depositories of personal experience, pressurised by the logic of deviance. Many hacker ‘.org’ download sites maintain a collection of essays – “rants” – (see Appendices). Respondents cited the source of certain text files when they were found on a prestigious group’s site, especially those that focus on ‘culture hacking,’ – e.g. 8lgm, L0pht. The absence of formal regulatory bodies mean that institutions evolve around this system of peer-review that becomes a major authority on legitimate style. In fact, if a hacker group earns renown of skill, their main function will be to vet media on hacker culture. PHRACK is published by Legion of Doom (se Appendices). Respect for hacks makes an organisation assume greater importance as a source of reference. 2600 has become a meta-organisation that publishes hacker news and gives credence to other groups, represents the hacker community in the public media, organises conferences, funds protest campaigns (see Appendices). The integration of hacker-ideology with instruction makes these groups the centres soft-institutions in this gift-economy reproducing the hacker status quo (cf. Bourdieu). 
I was reading everything I could get my hands on. Probably the most formative thing about BBSs back then was you got to talk in real time live pretty much to people who didn’t censor things. I was allowed to read books about programming but I wasn’t allowed to have relationships with weird people who weren’t Catholic. You get people up there who write flames at you. It was just fascinating to watch the real conversations that were going on between people on particular topics. That was the first exposure I had to what is effectively the last free media. 

Many subjects gave me the web-address for their essays on “how to crack reality, trying to find out what’s going on in the world instead of what’s being fed to you.” Perceptions about legitimate models of hacking scenes are acquired simultaneously with hacking knowledge:
the 2600 magazines, and PHRACK. I used to collect them all the time at Uni. and read them. Some of it made sense, some of it was just boyish showing off. A lot it was just very much trying to show how good you are and make some sort of name for yourself. There was a some good stuff in there, information.

Without coercive isomorphism, the verity of postings is maintained through ongoing discussion, and through flaming. Commentary on messages is according to specialty. A subject who is a chemist subscribes to  HPAP e-lists: 
you get a lot of people posting things up there that are just, well, wrong. So I try to set them straight and say, look if you want make this stuff, here’s how you do it, don’t go setting yourself on fire doing it this way,

Suspicion and self-dependence is highly valued. And the absence of official control is considered an advantage in the education of a hacker: 
Instead of just getting raw facts and the playground opinion, by socialising with these people, I learned about this sort of thing form intelligent people who have thought things over and I get a range of considered opinions to choose from and interpret myself. 

These models of interpretation –operationalised through each individuals relying in their wits - create hacker R and D institutions that are very effective in generating deviant epistemology. Perhaps it is only this kind of distributed knowledge system that succeeds when  
there are very few people around that it seems that really want to understand what’s going on right down at the instruction level … I think in the long term there’s a price to pay for extreme complexity and that’s that you reduce down to a critical point the number of people that can understand it.

The Local Scene 

  However, that body of knowledge is segmented. The channel providing observations of legitimate scenes are many and varied. Some subjects had direct experience of BBSs in overseas;
I have rung internationally. They were just the same really. It’s mindboggling how big the actually, the networks are. It’s good for that aspect to realise there’s much, so many computers, so much information, out there that’s all organised into these local depositories of information.

Perceptions of the Australian scene were no less confident. Asked about how the Australian computer underground compared to others, replies were puzzlement without exception: 
Oh, no idea. … But I think it was bigger in the U.S., there’s no doubt. 

I think there’s probably better expertise overseas.  There are groups in Australia that are quite cluey. Where they are now I don’t know at the moment. 

Uhm, I guess the computer underground over here - the limited bits of the underground that I’ve seen, yes it’s still full of posturing loonies and a few cluey people. Whether or not that’s been the experience overseas I couldn’t reliably tell you. 

Some subject have been active in the Sydney computer Underground for over ten years yet were no more certain of its comparison. The uncertainty of the legitimacy of Sydney hackers was a source of mutual curiosity, “that’s a very good question. I’d like to know the answer.” The limitation of the view of each individual of the scene here and those overseas, the question of legitimacy was a major concern:
I didn’t find the scene in Sydney that much: maybe the BBS scene. …. Like, the demo scene: in Europe it was huge: like, Finland and Holland, excellent coders. You know, that’s where all the good stuff was coming from. The U.S. was trying, they were trying hard. Australia, Sydney started having a good scene. They had good coders. But you didn’t hear about them, they didn’t release much. Yeah, I don’t know. It was all Sydney, what you could afford on phone-calls, I guess. 

What the subjects were certain of was that being located in Sydney used to be very important before the Net:
Geography used to matter. It did. It was, you know, within your area code and in fact that was used to be the case in the US because you get free local calls in some of the Baby Bell constituencies. … It’s not confined to geography now and that’s just part of the distributed nature of the TCP/IP. 

With a bulletin board you’d be constrained in the profile of people you’d be talking to, either by demographics or just who was prepared to ring up. You know I mucked around on BBSs in Adelaide and that was kinda costing a lot of money. Whereas on the Net you tend not be quite as constrained by the whole local area thing. When you get coders from a all over the world coming in and putting in their two bits worth about, here’s this and here’s how I got around it and here’s this neat little patch for that. It’s just a wider audience and a bigger bunch of people. 

Yet they were also all ambivalent about whether the location no matters at all. It seems it does, it just matters in a different way: 

It’s not really [physical] world based now. Like if you’ve got a clue then you know you go to certain places, you talk to certain people and if you don’t, you don’t. And the people who know each other in the same geographical location, they just know each other because they are in the same location. It used to be that because the systems were different, all over the place, they were scenes in inverted commas where people would actually share knowledge about the system they were trying to break. Whereas now everything basically is international. Its all TTP/IP. And there is no geographic breakdown. But regardless, because people actually prefer to know people that, I don’t know, at least in my opinion, people tend to know people that actually live near them, that they might actually met one time, you know, it’s still kind of geographic. I don’t know. 

Subjects said that they “preferred people from Australia”; 

I don’t know, I like seeing other Australian people. I always notice where people are from, and if someone’s Australian I might just look for the hell of it even though I wasn’t going to.

FAQs written by Sydney hackers were highly regarded; “the hardest thing to get a hold of is local, Australian hacking text files.” Although the 2600.org.au site (see Appendix C) debates about the consequences of proposed regulations for the Australian IT industry, and contains text files regarding national ISPs and networks, Australian government legislation, and organising to campaign against it, the organisation co-ordinator responded, regarding being a branch of the New York 2600:
Everything that we do has a local feel but the thing that unifies it is the name, the name and really the ideal behind it. We’re all basically computer nerds, that’s really the bottom line. 

Obviously the group was modeled on the New York group, according to their FAQs on holding meetings (see Appendices) but they are not in contact with 2600 New York, “talking on IRC a bit, that’s about it. There honestly no need for it really.” Nor do they confer with Melbourne and Adelaide 2600. Ideas of legitimacy were sometimes gained through personal experiences (or those of friends): 
I turned up to a 2600 meeting in San Francisco in May, … you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between what goes on here and what goes on there. The only difference is that they’re at an outside café they have to get wires and clips that we haven’t got. We’re just a bit better organised.

Organising 

The dynamics of decision-making did change dramatically with CMC. CatAlyst experienced many difficulties with confirming plans for the group, because  
With email, often you’ll say something and no one will respond it. And what we’ve decided is that if you put motion is the subject line, ‘I propose to do this” and no one responds then everyone agrees. And if someone does respond, its usually because they don’t agree and then you have to wait and figure it out. Which is actually not our idea, we got that from somewhere else. 
But we were kind of almost there in the way we were doing it, we were half way there. Well, yeah, it was half our idea and half from somewhere else. 

They had responded to the problems posed by VC and approximated a solution which was then reinforced by the example of a more successful  group with similar goals: 
There’s a AINFOS, Anarchists News Service and they have a collective organizing group and they never met because they’re from all different countries all around the world. So they had to sort something out. And they actually have this ten page document with specific procedures on how decisions are made. And I looked at script out the motion bit and thought, “that’s really useful” 

Their structure using affinity groups – project groups of ten to twenty people “so you’re always sort have some sort of trust with all of the people involved” – was purloined from FAQs from other anarchist organisations, “there’s good stuff on the net about it. As you know it doesn’t mean disorganization.” Anarchist models of decision-making informed other Sydney hacking groups. Subjects cited hacker organisation web-sites and, earlier, HPAP areas on BBSs. 

You can’t find those deep underground people to trust you enough to talk to you. You’re not going to know who they are. The best don’t make themselves known at all. 

Chapter 5  Between Neoinstitutionalism and 
			Institutional Regimes 

‘Space is no longer in geography – it’s in electronics. Clarity is in the terminals’  (Virilio 1983: 115)  

The project of modernity is, then, to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom. (Berman 1983: 345)

The City no longer trades in money: it trades in know-how (Rajan & van Eupen 1994: 4)

  The interviews supported the usefulness of many elements of DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983, 1991) work for the study of a subculture and allowed a focus on the symbolic social work at the level of social organisation in hacking communities. We saw that in agreement with the neoinstitutionalist argument, the structure of a hacker scene is subject to conflicting institutional forces. At the level of the individual, perceptions of the scene’s legitimacy are never complete. Perceptions of model scenes are learnt through many various media and forums of interaction; IRC conversation, BBSs message bases, hacking magazines, hacking electronic mailing lists, and the additions of other’s incomplete perceptions to their own. The role of peers and spectacular style (Hebdige 1988) provides a comparative logic to ambition, certification, and other screening processes of the professions. The knowledge databases form an interesting parallel to the homogenising function of formal educations in corporate fields. Successful hacking organisation were perceived through that process of informal education through, images of normatively sanctioned hackers and hacking group models appear in hacking tutorial philes and hacker group FAQs are very influential. The mobility of professionals was analogous with the direct exchange of information between hacking organisations and computer undergrounds world-wide, and indirect exchange through peer networks, hackers conferring in pursuit of their craft, and to some extent the movement of hackers through the field carrying ideas of legitimate organisation. The relationship between scenes is not at all coercive, but is so fiercely normative in some cases – with strong penalties and punishment resulting from appearing atypical -  that the effects of institutional isomorphism are clearly seen. The strong prevalence of mimetic change might be a result of the all-pervasive uncertainty of success for hacker organisations and individuals. The will to conform to hacker ideals to gain access to better resources and the company of esteemed colleagues was very prevalent. There were instances at a top echelon of hacker organisation of becoming umbrella organisation with the purpose of uniting and regulating quality and form of hacker subculture overseas there are a few hacker orgs that have assumed a field structuring role. These groups achieve a number of functions, as culture producers and technical R & D “laboratories,” they act as news service for the hacking community and as a go between for media representation (for two examples of hacking groups that have become semi-professional subculture organisations, see Appendix O) These responsibility increases up the scale of prestige or legitimacy. At the very top, hacking meta-organisations coordinate conferences and multi-group research projects; thereby they might be understood as having a minimal amount of indirect-coercive influence (in the form of requiring standardised practices, or the reflection of their own structure in order to mediate interaction, etc.). The hacker subculture field could, then, be studied using DiMaggio and Powell’s approach as conforming to the substantive rationality end of the organisational type spectrum (Rothschild-Whitt 1979), hackers exhibiting quasi-professional structuration effects far over state coercive isomorphism. The shape of the Sydney computer underground may be said to be definitely affected in some way by the overseas scenes, but the routes by which that influence travels is not easy to trace, even using DiMaggio and Powell’s ideal types. 

  Isomorphic processes were seen to be at work in hacker virtual; communities yet these processes had unexpected results. Gaps in the explanation of the research data using neoinstitutionalism unmediated by another theory suggest that we need to bring in complementary material, extending DiMaggio and Powell’ model of isomorphism. It may be that the translating of institutional dynamics to electronic communities complicates the consequences of field structuration. There are clearly developments beyond the traditional operation of institutional isomorphism that neoinstitutionalism on its own fails to explain. Although DiMaggio and Powell’s predictive criteria of isomorphic change use uncertainty as the major variable, the action of uncertainty for the hackers interviewed was of a different kind, a more individualised preoccupation with calculation of risk. The personal strategies of risk-management and the extraordinary concern with trust  point to a complication of the institutional effects. Not simply a factor in causing institutional isomorphism, they were the regular character of hackers’ interaction and the ever-present background to the computer underground. The messiness about the data signals a problematic with the simple application their theory to Internet phenomena: we need to supplement and develop further DiMaggio and Powell’s model with theory that addresses the special conditions of virtual reality institutions. 

  Nigel Thrift’s (1996) essay on the contemporary stockmarket, ‘A Phantom State? International Money, Electronic Networks and Global Cities’ assists, I believe, in explaining the unaccounted remainder in the results. As with writing on hackers, Thrift notes much of the power of money capitalists in the post-Bretton Woods international monetary system is often ascribed to the speed of electronic telecommunications, (215). Thrift argues that the impact of telecommunications is more subtle than this. In particular he proposes that the use of electronic telecommunications has generated more and more information which, in turn, produces a requirement for more and more interpretive work, leading to the formation of a variety of interpretive communities. This increasing interpretive load had had other effects. One thing that he thinks is that it has fuelled the need for face-to-face communication, producing a renewed need for ‘embedded’ meeting places in what is often considered to be an increasingly ‘disembedded’ electronic ‘space of flows’ (215). This theory of a return of the significance of place, in a new form, I contend accounts for the themes that arose in the interviews.

  Thrift argues that the success of the post-Bretton Woods City is increasingly based on the social power to launch and validate discourses within electronic networks, which in turn forces face-to-face communications in its space;
authors like O’Brien (1992) who have pronounced that the rise of electronic telecommunications will produce an ‘end to geography’ need to think again. (215)

Exactly as with the theorists of economics, the literature on VCs is in general agreement that the Internet advances a postnational geography (Appadurai 1996) and Virilio’s (1997) world-city - the city to end all cities. A series of paired ideas that we have taken to be closely connected are gradually coming apart, sovereignty and territoriality, once twin ideas, line increasingly separate lives (Appadurai 1996: 57). The separation of communication from transport meant that, when the new communication media were used internationally, people’s sense of the nation-state as expressed in a distinctive geographical spatiality diminished: the hyperspace of the Internet elides the geographical spatial formations of nation-states which underpin their claims to a national culture (Stratton 1997: 259); 
Key concepts in academic accounts of virtual communities – globalisation, information economy and telematics – all suggest that place no longer matters. (Sasseen 1996: 135) 

  However, Thrift has observed developments that contradict this opinion in the same way that the results of this study disagree with the insignificance of place for hackers. Managing the staggering amount of data means that hackers must form what Thrift recognises as international regimes (Krasner 1983; Young 1989; Murphy 1994). Thrift turns to this theory after the static theories in International Relations studies has him asking whether there are there any theoretical approaches which might be more flexible and more sinuous (229). Regimes are the principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue area (Krasner 1983: 1). This is very close to DiMaggio & Powell’s description of the self-structuration of industry institutional fields  by meta-organisations that impose ceremonies and rituals upon the largely unregulated practices with the effect of homogenisation. Thrift says regimes are arrangements for governing or regulating specific activities that have resulted from the expanding domains of international life, domains which have arisen from the growing dependence of states and societies on global flows and connections (229). They represent social institutions governing the activities of those involved in specific activities or sets of activities (Young 1989: 12). Apparently, regimes may be more or less formally articulated, and they may not be accompanied by explicit organisations like other social institutions (13). So the concentrating of authority for hacker subculture could be understood as forming these soft-institutions of models of organisation. Thrift says that the interaction between the different centres of rule constitutes what Rosenau and Czempiel (1992) call ‘governance without government’. 

  The hacking community may have perhaps constructed some of the same mechanisms as has contemporary economics in the formation of vague regulating bodies outside the state. Hackers because they’re a subculture and because hacking is criminalised. Brokerage because the state system became outmoded. The disintermediation, that Thrift observes in finance, has produced an ‘increasingly deinstitutionalised context, where traditional forms of authority and organisation are less evident’ (Sinclair 1994: 144), and because overall level of trust has decline, Thrift adds (224). Correspondingly with computer underground, we’ve seen that mistrust has evolved in the 3rd generation hackers from the fellowship and openness of the 1960s-1970s first-wave hackers (see Jordon & Taylor 1998; Levy 1984). In finance this disappearance of trust meant that for brokers, recourse is more often made to credit-rating agencies. The need for credit-rating is because for brokers the problem is no longer necessarily a shortage of information but how to make sense of the masses of information that exist. This is same problem seen for hackers. Thrift refers to how Wall Street Journal journalist explains in a Robert Erdman novel, ‘Well I’m plugged in and true, I’ve got information coming out of my ears. But what that information means I haven’t got a clue about’. Thus generation of interpretive schemes is now crucial (224). This scenario for the stock-market is perhaps only matched by the other information brokers, hackers. The main necessity for hackers is the formulation of a way to understand more data than they can manage to read. Thrift explains that for financing, information technology generates information that was previously unavailable, which both provides the possibility of more control but also provides a more complex and uncertain information environment of ‘electronic texts’ (225-226). The total uncertainty of hacking news and methods and their present validity is just as extreme a danger for hackers as it is for a stock-broker’s employment. However, the situations has become more acute with the reflexivity of the stockmarket, the market driven not by productivity but by the dynamics of cybernetic response to its own information: 

The need for continual interpretation has produced serious problems in the construction of trust which cannot all be solved by now privatised systems of trust like credit rating agencies. Skepticism is inevitably widespread. Yet interpretations still have to be got from somewhere … (244)

Making the level of uncertainty in finance converge even closer to the blindness of a subculture participant and the risk of a criminal enterprise. Now for both parties – a respected profession and delinquents alike - the turn to information technology for brokers and the accelerating move to the Net for hackers - solves few interpretive problems, it increases them. To begin with, information technology produces output which still has to be read, and read in action (226). The speed of change in the market is substituted for hackers by the speed of change of other’s hacker’s production of knowledge. Competition with the marketplace produces the same effects as competition with the expertise of the subculture community:
Most users readily admit that they need the extra eyes and ears of their extended family to bring them news of new offerings and found treasures. Whenever someone announces a new service people look it over and run it through their collective ‘cultural filter’. (Deutsch 1994: 3) 
 
  The CMC literature understands that the accelerating effects of technology and rapid transportation result in globalisation, racing  towards the structural effect of implosion (McLuhan 1964). The logic of globalisation is bound up with market forces of capitalism and related economic and colonialist forces of mass-media which is seen by all as pushing towards the greater standardisation and homogenisation of output, and detaching media cultures from the particulars of place and context (Morley & Robeins 1995: 17). All the cyberspace theory concurs on the time-binding and space-binding technologies (Innis 1964) amassing everyplace into McLuhan’s global village where the world in compacted by the compression of time and the annihilation of space (Harvey 1989; Findlay 1999). However, the hackers in the research suggest that there is something more to this process, something Thrift has also noticed in the current world of finance. There is another, and contrary, force at work, challenging the imperatives of globalisation, (Morley & Robeins 1995: 21): particularism. The observations of localism and particularism are reflected by the trends in the hacking community, but in a somewhat distorted light. Regarding the construction of nationality, broadcasting has been studied as one of the key institutions through which listeners and viewers have come to imagine themselves as members of a national community. Communication technologies played important parts in the haphazard development of the modern nation, 
the construction of a single mother tongue, rigid territorial borders, and cohesive mass populations evolved alongside the development of a national press … nations are therefore nations of people influenced by the same newspapers. (Luke 1998: 72) 

However contemporary nationhood has been transfigured by the homogenising project of international broadcasting and mass print media conspiring in globalisation. Think of the effect on hacker culture of the international distribution of PHRACK and 2600. Yet general global conformity via communication technology has had an converse reaction. In Europe especially, there is growing determination that the media should contribute to sustaining both the distinctiveness and the integrity of local and regional cultures (Morley & Robeins 1995: 18). There is world-wide desire to ‘re-territoralise’ the media, that is to re-establish a relationship between media and territory which is in part due to the perceived threat of ‘cocacolonisation’ (44). 
Regionalism appeals to the kind of situated meaning and emotional belonging that appear to have been eroded by the logic of globalisation, explain Morley & Robeins (17).

  Craig Calhoun has argued that direct, face-to-face relations, though they may not predominate, certainly do not disappear. Rather they get compartmentalized, and thus alter their sociological significance (Calhoun 1992: 208). Melvin Webber argued, in the 1960s, Americans are becoming more closely tied to various interest communities than to place communities, whether the interest be based on occupational activities, leisure pastimes, social relationships, or intellectual pursuits" and furthermore that "Members of interest communities within a freely communicating society need not be spatially concentrated (except, perhaps, during the formative stages of the interest community's development), for they are increasingly able to interact with each other wherever they may be located" (Webber 1963: 29). Giddens (1990) identifies two types of disembedding mechanism: symbolic tokens and expert systems. Expert systems consist of repositories of technical knowledge that can be deployed across a wide range of actual contexts. Each of these disembedding mechanisms implies an attitude of trust, that is, that people have confidence in the value of money an din the accuracy of expertise that is produced by non-present others. Modernity therefore involves both high trust and high risk (49).  This transformation in the codes of trust brings to mind Poster’s (1995) historical analogy of the potential of electronic communications, that technically advanced societies are at a point in their history similar to that of the emergence of an urban, merchant culture in the midst of feudal society of the middle ages:
At that point practices of the exchange of commodities required individuals to act and speak in new ways, ways drastically different from the aristocratic code of honor with its face-to-face encounters based on trust for one's word and its hierarchical bonds of interdependency. Interacting with total strangers sometimes at great distances, the merchants required written documents guaranteeing spoken promises and an "arms length distance" attitude even when face-to-face with the other, so as to afford a "space" for calculations of self interest (2).

Electronic communications constitute the subject in ways other than that of the major modern institutions (Poster 1990). In some ways the Internet undermines the territoriality of the nation-state thereby “rendering borders ineffective” (Poster 1995: 84) and in other ways it reinscribes significance to proximity and spatial organisation.
Nationstates will not necessarily disappear, but digitalisation is generating new crosscutting and cross-pressuring forces within this pervasive but also fragile territorial order (Luke 1998: 6).
Lukes argues that globalisation and electronic media results in a new form of subjectivity, a set of social relations he calls Nodality. 
This newest technics of communication linked with even more expansive markets and new cadres of cybernation-building elites on the electronic frontier is cross-cutting many older national and local identities (28). These new collectivities (“digital nodes”) are organised around interests or 
quasi-cultures with some real solidarity, therefore, begin the reproduce themselves around collecting Barbie dolls, watching Star trek, … or living in declining milltowns (29). 

This stretching is frequently read as loss (Lyon 1997: 25). But that is too simplistic an understanding. Most social analysts treat time and space as mere environments of action (Giddens 1985: 265) where as Giddens’ (1985) notion of the reflexive nature of human activity, and “structuration” interweaves contingency, material structure, and normative rules (Alexander, 1988). A more sophisticated conception of Net space is Giddens’ (1990) model of time-space distanciation: his concept of disembedding describes the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across time and space’ (21). Yet globalisation is a process of uneven development that fragments as it coordinates (175): 
Globalisation can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a away that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local transformation is as much a part of globalisation as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space. (64, italics removed)

  This might explain Michael W. Longan’s (1997) scrutiny of why people in cities and towns in the United States have begun to use interactive computer mediated communications technologies to construct community computer networks. His argues the construction of localised community sites in the global realm of cyberspace is in part a response to processes of globalisation and uneven development. Community computer networks, by making the locality visible and accessible, are one way in which people who are relatively immobilised in specific locations can jump scale to respond to the mobility of capital, he suggests. Apart from this creation of scale in non-space, the permanence of the community is reinforced in opposition to capital's mobility. Longan sees virtual communities as people “cooperating in the production of scale in the vertiginous climate of globalisation”;
in the constantly flowing space of global electronic networks, scale does not inherently exist, rather it must be consciously created. City officials, community activists, corporations, and others construct community computer networks to create geographical permanences out of a seemingly vast and undifferentiated space of flows. 

The term cyberspace hints at a ‘space’ being created where previously none existed (Lyon 1997: 27). The connection to physical place in hacker home-pages is over-laid onto Internet non-space, -  making the group’s location multi-layered: perhaps likewise the hacker groups’ we-image (cf. Elias 1965). Instead of the online self-hood experience of multiple personalities, membership to the hacking community is multiple collective identities that are nested within one another. Regarding the location of the community, it is not simply disembodied or embodied, hacker subculture is more complicatedly simultaneous. Representing hacking as at once embedded globally and exceptionally place-bound (sometimes pages even list their GPS location). The ambiguity being incorporeal-distributed-global, meanwhile connected with being somewhere, a city other hackers could visit perhaps foreshadows the future of electronic society. Despite that cohesion, the space is constantly carved up into smaller slices as specific ‘tribes’ demand their own space and forum (73) because the Internet neither requires nor produces closure because it is an ongoing process (Mitrapp 1997: 74). ‘Local discourses’ and ‘neo-tribalism’ simply find further instances in the virtual communities of cyberspace, although they may have some special features (Lyon 1997: 36). These local discourses are epistemistic communities that take over the regulation role of meta-organsitions in traditional institutional fields. 

  Thrift details the historical homogenisation of financing practices that saw unrelated and conflicting standards become generally accepted customs, thus complying with DiMaggio and Powell’s field structuration (cf. Giddens, 1979) theory of isomorphism. Thrift explains that, as  Denzin (1991) has said, the international financial system is built on ‘imaginary properties of imaginary things’ (91), and nowadays the electronic networks provide a `space of flows’ (Castells 1989, 1993) through which money can pass swiftly and effortlessly. Money becomes a free-floating signifier circulating in an economic stratosphere (214) explicates Thrift. Likewise, if we understand hacking as an economy of symbolic goods both in terms of stylising and an epistemology, both acting as a cybernetic social system of constant input of objects, affecting its sum status, affecting the outputs, which feeds back in again. Thrift demonstrates how I.T. has accelerated that exchange in stock prices to a unstable velocity. Price cycles have become very volatile and sensitive to mass scares. All these processes together have resulted in demise of grand interpretive scheme like Keynesianism or monetarism, and the growth of a multiplicity of different explanations of financial events, leading some commentators to talk of ‘the relativism of the electronic age’ (C.W. Smith 1983: 325), informs Thrift. In other words,
the powerful macro-frameworks of the past are no longer adequate as contexts of reporting modern transnational capitalism. The continued privatisation of economic discourse has not helped to provide any new popular paradigm. But another reason for this splintering process is the sheer expansion in the availability of greater qualities of information itself. (Parsons 1989: 218)

The economics has turned into a discursive body of knowledge. As my research has shown, although hacking is about information, it is primarily a subculture discourse. That the media now constitute a powerful source of governance, says Thrift, is nowhere better illustrated than by the growth of bond credit-rating agencies (Sinclair 1994). Following Poster (1990), Thrift suggests we might see new and partly unrecognisable modes of community coming into being, imagined communities in which electronically mediated communication both supplements and substitutes for existing forms of communication. He thinks we could conceive of the international financial system as an electronically networked, constantly circulating, nomadic ‘state’, operating 24 hours a day around the world (230). Just like multi-national community of hackers wheeling and dealing the around-the-clock. The regimes of financing authority constitute a ‘virtual world of information hubs, data bases and networks’ (Mulgan 1991: 3). The hacking symbolic economy too is organised into focal points of legitimacy. Thrift says that although electronics driven homogenisation may appear as a kind of universal, its very universalism forces a new set of particulars. The pressures of the interpretive load of multiple networks of electronic texts and the ‘fictive sociality’ (Gergan 1991) that it produces are so great that they force embodied, interpersonal, face-to-face interaction as the only way to come to fully finished mutual understandings (231, my italics).  

   Thrift’s proposal is that in many of the situations of monetary negotiation, especially involving a high degree of uncertainty, it is presentation of knowledge and self (the two being related) which is the main resource brought to the situation by participants. Self-identity can therefore become a crucial determinant of economic success (224). With the uncertainty brought on by tele-communications, Thrift argues that work on the self becomes of crucial importance since it is often only through such work that money capitalists can now build up trust and reciprocity.  Thrift uses Giddens’ idea of  ‘active trust’, ‘trust that has to be energetically treated and sustained’ (in Beck et al. 1994: 186). The concurrence of concerns that hackers I interviewed presented in the results intimated this analysis, unprompted. Only the clear commonality in all of the interviews indicated this unexpected result. Hacking takes the consequences of VC beyond the ideas of fluid identity and anonymity where CMC literature stops.    

  According to Thrift regarding the unimportance of time and location in the never ceasing, totally global finance system , there is still a ‘compulsion of proximity’ (Boden and Loltch 1994). But only in very specific locations. In other words, greater universalism forces new kinds of particularism (231). There is a disembedded electronic space but there is also a re-embedded set of meeting places (from restaurants to trading floors) where many of the practices of this first space still have to be negotiated. The original very nations-state oriented organisation of the world economy may have disappeared but because
there are now teeming images from which to draw, often fleeting in duration, and the options for action are enormous. The audience for such actions is also complex; what plays with ease in one context may seem superficial in another (Gergen 1991: 223) 

the second, re-embedded space is increasingly an outcome of the first.
In turn, this electronic world, with its emphasis on meaning and increased social connectedness (Gergen 1991), forces an even greater reflexivity into the conduct of many meeting places. Thus these meeting places become nodes of reflexivity, where people work hard to make contact and to present themselves (231). The superordinant amount of reference made by the interviews subjects – and in hacking e-lists, HPAP message bases, hack group FAQs, etc., - to the places where groups meet, especially in group histories is at odds with the VR placeless (Batty & Barr 1994) consensus of cyberspace literature. Thrift then says that in the electronic stock-market ‘phantom state’, the interdependent connectedness of disembodied electronic networks promotes dependence on just a few places like London, New York and at Tokyo where representations can be mutually constructed, negotiated, accepted and acted upon. In effect, these are the places that make the non-place electronic realm conceivable. They are what Law (1994: 104) calls ‘ordering centres’ (232-252). This is exactly the mode of reference for the treatment of cities in hacking media. The physical cities are used as referential points, indexes to peg the global cyberspace meta-city not so much to a latitude-longitude geography but as a means of overlaying a spatial concept onto the depthless Net. So in the hacking community cities – particularly hacking centres like New York, L.A., Moscow, Melbourne and so on – are constantly cited (notice the role of the City of New York in the article on HOPE conference, Appendix H). Even when these the mention of location is unnecessary to the narrative. Also these cities take on an extra significance as routing points. The gratuitous role in hacking FAQs of these names of cities makes little sense according to the transcendence cyberspace discourse (see Appendix E for 2600 meeting list). This strategy for organizing the hacking virtual community has another effect. 

  Yet the City of London is still at the heart of an empire in another way as well, in terms of the world market. The need for continual interpretation of electronic information has produced serious problem sin the construction of trust which cannot all be solved by now privatised systems of trust like credit rating agencies. In the past, the City’s business was chiefly based on face-to-face contacts that were made in order to stabilise relations of trust and reciprocity. However, much of the content of these transactions was foreordained, since they involved reading ‘badges of office’ which were readily recognisable signs of class, gender and ethnicity (241). “gentlemanly order” (246) which he believes now extinct (245).  With hackers too, the first generation were MIT graduates or the equivalent thereof, middle-upperclass.  Another hacker was certain to be immediately trustworthy, certain of a common background. With the diversification of the demographic of brokers, and correspondingly the 1990s hacker class demographic, trust now has to be actively constituted through work on relationships, not read off from signs of trustworthiness (247). 

  To these social institutions must be added all manner of other social practices which have gained in prevalence in the London since the 1960s, an din hacker culture during this decade. Thus there is the growth of the business card, an amalgam of the old calling cards and trade cards of the nineteenth century. Exchanging business cards is now a part of ritual meetings in the City in a way that it never was before. For hackers there is the exchange of home-page-addresses, the trading of gifs, giving out e-mail addresses which has become ritualised as a practice of expressing trust. There is a growth of the business lunch. There was always a lunching culture in the City, dating from the chophouses of the nineteenth century (Kynaston 1994). But, after a period in the 1980s when it looked as though this culture would disappear into in-house private dining rooms, it has now re-appeared (247). In the research, the need to meet and the specialised purpose of face-to-face interactions supports this by-product of CMC. The more  virtual a community is, the greater the reassignment of importance to proximous relations and weight of the interpersonal activity that occurs at meetings. Additionally, the prevalence of referral to these lunches, malls, cafes, houses, group exploits in the physical world (see Appendices) - for a VC that really need not venture from the Net for the truck and barter of warez – and the value given allusion to these events in hacker conversation and print – their symbolic function must exceed their raw utility. Thrift also mentions here the growth of conferences and conventions in the financial world. The significance given to hackers conventions exceeds their use value. Little technical information is exchanged at these events but they hold an unmatched place in hacker folklore (much celebrated articles on hacking conferences focus almost solely on the social activity behind the scenes, Appendix H). They serve as measures of both time and place for a trans-national hacker phantom state: 
the world economy is developing is such a way that people need to communicate far more widely in order to do their jobs well. Professional jobs are becoming very complex, and anyone doing them needs to find ways of meeting other people in a similar field to improve performance … their peers in other corporations or countries. A conference is often the only way people can meet. (McRae 1994: 16 in Thrift 1996: 248)

Thrift submits that electronic communication have fuelled the connectedness of cities by acting as a supplement to face-to-face communication, rather than an alternative, increasing the overall amount of communication between the City and the rest of the world:
The City is now an important transient space for international financiers, a place to do business. It has become a global node for circulating stories, sizing up people and doing deals. (252)

This extension of DiMaggio and Powell’s neoinstitutionalism Poster’s (1990) Phantom State might herald a new order of governmentality  for the Mode of Information. The conception of the global information economy as placeless clearly needs complication, as does the understanding of contemporary nationality. To an extent at least, the old nation state form has been outfoxed by a combination of money power and communicative power, says Thrift. In one sense, the power of the new ‘phantom state’ is still based in institutions, but in another sense it is based in the flow of communication itself:
More and more, it might be argued that, in the modern world, money power and communicative power have been  able to replace  state authority based on administrative power with a discursive  authority which is based in electronic networks and particular ‘world cities’. This discursive authority is the stuff of a phantom state whose resonances are increasingly felt by all. (253)

   
As the movie says, TRUST YOUR TECHNO LUST

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