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What does it really mean to call someone a hacker?

In pop culture, a hacker is often portrayed as someone who spends many hours of his (or her) day in an ill-lit corner of a dark room, hunched over a computer, viciously typing indiscernible lines of green and red on a flashing white screen.

But pop culture tends to exaggerate and over-simplify, and its portrayal of hackers is no different. While there are small grains of truth behind the negative image that hackers bear, I think it’s fair to say that there are far more morally righteous programmers than there are programmers with malicious intent.

But that still doesn’t answer the question for us – what are hackers exactly?

Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, tries to spell it out for us. In short, Levy says that a hacker is a figure who carries out duties for the “common good.” But unlike the medieval hero Robin Hood who worked for the common good by stealing riches from the nobles and aristocrats, Levy understands hackers as the modern-day version of Robin Hood who works for the common good by making information and knowledge available to all — often against the wishes of authorities who prefer opacity over transparency.

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Frankly, I’m unsettled by Levy’s definition. In particular, the latter half stands out to me where he claims that hackers should stop at nothing to extract information and spread knowledge across the world. In other words, Levy is saying that to be a true hacker, you need to: (A) endure sleepless nights and live a life devoted to your computer over your family, and (B) feel comfortable undermining authority in all sense of the word.

As it has to do with devoting your life to coding to be accepted as a true hacker, I disagree. People often say that if you’re not 100% of something, you’re nothing at all —  if you’re not devoting 100% to a sport, you’re not a real athlete; if you’re not devoting 100% to your kids, you’re not a real parent; if you’re not devoting 100% to an endeavor, you don’t care about it at all. But that’s beyond ridiculous. We can all work towards something without losing who we are. As people, we have simultaneous interests and that’s okay. It’s our nature to be imperfect in everything that we do, so the notion that we have to incessantly code and program to be a “true hacker” is a futile attempt at perfection.

As it has to do with undermining authority, I am not comfortable with having to break rules to achieve a certain purpose. While I would never oppose the spread of information as a general practice — I believe that people are born with a basic right to have access to the same information as everyone else — I also think that there is information and knowledge out there that is better unknown than known. But if hackers break the rules to extract that information anyway, are they really doing the public a service? Where do we draw the line to divide behavior that is “for the common good” and illicit behavior? And for that matter, are we comfortable with hackers cherry-picking the information that gets made public and that doesn’t?

Ultimately, I believe that working to make information more accessible is an honorable endeavor. But we still need to draw a line in the sand. That is to say, unless there is a call that deserves extreme measures, hackers shouldn’t be breaking the rules to make information public. And if that is what it takes to be a hacker, then I pass.