ABSTRACT

Hackers are often, and sometimes contradictorily, seen at once as geeks, experts, amateurs, rule breakers, and even as forces of sociopolitical resistance. Popular media accounts of hackers focus on their acts of transgression and infiltration, but scholarly explorations of the hacker ethos—from hack-driven leakers and journalists to young people who organize hackathons and hacker schools—indicate that hackers vary widely in terms of their identities, practices, and motivations. Thus, the definitions of both who a hacker is, and what a hack constitutes, vary by who tells the origin story with significant consequences for justice.

This review presents the phenomena of hacking and the hackathon. It also addresses issues of access and equity in how racialized, gendered, classed, or other marginalized social groups can undertake hacking or how they are treated within hacking spaces. It examines how emerging forms of hacking operate under multiple, often contradictory logics, resulting in more or less equitable technological structures and interactions that may well provide opportunities for liberation and inclusion but that also succumb to profit pressures leading to exclusion and inequality. It shows how visibility and shifting norms of who gets to break rules are both closely interconnected in the construction of hacking culture. Understanding how some forms of hacking have been valued and others devalued—even criminalized—is central to understanding the limits and potential of hacking as a practice and an identity.

This field review is forthcoming.