Hacker Crackdown, page 30 by Bruce Sterling
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ad-scratching and have been described as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human community.
The words "community" and "communication" have the same root. Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as well. And whenever you TAKE AWAY that network-- confiscate it, outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability--then you hurt that community.
Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight to defend their own individual selves. And this is very true of the "electronic community" that arose around computer networks in the 1980s--or rather, the VARIOUS electronic communities, in telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry manifestos.
None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and importance was the feeling--the COMMUNITY feeling--that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of the future.
These electronic communities, having flourished throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other, rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great publicity break, the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause celebre.
That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990. After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone community would come out fighting h