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2014 | Book

Introduction: How European Players Captured the Computer and Created the Scenes Read chapter Read first chapter

Hacking Europe

From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes

Editors: Gerard Alberts, Ruth Oldenziel

Publisher: Springer London

Book Series : History of Computing

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

Hacking Europe traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the book shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct “demoscenes.” Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the “ludological” element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction: How European Players Captured the Computer and Created the Scenes
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.
Gerard Alberts, Ruth Oldenziel

Appropriating America: Making One’s Own

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. Transnational (Dis)Connection in Localizing Personal Computing in the Netherlands, 1975–1990
Abstract
Examining the diffusion and domestication of computer technologies in Dutch households and schools during the 1980s and 1990s, this chapter shows that the process was not a simple story of adoption of American models. Instead, many Dutch actors adapted computer technologies to their own local needs, habits, and cultural settings. For one, actors developed different views about the relations between Dutch users and North American suppliers. This chapter identifies different types of producer-user relations and the varying ways in which Dutch users and North American suppliers viewed their relationships. Dutch computer hobbyist considered themselves equal partners with their trans atlantic counterparts and the coproducers of the computer technologies. This relationship involved production of technologies for local markets and lowering of corporate boundaries by a “computer Esperanto” to facilitate software exchange. By contrast, governmental computer literacy programs tried to de-link from US producers. When introducing computers in schools, policies favored national computer industries. Local practices of cracking and copying of software, showed how computer users found themselves at safe distance from legal procedures by U.S. Commercial companies against their “illegal” copying. In computer users’ view, their practice did not harm the wealthy foreign manufactures across theAtlantic. The chapter shows how in these interactions views of American producers implicitly and explicitly played a role.
Frank C. A. Veraart
Chapter 3. “Inside a Day You Will Be Talking to It Like an Old Friend”: The Making and Remaking of Sinclair Personal Computing in 1980s Britain
Abstract
The initial domestication of the computer in 1980s Britain was accompanied by its configuration for educational benefit, as part of a wider culture of computer literacy. Among the most popular British home computers were those of Sinclair. Originally intended to introduce people to computing, Sinclairs low-cost and basic capabilities Have led to write them off as undistinguished introductory computers or as mere video game machines. Closer attention to the role of users, peripheral manufacturers, software producers, and computer magazines, however, reveals a complex picture that shows the Sinclair computer was much more flexible in its use and representation.
In this essay, the author demonstrates how the initial conception of a simple introductory computer was subverted by the activities of different groups of users with alternative ideas. Although gaming eventually came to dominate Sinclair computers’ identity, the author argues that the process was more contested when considering other categories of users who had quite different views on the utility of a basic computer. The chapter demonstrates how users remade Sinclair’s computers into new forms as their ideas of computing developed and how these user practices in turn influenced the design and representation of subsequent machines. It thus “closes the loop” between technology production and technology use by showing how the practices of popular computing helped to shape its artifacts.
Thomas Lean
Chapter 4. Legal Pirates Ltd: Home Computing Cultures in Early 1980s Greece
Abstract
During the early and mid-1980s, a home computing practice of use and openness of software emerged in Greece. This computer culture both reflected and reinforced the local economic and technological characteristics. Because the protection of intellectual property rights regarding software was not an issue, software piracy was not considered such a pressing problem as it would become later. Home computing in Greece was shaped by two technology-mediating actors, who actively guided and manipulated the technology and its use: the computer magazine Pixel and small computer stores. The author argues that these technology mediators supported a conception of software as something that could and should be adjusted to the needs of local users through the – legitimate – altering of the software code. The chapter discusses the so-called “cassette piracy” phenomenon during the period together with the interaction between home computer users and the development of computing technology.
Theodoros Lekkas

Bastard Sons of the Cold War: Creating Computer Scences

Frontmatter
Chapter 5. Galaxy and the New Wave: Yugoslav Computer Culture in the 1980s
Abstract
During the Cold War, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was geopolitically positioned in-between major world powers. Neither a part of the Warsaw Pact nor of NATO yet sandwiched geographically between these powerful blocks, the country occupied a unique position among countries politically, technologically, and culturally. In the context of the Cold War, the local emphasis on self-reliance and massive government investments resulted in a high-level technological expertise in urban Yugoslavia, while the government maintained tight control over the import of objects and ideas from the superpowers. In the cultural sense, Yugoslavia followed many contemporary trends with Western Europe and the United States, while adding a distinct local cultural flavor into the mix. As a consequence, Yugoslavia knew local subcultures that were more than a mere emulation of their Western analogues. One of these subcultures, coming to prominence in the 1980s, was the Yugoslav New Wave scene: it blended social critique, music, and arts with the occasional use of home computers. Among young urban educated Yugoslavs, a specific set of routes and trends in appropriating technologies emerged that included a home-brew computer industry and distinct subculture of meetings, radio shows, music, and parties.
Bruno Jakić
Chapter 6. Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer Users in Poland during the 1980s
Abstract
In this chapter, Wasiak shows how Polish users appropriated home computer technology during the 1980s in a social, political, and economic climate highly influenced by the Soviet Bloc. He introduces a host of social actors who were instrumental in shaping Poland’s home computer market: state institutions, computer experts, private entrepreneurs, and hardware and software retailers. The chapter argues that these social actors not only filled the supply and demand for home computers but also offered the scripts for using them. At the same time, users were actively co-constructing the technology through gaming culture, hobby computing circles, and the computer-oriented subculture known as “the demoscene.” The process of disseminating home computer technology was based on the transnational flow of material artifacts, software objects, and information. The study thus questions the distinction between global and local practices and how these are linked with local culture, the economic situation, and legislation in the cross-border appropriation of technology.
Patryk Wasiak
Chapter 7. Multiple Users, Diverse Users: Appropriation of Personal Computers by Demoscene Hackers
Abstract
The chapter deals with the domestication of technology from a hobbyist viewpoint. The authors discuss how a specific hobbyist group, the demoscene, adopted home computers over the past few decades. The demoscene—or just the scene, as its members called it—represents a European, technically-oriented, and creative community that has existed since the mid-1980s. Based on written primary sources from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, the authors highlight various aspects of the complex process of the computer’s adoption. They argue that the demoscene did not accept personal computers without criticism, even though members enjoyed strong ties to computers and developed high-level skills. The main themes guiding the analysis are the concept of a “scene,” referring to thematically-focused communities of technology users and the concept of a “script,” denoting the perceived possibilities for the use of new technology.
Antti Silvast, Markku Reunanen

Going Public: How to Change the World

Frontmatter
Chapter 8. Heroes Yet Criminals of the German Computer Revolution
Abstract
Today, common ideas of hacking refer to activities like wiretapping or interrupting critical infrastructure as crimes. Underneath this image lies a past of hackers, who were in the vanguard of the digital age. To understand how the so-called criminal hacker came into existence, the chapter explores the history of German hackers. In 1984, Herwart “Wau” Holland and Steffen Wernéry, two of the founders of Germany's Chaos Computer Club, announced their “hack” of Germany’s BTX interactive videotext system. This unsettled not only its operator, Germany’s Federal Mail, but also the users of its service. Promoted as a secure technology for doing business and communication at home, the BTX system was surrounded by concerns from the very start. Its large, centralized, and opaque technology worried both data-protection commissioners and critics in the emerging Green movement. Tinkering with the BTX system, the hackers manipulated its billing system and carried out a “digital bank robbery.” When the German Federal Mail was thus exposed, the organization tried to shift the blame to the hackers. The journalists and lawmakers, however, applauded the hackers for uncovering the flaws of BTX system. Instead of criminalizing young computer enthusiasts, this episode shows how hackers were seen heroes and “hacktivism” asa consumer protective endeavor before they became considered as representatives of a suspicious subculture in the late 1980s.
Kai Denker
Chapter 9. How Amsterdam Invented the Internet: European Networks of Significance, 1980–1995
Abstract
In January of 1994, the Internet became available to the general public in the Netherlands via a new dial-in service and virtual access area called De DigitaleStad (Digital City, called DDS). Hailed as a new form of public sphere, DDS visualized the Internet as a form of a virtual city. Rather than trace how DDS gave shape to an online city, however, this chapter explores how an existing and emerging culture of the city gave rise to this new digital sphere. In particular, it highlights how actors from a range of independent media labs and cultural centers helped to invent the participatory city culture that was visualized within DDS. First, it traces the growth of Amsterdam as a central node and gateway of the Internet in Europe in parallel with the rise of independent media and cultural centers in the 1980—a culture related, among other things, to the squatter’s movement and worldwide activist groups fighting social injustice. The chapter then shows how these sectors came together in the late 1980s with the involvement of a third set of actors, the hacking community, to shape what would become Digital City and Amsterdam’s booming digital culture. Through a series of network events that brought these groups together, a digital culture took shape that eventually gave shape to the city’s digital culture.
Caroline Nevejan, Alexander Badenoch
Chapter 10. Users in the Dark: The Development of a User-Controlled Technology in the Czech Wireless Network Community
Abstract
“Ronja” is a piece of hardware used for sending data by means of visible light. The technology was developed by users in the Czech wireless network community. The philosophy behind the project states that anyone lacking previous knowledge of electronics should be able to build the device by themselves. In order to realize this vision, the mechanics and electronics were designed with generally available and off-the-shelf components. The instructions for building the device are published on the Internet under a free license. These principles have been summarized under the label “user-controlled technology.” At the center of the case study is a schism in the Czech wireless community over the commercialization of Ronja. The article looks at how the growing market demand for free space optics in the Czech wireless community called forth a redesign of the product in line with the requirements of mass production. The relation between a “democratization of innovation” and the entrepreneurship that flourished around the product was marked by internal tensions.
Johan Söderberg
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Hacking Europe
Editors
Gerard Alberts
Ruth Oldenziel
Copyright Year
2014
Publisher
Springer London
Electronic ISBN
978-1-4471-5493-8
Print ISBN
978-1-4471-5492-1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5493-8

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