AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
The wonderful thing about hacking, that I don't think anyone has quite adequately conveyed – its working with very malleable stuff, so irritation can always be turned into action. Pretty much. Certainly I have enough freedom in my work, almost too much. Still software is very irritating, and in practice you can't actually change the software you interact with all that much, you don't have the time even if it was all open source, which it isn't.
Schneier has a rather idiosyncratic and expansive definition of hacking. In this book, hacking is any effort to try to subvert the purpose of a system by exploiting flaws in its structure:
Hack: a clever,unintended exploitation of a system that (a) subverts the rules or norms of the system, (b) at the expense of someone else affected by the system.
Hacking as an ethos. It celebrates complex systems and the minds that create, manipulate, and dwell in them; it celebrates gamesmanship, that is, knowing how to play games, what the rules are and how to bend them, what rules underlie the rules.
A common cultural figure now, of course, but the nerd stereotype doesn't quite capture it. The characters in Silicon Valley were actually drawn really well, capturing certain subtypes and behavior patterns. Good caricature, but that doesn't mean it addressed the essence of hacking, if there is one.
Papert and Sussman, and Minsky of course, as attempts to take the hacker stance more seriously, to investigate it, to use it to revolutionize psychology and education as well as more obvious technical disciplines. See procedural epistemology
Stallman, ESR, and free software as a self-aware movement.
The RMS-led street protests, I bet most people don't even know about those...
Apple's polished designerism as kind of anathema to hacker stance. Hackerish software always has a scruffy aspect.
Hypercard as Apple's effort to make a hackerish environment within their tightly-controlled world. Very successful but eventually killed off. Loper OS » Why Hypercard Had to Die
When Burger King advertises their sandwiches as "a hunger hack", you know your idea has gone mainstream, for better or worse.
Actually the subculture was ruined about at the moment ESR published "his" dictionary. Not that he's to blame, it would have gone mainstream one way or the other.
Morozov is anti-hacker, at least, anti the way it melds countercultural rebellion and tech. Like, he really hates Stewart Brand. This is so weird to me. I mean, he has some valid critiques, and hacking has come to be a bit too self-congratulatory a cultural marker. But still, these are the people who Manipulate Technology to Make Lives Better. If they do it within a context of capitalism, its because that is the world we live in.