Given my current work, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about people. Not specific people, but rather people from a sociological and anthropological perspective. How they communicate, how they interact with each other, how they develop meaningful connections, and how they define and present themselves to the world. It’s led me down a path of introspection thinking about the past 26 years of my life that have been formative in a variety of social ways that I had never previously considered having parallels until recently. Over this time a lot has changed in society in terms of how we engage and interact with each other, and the experiences that I have had and subcultures I have participated in have helped form my perspective on various aspects of human interactions. This post is a reflection on my personal experiences socializing in circles related to computer hacking, graffiti writing, and the development of contemporary social networks.

When I was 12 years old I graduated from 8th grade and my parents bought me my first personal computer. I mean, this computer was for me. Prior to this we had the family computer, which was really my dad’s business computer. By this age I was already heavily into computing; having multiple tripod.com web accounts where I was hosting various strange experiments in online content. I would spend a lot of time hogging my dad’s computer, and I think it became more a matter of convenience to buy me my own.

It was the summer of 1997, and I was the proud owner of a Voodoo3 graphics card. I could finally do some proper gaming beyond Doom and Descent. I also had a USRobotics 33.6kbps modem that would allow me to connect to our local internet service provider and find people to play games with. The hot game that summer was LucasArts’ Star Wars: Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight. It was a highly acclaimed game, with a great story, epic landscapes, beautiful level design, and innovative gameplay characteristics for the time such as forcing the player to choose between the light and the dark side of the force. The single player campaign was great, but multiplayer was such a hot new feature, I wanted to seek out ways of playing with others. Someone suggested that I check IRC to try to find people to play with.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was an early protocol for chat developed in the 1980’s. People could connect to a server and list the channels that existed on it, discover content, meet people, manage their logins and messages, and socialize on a variety of topics. Initially it was difficult to get into. It wasn’t AOL or Yahoo with an easy to navigate graphic user interface, rather it had a higher learning curve being that it was developed much earlier on and required learning a lot of text commands to navigate and perform operations. I downloaded mIRC, the shareware client of note at the time, and connected to DALnet. I spent some time looking for channels that would connect me with people that were playing Jedi Knight, but I ran out of luck. Being exhausted with my search, on a whim I decided to enter #hackers.

My bedroom computing setup summer of 2001. Most of my collection was acquired from the Salvation Army, but some were e-waste from my high school.

At the time I was very interested in the mythos of the hacker. It was this kind of technological wizard or magician that seemingly defied the laws of technology (but really had obtained a level of understanding that would allow them to manipulate it), and appeared to have a super power level of control over their digital environment. This interest was greatly amplified by the film Hackers (1995) that propelled the cyberpunk mentality into my imagination. I felt like an outsider in the rural community that I was growing up in and admired this idealized rejection of the status quo by the hacker protagonist among an urban setting and the trappings of capitalist society and consumer culture.

When the channel opened I was surprised by how many users were there. Surely some place named #hackers would be too easy a location to find actual hackers, like a channel named #bankrobbers. But there were around fifty people at the time. I would lurk in the channel and observe the interactions between the users. It’s fundamental to understand the hierarchy of IRC channels when assessing their social interactions. At the very top you have SOPs, or System Operators. They are designated with an @ symbol in front of their username. They can control all aspects of the channel people are in, such as muting people or kicking/banning them from the channel, as well as many aspects of the network everyone is connected to. Then there are AOP’s, or Admin Operators. They also have an @ symbol in front of their username, and can control administrative features of the channel that they have been designated on. Then there are voiced users, who have a + in front of their username. They have been selected by OPs or by OP’d bots, having been added to a list, to have voice in the channel, which allows them to continue to speak when the channel is under voiced mode, which is a form of moderation that mutes all of the users who do not have voice or are not operators.

Understanding the channel hierarchy has a lot to do with understanding the channel social structure. It was very evident who the regulars and the visitors were. You could see who was a VIP and an established figure in the community. It was very difficult to break into the social setting, in the same way that it would be to nudge your way into some other group's conversation at a bar. Being an antisocial preteen, I was unaware of the best method for mixing it up with the locals. I wanted to begin the integration process, but how? It was clear that the last thing I should do was ask questions. There was a mantra at the time that permeated all technology related networks: RTFM. Read The Fucking Manual. This generally refers to using the ‘man’ command on a unix system to learn more about a particular function in that environment. The man page is basically a digital text-only manual that describes all of the information a user should need for utilizing that functionality. If a user wants to use a function properly, they should read the corresponding man page thoroughly before attempting to ask a question from a human being.

How did I break into the social scene? I don’t actually remember what it was. I lingered, that was a big thing. My username became familiar. I didn’t front about my technical prowess, I responded to things, I asked follow-ups that I knew would be meaningful from a human angle, and I made my interests known. I started coding Perl scripts, learned socket programming, and began making bots that would connect to IRC channels and respond to keywords with definitions, acquiring and disseminating information from within the channel. I was reading 2600 magazine and listening to the Off The Hook radio show via RealPlayer, as well as books recommended by other channel visitors, from authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. The difficult thing about the social scene in #hackers was that they knew they were always being monitored. There was a mantra that there was always a federal agent in the channel, so be wary of what you say. It lacked the dank musty corner of the internet vibe I was anticipating and was too exposed to prying eyes. That’s when I was invited to #crontab.

I didn’t even know what #crontab meant at the time. It refers to the ‘cron’ task scheduling system on unix operating systems. Someone must have vouched for me to get me into the channel, as it was invite only. It was a lot of familiar faces from #hackers, but some I hadn’t seen before. The subject matter was more about the latest security exploits. Every day it was a different piece of software compromised, a different network hacked, and a different website defaced. A lot of the moderators of the channel belonged to a hacking organization called globalHell (gH). They were a notorious group that specialized in high profile website defacement, showcasing the latest exploits and making them publicly aware by changing the web sites hosted on the server to one of their own design; typically declaring their ownership of the system and whatever belief system they might have, early internet memes, pornographic images for shock value, and typically whatever other content might piss off the administrators of the server and their clientele.

To me this felt like the inner circle. I was seeing actual computer security circumventions and discussing them with the people that discovered and exploited them. It was an incredibly strange and unifying feeling; that I could be so far removed from physically constructed society and yet so close to people committing acts that would impact so many (my first foray into parasocial relationships). This would culminate in 1999 when 60 minutes did an interview with one of the founding members of globalHell, Patrick W. Gregory a.k.a MostHateD. I managed to convince my parents to allow me to momentarily hijack the living room TV in order to watch a news story (completely out of the ordinary). The story was about young hackers who were identifying security holes in systems and then gaining employment from the companies they had circumvented. We watched it together and as it progressed I could tell we were developing different feelings about the content. I felt that these people found value through their adventurous and inquisitive nature, and my parents felt the companies were being extorted into employing these people. It was a wake up call about how different my thought process was from my parents at the time.

After furrowing my eyebrows repeatedly at my parents' reactions, I relinquished the remote control and returned to my room. I opened up IRC to see who was discussing the segment, and there was already a lively discussion going on. Among the participants was @MostHateD, the primary subject of the interview who was op’d in the channel, so clearly authenticated as the real deal. It was a surreal experience having just seen this person on national television and immediately interacting with them right after. He was unhappy with the segment and how the producers and editors made him look. A few days later he was arrested by the FBI. He was sentenced to 26 months imprisonment, three years supervised release, and to pay $154,529.86 in restitution. He was 18 years old at the time.

During the late 90’s, the way to make a name for yourself as a hacker was to discover previously unknown security vulnerabilities in a piece of software, program an exploit that would take advantage of that security vulnerability and provide administrative access to any number of computer systems utilizing that software, and then to make your takeover known by defacing websites hosted on that system. There were plenty of hackers who preferred to not call attention to themselves, compromising systems and covering their tracks carefully, with the intention of not drawing attention from authorities. Websites existed to track and archive the defacement of various websites around the world as well as who the hacker or group was that had committed the act.

Fast forward to 2001. I graduated from high school and left my tiny podunk town in search of more enlightened surroundings. I headed to San Jose, population one million, with a university dead center of the urban population where I would be doing my undergraduate studies in digital media art. It was the heart of Silicon Valley and seemed the most appropriate place to be for someone with such a passion in computing and the emerging aspects of the world wide web. I met someone in the dorm my freshman year who had grown up in the much more urban environment of the east bay area who introduced me to graffiti. I had already been familiar with the art form from some of my classmates who chose to spend their weekends underneath bridges among river rocks practicing their bubble letters and Vaughn Bod?-esque characters, but most of the graffiti found in that rural environment would be marker tags or engraved roman numerals XIII or XIV representing the Sureño and Norteño gangs of the area. This was their method of communicating to each other about what areas they claim ownership of, a practice that usually gets compared to dogs pissing on trees to mark their terrority, but clearly a socially impactful activity.

Given my new surroundings, I felt compelled to understand this new form of visual language. It was omnipresent once I began to pay attention to it. When I started to think like a graffiti writer I started to see all of the little bits of urban infrastructure that would, or could, contain some interaction from a street artist. It not only got me to question the history of these spaces, the way people interacted with them in conventional and unconventional ways, but also all the physical minutiae that comes with modern urban infrastructure, whether it be transportation or architecture or wayfinding. All of our urban space has been designed from the underground up, but it’s not always designed with everyone in mind. Buildings go up with their interior experience as a priority, often leaving the exteriors to be a brutalist defensive architectural experience that has little to no consideration for those encountering the architecture from the street level.

At the time downtown San Jose was for the most part a pretty sterile environment. After the first dot-com bubble burst, a lot of the downtown area was left vacant and it generally emptied out by 6pm, leaving the city with a bit of a ghost town vibe except for a strip of bars along first street. Back in the 1980’s, the city was known as being a hub for graffiti when it was a center for freight trains moving through the area, and artists would take the opportunity to cover the outside of freight cars which would make their way around the rest of the bay area and eventually the country. However the dot-com boom of the 90’s led San Jose to a dramatic face lift that meant pushing out graffiti and gangs in hard and violent ways. The police presence in downtown San Jose was very heavy throughout my days as a student, and it was not uncommon to be stopped for the most minor of infractions (I was once stopped for jay-walking at 3am, and another time for meditating near the fountain on the SJSU campus after dark).

I could see this visual communication occurring around me, so regardless of the omnipresent police state, I decided I would attempt to participate in graffiti culture. It’s not something one undertakes lightly. You must first decide on a moniker. This is derived from the inscriptions left by hobos on freight trains and underpasses, drawing characters and leaving their pseudonyms in scrawling remnants of oil paint sticks. Your name must characterize some value about yourself but must also obtain the visually aesthetic appeal of symmetry and balance of negative space. The name is the brand. The application of the brand across mediums differs by tool. The tag is different from the throwie, and the throwie is different from the piece. All of these considerations have to be made when deciding on a name. I decided on DIGITAL.

DIGITAL was a 7 letter word, which was a little different than most graffiti writers. Typically a 5 or 4 letter word is selected, as it is quicker to write and has fewer areas for variation (maximize efficiency). I ignored this advice and decided to start writing based on a calligraphic technique I created to tag the name in a single stroke. I would do this on stickers which I would post in newspaper boxes or on the backs of signs, but also tag directly onto lamp posts with a silver pilot marker or broad pilot black. I eventually got tired of the name and switched to using MEDIA, which was a 5 letter word and had a much better balance of negative space. Knowing now what to look for in word composition from a typographic perspective, I was able to compose a word that worked well as a tag and as more defined outlined pieces.

Participating in this culture opened my eyes to a few metrics that I could use for analyzing the work I came across:

• I could evaluate quality. Everyone was vying for space and making qualitative comparisons among the marks in a given area was relatively easy as you could view them as small multiples. One can assess style, consistency, line confidence, and compare those attributes with those of other artists.
• I could assess who was the most prolific. It was evident how many times I would see a given person’s name given the sheer quantity of output and frequency of occurrence when traveling from A to B. This is a sheer quantitative analysis, otherwise known as “getting up”.
• I could see where people trafficked. It was evident to see the neighborhoods and routes that other artists took based on their tagging styles and implements, the targets they chose and when the tags popped up. This is not dissimilar from tracking animals in the wild by looking for footprints and bent grass stems.
• I would notice when fresh tags popped up. Going over regular routes and knowing what to look for made it evident when new content would pop up on the street, signifying that somebody had just come through recently.
• I could see artists develop over time. Retracing their paths, updating their content, changing their styles, and placing accompanying marks. Artist development is apparent in line confidence, composition, application, medium, and location.
• I could see who travels together. You see the same artists popping up in pairs because they are walking the route together. This is often done as a safety precaution to look out for law enforcement or citizens who want to be a hero, but also simply as a way of socially interacting in person and sharing in the adrenaline usually involved in the adventure of going out “bombing”.
• I could see impromptu asynchronous socialization and collaboration occurring. One artist would tag a door, pole, or sign, and soon others would follow suit. Before you know it, the entire surface is covered with an assemblage of street art. This may be confirming the broken windows theory, or it may be identifying a social phenomena of people attempting to find meaning and place within an uninviting public space co-opted by private commercial interests.

There’s also a semi-codified way of assessing the effort of a particular street art or graffiti piece based on multivariable analysis. Size of a piece, number of colors, details, can control, and of course location are all factors graffiti artists use to assess a piece. There’s a hierarchy to the medium, with marker tagging being the lowest on the totem pole, working its way higher through stickers, wheat pasted posters, throwies (quick outlined letter forms done in spray paint), filled bubble letters, and then finally full color pieces that generally follow a predetermined plan of work that has been laid out on paper. Locations that receive the most eyeballs are the most highly coveted. A “heaven spot” is a double entendre meant to indicate how high up a piece might be painted for increased visibility, but also so precarious of a location that one missed step will send the writer to heaven. While incredibly dangerous, these heaven spots are pursued because of the impact a high-profile installation has on the public as well as the social stature within the community of local street artists.

There’s also direct negative engagement between graffiti artists known as beef. If one writer paints over the work of another writer, beef is established as territory is being taken over. Occasionally the new work is of a higher quality, or of a higher degree of territory, to the point where communally it is accepted (the artist is more renowned, or a piece can go over a throwie or lower tier-level executed medium). Beef can still occur, and it’s generally done through painting/tagging over each others work. A famous example of this is CAP from NYC in the 1980s who made it his mission to start beef with every writer in the city, while simultaneously backing it up with threats of physical violence. When a writer or crew determines that someone else putting up work in their territory isn’t of a skill level or caliber they feel is worth the wall it’s on, they remark them as a “toy” and will write such all over the piece.

A similar parallel occurs in hacking circles, where someone will take administrative access to a system and keep it on the downlow in order to continue leveraging that system as a shell to be able to connect and access more computer systems while creating a buffer between their target and their real location. Another hacker might access that system with the sole intent of defacing publicly facing services, attracting as much attention as possible to themselves and their exploits, ultimately resulting in patches being made to the system which locks out anyone who might have circumvented security measures for access.

The closest equivalent in social media has been ratioing people on Twitter. When a tweet gets more replies than likes or retweets, it has been ratioed, symbolizing that more people are bringing negative attention to the post than they are liking its material.

Graffiti and street art used to be a highly regionalized phenomena, with artists typically representing their neighborhood and doing most of their work in familiar territory. The act of going “all city” is when a graffiti writer becomes so prolific around their entire metropolitan area that they have earned a level of notoriety that can be acknowledged across the city. In large spread out cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, going all city is a meaningful ascription reflecting a lot of effort. This is inherently a socially driven pursuit, with the intent to become as recognizable as possible. With the advent of contemporary social media platforms, graffiti has seen a global distribution of styles as well as methods for pursuing notoriety. The locational context of where a piece physically resides begins to diminish and become less important when absorbed through Instagram, and instead its value is assessed based on the characteristics of the platform; views, likes, comments.

While social media has been a component of computing since the mid 1970s, the contemporary understanding and perception of it didn’t really manifest in the public consciousness until MySpace launched in 2003. This was the first social network to truly gain mainstream traction and was able to scale to meet global demand. MySpace generally consisted of a profile for a person where they could upload images, post lists of their favorite music, movies, books, and tv shows, as well as connect with people to form a network of users. Users could also customize the look of their profile pages using early CSS and JavaScript, as well as incorporate automatic playback of MIDI music files. MySpace users would curate their top 8 friends which would be publicly visible and often lead to disgruntled engagements from those that didn’t meet the top 8 (this subtle rearrangement of the top 8 is the type of social interaction reminiscent of the Seinfeld episode “The Millenium”).

Kim Kardashian's MySpace profile from 2006. Not the most creative design.

Facebook emerged shortly after MySpace but decided to roll their product out in a completely different fashion. It would be a demonstration in exclusivity, reflecting the ivy league heritage of the service and the types of social groups surrounding Harvard that the team intended to emulate. The need to be from a specific school with a registered email address was a hard limit on not only the type of people that could join the platform, but also the scale of growth that the company could sustain as they rolled out their product. Facebook took the selective approach to build desire and hype and incrementally add universities to the system based on their prestige and social clout.

At this point MySpace and Facebook were focused on how to establish a network of friends. Later social media would turn to focus on establishing a network of followers, which to this day persists as the ultimate form of social clout as well as pushing the social engagement of individual users into now brand ambassadors, turning themselves into “influencers” in order to gain notoriety through their messaging or gain financial independence through their consumer reach. Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, and TikTok all utilize this model as a dark pattern to entice people into engaging more with the platform with the hope of building their subscriber/follower base in order to feel more relevant or earn more by pushing products to their audiences.

Social media as a means of establishing a base of followers is little different from hackers gaining social prominence through regular defacement of high profile websites, or graffiti artists getting up at high profile locations and executing their best work from a technical perspective. It’s the regular activity of putting oneself out there in the public image, often within an enclave of like-minded individuals, hoping to make an influential impact based on style, originality, aesthetic sensibilities, production quality, entertainment, and engagement.

At their core, computer hacking, graffiti writing, and social media have notoriety as a primary component which drives individual participation in these systems. Each system has a different criteria for analyzing performances within its platform/medium which is largely a malleable set of conditions that changes over time, but is largely collectively agreed upon in a folksonomic fashion. This seems to fundamentally come down to a characteristic in human behavior to seek out belonging, acceptance, and striving to be identified among the swirling mass of organic chaos which is life. Perhaps it’s posterity that is sought, in order to have some identity beyond our lived existence.