The Hacker Crackdown
By Bruce Sterling
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier is a work of nonfiction by Bruce Sterling, first published in 1992. The book discusses watershed events in the hacker subculture in the early 1990s. The most notable topic covered is Operation Sundevil and the events surrounding the 1987–1990 war on the Legion of Doom network: the raid on Steve Jackson Games, the trial of “Knight Lightning” (one of the original journalists of Phrack), and the subsequent formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The book also profiles the likes of “Emmanuel Goldstein” (publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly), the former assistant attorney general of Arizona Gail Thackeray, FLETC instructor Carlton Fitzpatrick, Mitch Kapor, and John Perry Barlow.
In 1994, Sterling released the book for the Internet with a new afterword. Though published in 1992 and released as a freeware electronic book in 1994, the book offers a unique and colourful portrait of the nature of “cyberspace” in the early 1990s and the nature of “computer crime” at that time. The events that Sterling discusses occur on the cusp of the mass popularity of the Internet, which arguably achieved critical mass in late 1994. It also encapsulates a moment in the information age revolution when “cyberspace” morphed from telephone modems and BBS’ into the Internet and the World Wide Web.
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Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling (born April 14, 1954) is an American science fiction author known for his novels, short fiction, and editorship of the Mirrorshades anthology.
Biography
In particular, he is linked to the cyberpunk subgenre. Sterling’s first science-fiction story, Man-Made Self, was sold in 1976. He is the author of science-fiction novels, including Schismatrix (1985), Islands in the Net (1988), and Heavy Weather (1994). In 1992, he published his first non-fiction book, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. Sterling is one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan. In addition, he is one of the subgenre’s chief ideological promulgators.
This has earned him the nickname “Chairman Bruce”. He was also one of the first organizers of the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop and is a frequent attendee at the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop. He won Hugo Awards for his novelettes “Bicycle Repairman” (1996) and “Taklamakan” (1998). His first novel, Involution Ocean, published in 1977, features Nullaqua, where all the atmosphere is contained in a single, miles-deep crater. The story concerns a ship sailing on the ocean of dust at the bottom and hunting creatures called dust whales. It is partially a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. In the early 1980s, Sterling wrote a series of stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe: the Solar System is colonized, with two major warring factions. The Mechanists use many computer-based mechanical technologies; the Shapers do genetic engineering on a massive scale.
The eventual contact with alien civilizations complicates the situation; humanity eventually splits into many subspecies, with the implication that some of these vanish from the galaxy, reminiscent of the singularity in the works of Vernor Vinge. The Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the Crystal Express and Schismatrix Plus collections, which contain the novel Schismatrix and all of the stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe. Alastair Reynolds identified Schismatrix and the other Shaper/Mechanist stories as one of the most significant influences on his work.
Bruce Sterling
