Abstract
Playfulness was at the heart of how European players appropriated microcomputers in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Although gaming has been important for computer development, that is not the subject of Hacking Europe. Our book’s main focus is the playfulness of hacker culture. The essays argue that no matter how detailed or unfinished the design projecting the use of computers, users playfully assigned their own meanings to the machines in unexpected ways. Chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, or partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam—wherever computers came with specific meanings that designers had attached to them—local communities throughout Europe found them technically fascinating, culturally inspiring, and politically motivating machines. They began tinkering with the new technology with boundless enthusiasm and helped revolutionize the use and meaning of computers by incorporating them into people’s daily lives. As tinkerers, hackers appropriated the machine and created a new culture around it. Perhaps best known and most visible were the hacker cultures that toyed with the meaning of ownership in the domain of information technology. In several parts of Europe, hackers created a counterculture akin to the squatter movement that challenged individual ownership, demanded equal access, and celebrated shared use of the new technological potential. The German Chaos Computer Club best embodied the European version of the political fusion of the counterculture movement and the love of technology. Linguistically, in Dutch, the slang word “kraken,” the term used for both hacking and squatting, pointedly expressed such creative fusion that is the subject of this book.
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- 1.
See the contribution by Caroline Nevejan, and Alexander Badenoch. 2014. How Amsterdam invented the Internet: European networks of significance, 1980–1995. In Hacking Europe. From computer cultures to demoscenes, ed. Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, 189–217. New York: Springer; Ine Poppe, and Sandra Rottenberg. 2000. De KRAAKgeneratie. Amsterdam: De Balie.
- 2.
Joseph Weizenbaum. 1976. Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation, 116. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
- 3.
Tracy Kidder. 1981. The soul of a new machine. Boston: Little Brown.
- 4.
Turkle explicitly refers to the method of thick description made famous by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in her ethnography of hacker culture. Sherry Turkle. 1984. The second self: Computers and the human spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- 5.
Ibid., 227.
- 6.
Ibid., Chapter 6.
- 7.
Espen Aarseth. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Gonzalo Frasca. 2007. Play the message: Play, game and videogame rhetoric. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen; Gonzalo Frasca. 2003. Simulation vs. narrative: Introduction to ludology. In The video game theory reader, ed. J.P. Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron, 221–236. London: Routledge; Johan Huizinga. 1949 [1938]. Homo Ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- 8.
Fred Turner. 2006. From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago. Other classics are Steven Levy. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. For a general survey offering context to this story cf. Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, and Jeffrey R. Yost. 2014 [1996]. Computer: A history of the information machine, The Sloan technology series, 233. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Steven Lubar. 1993. Infoculture. The Smithsonian book of information age inventions. Boston/ New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
- 9.
The fascination with the technique is ubiquitous in the traditional literature of personal accounts and journalism. John Chirillo. 2001. Hack attacks encyclopedia: A complete history of hacks, cracks, phreaks, and spies over time. New York: Wiley; Constantin Gillies. 2003. Wie wir waren: die wilden Jahre der Web-Generation. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH; Katie Hafner, and John Markoff. 1991. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier. London: Touchstone; Steven L. Kent. 2001. The ultimate history of video games. From Pong to Pokémon and beyond: The story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world. New York: Three Rivers Press; Brad King, and John Borland. 2003. Dungeons and dreamers. The rise of computer game culture from geek to chic. New York: McGraw-Hill; David Kushner. 2003. Masters of Doom. How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture. New York: Random House; Fred Moody. 1999. The visionary position. The inside story of the digital dreamers who are making virtual reality a reality. New York: Times Business.
- 10.
Victoria de Grazia. 2005. Irresistible empire. America’s advance through twentieth-century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
- 11.
John Krige. 2006. American hegemony and the postwar reconstruction of science in Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; John Krige. 2008. The peaceful atom as political weapon: Euratom and American foreign policy in the late 1950s. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38(1): 5–44; Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann (eds.). 2009. Cold War kitchen. Americanization, technology, and European users. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. On nuclear reactors see, for example, Irene Cieraad. 2009. The radiant American kitchen: Domesticating Dutch nuclear energy. In Cold War kitchen. Americanization, technology, and European users, ed. Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, 113–136. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 12.
Nelly Oudshoorn, and Trevor J. Pinch (eds.). 2003. How users matter. The co-construction of users and technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 13.
Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (eds.). 1987. The social construction of technological systems. New directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 14.
Bruno Latour. 1992. Where are the hidden masses. Sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 225–258. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Madeleine Akrich. 1992. The de-scription of technical objects. In Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 205–224. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Madeleine Akrich, and Bruno Latour. 1992. A summary of convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies. In Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 259–264. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Steve Woolgar. 1991. Configuring the user: The case of usability trials. In A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination, ed. John Law, 57–100. London: Routledge; Christina Lindsay. 2003. From the shadows: Users as designers, producers, marketers, distributors, and technical support. In How users matter. The co-construction of users and technology, ed. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor J. Pinch, 29–50. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 15.
Nelly Oudshoorn. 1996. Genderscripts in technologie: Noodlot of uitdaging? Tijdschrift voor Vrouwenstudies 17(4): 350–368.
- 16.
For an analysis of De Digitale Stad through this lens, see Els Rommes. 2002. Gender scripts and the Internet: The design and use of Amsterdam’s digital city. PhD thesis, University Twente. For the ubiquity of the gendered scripts: Thomas J. Misa (ed.). 2010. Gender codes: Why women are leaving computing. Hoboken: Wiley.
- 17.
With the notable exception of the IBM user groups as revealed by Atusushi Akera. 2001. Voluntarism and the fruits of collaboration: The IBM user group, SHARE. Technology and Culture 42(4): 710–736.
- 18.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan. 1987. The consumption junction: A proposal for research strategies in the sociology of technology, in The social construction of technological systems, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, 261–280; Ruth Oldenziel. 2001. Woman the consumer: The consumption junction revisited. In Feminism in twentieth-century science, technology and medicine, ed. Angela N.H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger, 128–148. Chicago: Chicago University Press; Ruth Oldenziel, and Adri A. de la Bruhèze. 2009. Theorizing the mediation junction for technology and consumption. In Manufacturing technology, manufacturing consumers. The making of Dutch consumer society, ed. Adri A. de la Bruhèze and Ruth Oldenziel, 9–40. Amsterdam: Aksant.
- 19.
Steven Lubar. 1992. ‘Do not fold, spindle or mutilate’: A cultural history of the punched card. Journal of American Culture 15(4): 43–55. Turner, From counterculture to cyberculture.
- 20.
William Aspray. 1997. The intel 4004 microprocessor: What constituted invention. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 19(3): 4–15.
- 21.
Thomas Lean, ‘Inside a day you’ll be talking to it like an old friend’: The making and remaking of Sinclair personal computing in 1980s Britain, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 49–71. Frank Veraart, Transnational (dis)connection in localizing personal computing in the Netherlands, 1975–1990, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 25–48.
- 22.
Simon Nora, and Alain Minc. 1978. L’informatisation de la société: rapport à M. le Président de la République. Paris: La Documentation française.
- 23.
Thomas Kaiserfeld. 1996. Computerizing the Swedish welfare state: The middle way of technological success and failure. Technology and Culture 37(2): 249–279.
- 24.
Bruno Jakić. 2014. Galaxy and the new wave: Yugoslav computer culture in 1980s, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 107–128.
- 25.
Maciej M. Sysło, and Anna B. Kwiatkowska. 2008. The challenging face of informatics education in Poland. In Informatics education – Supporting computational thinking, ed. Roland T. Mittermeir and Maciej M. Sysło, 1–18. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, as cited in Patryk Wasiak, Playing and copying: Social practices of home computer users in Poland during the 1980s, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 129–150, fn. 33.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Lean, Inside a day you’ll be talking to it like an old friend; Veraart, Transnational (dis)connection; Jakić, Galaxy and the new wave; Kaiserfeld, Computerizing the Swedish welfare state.
- 28.
Weizenbaum, Kidder, and Turkle all focus on users of a big university computer or in the research department of a major enterprise.
- 29.
Turkle, The second self.
- 30.
Tim Jordan, and Paul A. Taylor. 2004. Hacktivism and cyberwars. Rebels with a cause?, 5. London: Routledge.
- 31.
Ibid., 18.
- 32.
As Rachel Maines writes: “Any technology that privileges the pleasures of production over the value and/or significance of the product, can be a hedonizing technology.” Maines discusses technologies once professional that have become popular hobbies like photography, sewing, cooking, car dragsters, and ham radio amateurs, but could also have included hackers. Rachel P. Maines. 2009. Hedonizing technologies. Paths to pleasure in hobbies and leisure. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
- 33.
Ksenia Tatarchenko. 2010. Not lost in translation: How did English become the common language of information processing (1960–1974)? Paper presented at the Software for Europe workshop. Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, September 2010.
- 34.
Heinz Zemanek. 2002. Computers in small countries. In Computing technology past & future, ed. J. Folta, 157–170. Prague: National Technical Museum in Prague.
- 35.
Aristotle Tympas, Fotini Tsaglioti, and Theodore Lekkas. 2008. Universal machines vs. national languages: Computerization as production of new localities. Paper presented at the international conference ‘Technologies of Globalization’, Darmstadt.
- 36.
- 37.
Simon Donig. 2010. Appropriating American technology in the 1960s: Cold War politics and the GDR computer industry. IEEE Annals in the History of Computing 32(2): 32–45; Petri Paju, and Helena Durnová. 2009. Computing close to the iron curtain: Inter/national computing practices in Czechoslovakia and Finland. Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 7(3): 303–322.
- 38.
Patryk Wasiak. 2010. Computing behind the iron curtain: Social impact of home computers in Polish People’s Republic. In Tensions of Europe and Inventing Europe Working Paper series, working paper No. 2010/ 08. Accessible online at http://tensionsofeurope.eu/www/en/publications/working-papers.
- 39.
Kai Denker. 2014. Heroes yet criminals of the German computer revolution, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 167–188; Wasiak, Playing and copying; Veraart, Transnational (dis)connection; Jakić, Galaxy and the new wave.
- 40.
Chirillo, Hack attacks; Hafner and Markoff, Cyberpunk; Kent, The ultimate history of video games; King and Borland, Dungeons and dreamers; Kushner, Masters of doom. The French Micral computer, a 1973 product based on the Intel 4004 processor, advances the French claim of having invented the microcomputer. It is a favorite website story but lacks proper historiographical groundings. For historically based cases on domestication of the PC in Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany, see, respectively, the works of Petri Saarikoski, Frank Veraart, Thomas Lean, and Kai Denker. Petri Saarikoski, and Jaakko Suominen. 2009. Computer hobbyists and the gaming industry in Finland. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31(3): 20–33; Petri Saarikoski. 2005. Club activity in the early phases of microcomputing in Finland. In History of Nordic computing, ed. Janis Bubenko, John Impagliazzo, and Arne Sølvberg, 277–288. Berlin: Springer; Frank Veraart. 2008c. Vormgevers van Persoonlijk Computergebruik: De ontwikkeling van computers voor kleingebruikers in Nederland 1970–1990. PhD thesis, TU Eindhoven. Frank Veraart. 2008b. De domesticatie van de computer in Nederland 1975–1990. Studium 2(1): 145–164; Thomas Lean. 2008. ‘The making of the micro’: Producers, mediators, users and the development of popular microcomputing in Britain (1980–1989). PhD thesis, University of Manchester, Manchester.
- 41.
Helena Durnová. 2010. Sovietization of Czechoslovakian computing: The rise and fall of the SAPO Project. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32(2): 21–31.
- 42.
On this topic of microcomputers in Taiwan, see Honghong Tinn. 2011. From DIY computers to illegal copies: The controversy over tinkering in Taiwan, 1980–1984. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33(2): 75–88.
- 43.
For a striking parallel, see Joy Parr. 1997. What makes washday less blue? Gender, nation, and technology choice in postwar Canada. Technology and Culture 38(1): 153–186.
- 44.
Theodore Lekkas, Legal Pirates Ltd: Home computing cultures in early 1980s Greece, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 73–103.
- 45.
See Frank C.A. Veraart. 2011. Losing meanings: Computer games in Dutch domestic use, 1975–2000. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33(1): 52–65.
- 46.
Antti Silvast, and Markku Reunanen, Multiple users, diverse users: Appropriation of personal computers by demoscene hackers, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 151–163.
- 47.
See: note 1; Turner, From counterculture to cyberculture; Gillies, Wie wir waren.
- 48.
Johan Söderberg, Users in the dark: The development of a user-controlled technology in the Czech Wireless Network Community, in Alberts and Oldenziel, Hacking Europe, 219–239.
- 49.
The burgeoning of the European history of technology can be followed in the research agenda of Tensions of Europe established in 1999. See www.tensionsofeurope.eu
- 50.
Richard Pells. 1997. Not like us: How Europeans have loved, hated, and transformed American culture since World War II. New York: Basic Books. Mel Van Elteren. 2006. Americanism and Americanization. A critical history of domestic and global influence. Jefferson/London: McFarland; Pells, Not like us; Jonathan Zeitlin, and Gary Herrigel (eds.). 2000. Americanization and its limits. Reworking US technology and management in post-war Europe and Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Mattias Kipping, and Ove Bjarnar (eds.). 1998. The Americanisation of European business. The Marshall plan and the transfer of US management models. London: Routledge. Richard F. Kuisel. 1993. Seducing the French: The dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oldenziel and Zachmann, eds., Cold War kitchen.
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Alberts, G., Oldenziel, R. (2014). Introduction: How European Players Captured the Computer and Created the Scenes. In: Alberts, G., Oldenziel, R. (eds) Hacking Europe. History of Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5493-8_1
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