Editorial: introduction to hacking and hacktivism

The activity of hacking constitutes one of the more contested and misunderstood aspects of network culture. Initially the word denoted a kind of obsessive commitment to creative and innovative computer programming, especially the re-engineering of systems that pushed the relatively new technology of the computer in interesting directions which were oftentimes not anticipated or recognized by their designers. For this reason, hackers have been celebrated as the heroes of the computer revolution, the visionaries of the internet and the principle architects of cybersociety. However, shortly thereafter the word came to be employed to name various forms of computer crime, network intrusion and even cyberterrorism. Under this denotation, hackers have been routinely characterized as a threat to network security and are determined to constitute one of the more pernicious problems faced by societies which are becoming increasingly dependent on new media and digital information systems. Recently, this ominous image of the hacker itself has been re-engineered into what many find to be an unlikely but potent hybrid of computer technology and social activism. ‘Hacktivism’, as it is called, draws on the creative use of computer technology for the purposes of facilitating online protests, performing civil disobedience in cyberspace and disrupting the flow of information by deliberately intervening in the networks of global capital. This special section of New Media & Society investigates the contended and contested meaning of hacking and hacktivism. The three articles that comprise it re-evaluate the history and social significance of hacking, trace the complex genealogy that connects earlier generations of hackers to the recent development of hacktivism and investigate some of the mechanisms of resistance that have been employed by hackers and hacktivists to intervene in social networks which have become increasingly obsessed with new media & society