Ultimately computer hacking and net navigat-ing, and the images and fantasies surrounding them, represent something greater than the sum of the parts outlined here. It is this writer's opinion that hackers represent the scouts to a new territory that is just now beginning to be mapped out by others. Hackers were the first
cybernauts, the first group of people to understand that we as a species are about to disappear into a cyberspace at least similar in function to that posited by William Gib-son in his 80's fiction. As Manuel De Landa explains in his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT, 1991), we are forging a new symbiotic relationship with machines via computers. The na-ture of this relationship and the level of
individual freedom afforded by it has a lot to do with how hackers, visionary scientists, and the first wave of cyber-settlers go about their business. While De Landa is very laudatory toward the "freedom of in-formation" ethic and developmental ingenuity of hackerdom, he cautions those who wish to make too much trouble for individuals and organiza-tions, leading to retaliation, escalation of tensions, and increased paranoia.
He writes: "...[S]orne elements of the hacker ethic which were once indispensable means to channel their energies into the quest for interactivity (system-crashing, physical and logical lock-busting) have changed character as the once innocent world of hackerism has become the mul-timilliondollar business of computer crime. What used to be a healthy expression of the hacker maxim that information should flow freely is now in danger of becoming a new form of terrorism and organized crime which could create a new era of unprecedented repression. "De Landa. argues elsewhere in Machines that the U.S. government's, especially the military's, desire to centralize decision-making power has been seri-ously compromised by the personal computer revolution. He speculates that those outside the military-industrial machinery have only a few years to develop a new and truly decentralized sys-tem of networks before the military devises a new tactical doctrine that subsumes the distributed PC.
The images of hacking: coming in under the wire of mainstream society, cobbling together tech-nology for individual and group purposes, over-coming limitations, and all the other real and imagined dimensions of hacking, have become part of a new academic trend that uses the sci-fi image of the cyborg as a model of late
twentieth century humanity. These academics have embraced cyber-punk sci-fi, the politicized image of the hacker, and postmodern ideas about posthumanism (a future of human/machine hybridization). Anyone who spends most of their waking hours patched into a PC and the Internet or in hacking code has felt the margins
between themselves and their machines getting very leaky. Hackers were the first to experi-ence this " many others are now following in their digital footsteps.
Hacking has become trendy and chic among people who, if pressed, couldn't even define an operating system. The "idea" of hacking has migrated far from the actual act of hacking. It has become a cultural icon about decentralized power for the turn of the millennium.
