This is a project for one of my design seminars, for which we were asked to create a 5″x7″ postcard that reflects our “cultural identity”. Rather than taking the obvious route of addressing my mixed ethnicity, I decided instead to focus on the parts of my identity that relate to hacker culture.

I still remember the day sometime around 1981 when my dad brought home our first home computer, an Apple ][+. One of the first things we did with it was to burn and install a custom video ROM EEPROM chip so that we could type using lower-case letters, which the default setup didn’t allow. Several years later I got my first modem, a “blazing fast” 1200 baud unit, which allowed me to explore the pre-Internet world of electronic BBS systems.

Contrary to the popular belief founded largely through mass media, the term “hacker” should not necessarily be taken to mean someone who is breaking through security systems and otherwise wreaking havoc on electronic resources. Originally, the term was meant to refer to highly skilled computer programmers and technicians who push the bounds of possibility in their craft. Incidentally, many hackers have historically turned at least part of their attention to pushing these boundaries in terms of gaining access to systems which would otherwise be closed to them, which probably accounts for the term’s commonly held negative connotations. This wikipedia article contains a good discussion of the subject.

At any rate, I spent a much of junior high and high school immersed in the hacker culture of the time, and while I never did anything particularly outrageous (or clever, for that matter), I still have a fondness now for those “good old days” before college and the Internet.

For the postcard, I tried to convey the sense that I had of what it meant to be a hacker during that time. I traced a photo of myself at a computer terminal, slouched back in a casual yet intent posture–this isn’t meant to represent someone working at an office, after all. The figure is intentionally placed in solitide, to reflect how I spent most of my time, yet connected via the various wires and cables as the sole conduits to the urban landscape (San Francisco, of course) above. I didn’t want to get too literal with the notion of being “underground”, so I hope that the composition doesn’t push it too far in that sense.

The single line of text on the piece is meant to look like a Unix command line, evoking the somewhat obfuscated feeling of the pre-Windows/Macintosh environment. The term “hacker 2.0″ is intended to represent the idea that while I certainly can’t make any claims to a member of the first generation of real hackers, my roots and experiences go back far enough that I might be able to make some claim to being part of “version 2.0″ thereof. Finally, the use of l33t-speak for the work “hacker” is an obligatory nod to the ridiculous way that we typed in those days.