Picturing the Hacker Subculture

Both Turkle (Second Self) and Taylor ("Hackers: Cyberpunks or Microserfs?" in The Cybercultures Reader) engage directly with the issue of how hackers are depicted. Turkle's description of MIT's "the Ugliest Man on Campus" contest depicts computer engineers as mostly men, reveling in their nerdiness. Some of the interviewees see "having a girlfriend" as being at odds with being a hardcore programmer, some see the latter as a way to sublimate the desire for the former. Neither the contest nor the depiction of the hackers in the chapter seek to really undermine the stereotype of the unattractive a-sexual or "girlfriend-less" computer geek. If anything, the chapter brings to light the way these constructions of geekiness rely on certain hegemonic notions of beauty and the ways in which sexual frustration/under-development is almost always constructed under a heteronormative system. 

Taylor's essay shows how cyberpunk works against some of this. By pointing out the fundamental difference between depictions of real-world employees at Microsoft and the hackers of cyberpunk fiction, he at least opens the possibility of sexy, engaged, uber-cool computer geeks.  Certainly this depiction is more compelling to the media market. The guys in Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science have given way to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and Ryan Phillippe in Anti-trust. Angelina Jolie in Hackers or, even better, Kristin Lehman as the hacker "invisigoth" in the William Gibson-penned X Files episode. Even the cyberpunk authors seem to be getting cooler as their latest books come out, whether it's Neal Stephenson pictured in a motorcycle jacket ... or the creation of the Buzz Rickson's "Pattern Recognition" MA-1 flight jacket, which was customized to match the description of the jacket favored by the main character of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

I'll be interested in discussing the implication of these curious dynamics in class!