Medieval Hackers

Front matter

punctum books * brooklyn, ny

MEDIEVAL HACKERS © Kathleen E. Kennedy, 2015.

Qos http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Table Of Contents

2: Hacking Bread Laws // 29

3: The First Hacker Bible // 55

4: Tyndale and the Joye of Piracy // 81 5: Selling Statutes // 117

Chapter 1: Medieval Hackers?

Hackers are the last thing most people would associate with the Middle Ages. I copyrighted that sentence as I typed it into my phone while waiting in a grocery line. Indeed, the sentence was copyrighted whether I intended it or not, as under current American law, text is copyrighted the moment it is fixed in media. Such a short description of a textual event hides a wealth of cultural norms, norms which I hope to explore in this book. I am an author. I am the author of that sentence I wrote in the grocery line. However, until I shared that sentence, I had an audience of one, myself. Copyright is fundamentally about who has the right to share a text, that is, who has the right to copy that text, and also who has the right to alter that text. Ultimately, copyright determines who can profit legally from the copying of a text. Historically, however, anyone could copy a text, and profit from that copy. Today if I wish to publish my sentence professionally, as the author I am unlikely to retain the copyright of it. Instead I exchange the copyright with a professional publisher, who then has control over making copies of the sentence I wrote, and over who else can use my sentence. The fact that something else has occurred instead is a tribute to punctum books’s interest in openness, commonness, and freedom of information.

As with any cultural practice, copyright has a long history that extends back before there were laws devoted to copyright in the eighteenth century. In the late Middle Ages, authors shared their texts freely. Once completed, a text could be copied by anyone with the skills to do so, and the evidence is overwhelming that this copying included what we today would call “derivative works.” That is, copyists felt free to translate texts into other languages, add or subtract material to or from texts, and insert texts into other texts. In every way medieval copyists treated texts as common to all, something we might call “public domain,” or, more generally, an “information commons.” Occasionally, a king or a clergyman attempted to control this free movement of texts, and then we see people, “medieval hackers,” mounting defenses of this information culture. This book will trace intellectual property norms from late medieval England until the crown and a group of printers collaborated successfully to control printing in the 1550s. Despite such channeling, this book considers how the medieval norms of commonness, openness, and freedom of information are still present in our textual culture in the culture of computer hackers. I will also explore how these norms challenge modern copyright law.

The people involved in translating both the Bible and the parliamentary statutes in late medieval England used the very terms of openness and access that hackers use today: they stress commonness, openness, and freedom. This book traces the striking similarity of vocabulary used by contemporary legal theorists and hackers and that of early translators such as the anonymous translators of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete translation of the Bible into English, later Bible translators such as William Tyndale and George Joye, and early legal translators such as John Rastell. As modern hackers would say, in late medieval England the desire for sacred and secular law in the vernacular was “an itch that had to be scratched,” not just for the good of the translators, but for the common good.' The major distinction between medieval hackers and modern hackers is that these ideals and the information commons that enabled them were normative in manuscript culture, came to be restricted under the early Tudors, and are now marginal, as are hackers themselves.

It is the rhetoric shared by the medieval information commons and modern hackers that led me to that sentence typed at the grocery store: “hackers are the last thing most people would associate with the Middle Ages.” When we think of hackers we think of computers, of programming, maybe even of crime. We are not wrong to think so: today hackers are most frequently computer programmers, and some hackers commit crimes. However many hackers argue that this is a reductive way of thinking about hacking. These hackers counter that hacking is bigger than computer programming. They claim that it is a culture, an ideology. The hacker ideal is a community of equals who gain entrance to the community and position among its hierarchies through skill. This skill is often quite physical, skill at making things, but at a more fundamental and idealistic level it is about having the skill to make something do what the hacker wants it to do, whether or not that thing was designed originally to perform that action. Yet the existence of the notion of “hacker” suggests that this level of skill and control is not the norm today. That we have a word for “hacker” at all suggests that distance, institutional control, or some other physical or cultural barrier prevents manufacture and repurposing from being commonplace.

Such hacking might appear to be strictly limited in time, place, and culture, but I argue instead that hackers are truly medieval, thanks to their relationship with the information commons. Sadly, today many of us think very little about this commons, to which we all have access. The information commons is the “public domain” loosely understood. As we will see in detail later in this chapter the information com-

! Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux

2 >)

mons includes all “texts” which the public has the right to circulate and modify as they desire. The information commons does not end with large digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), The Internet Archive (archive.org), or Google Books, but extends to a range of computer code, and in the past extended much, much further. We can be pardoned for being unfamiliar with the concept though, as in the early twenty-first century the information commons appears to be shrinking.

Recently institutions and corporations have found it both useful and possible to impose the strictest control in history over the use of information, and this control extends to limiting the information commons. Such wide-ranging control of information is possible thanks to the digital revolution of the late twentieth century. I argue that our modern notion of “the hacker” has developed as this digital control over information has developed. A hacker is an active person, but also a person in opposition, and these inflections are inherent in our uses of the term. The title of this book, Medieval Hackers, highlights that opposition with its anachronistic title. The title implies several other aspects of my argument, too. It suggests that the information commons was the norm in medieval England until government and trade institutions and guilds found it both useful and possible to impose controls over the use of information, to limit the information commons. The title implies that these early attempts at information control resulted in the first articulations of hacker culture. This book argues that the historical bedrock on which our own Anglo-American culture is founded is that of an information commons, and that like all bedrock this information commons influences and emerges into culture in various ways today, including in the figure of the hacker.

MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY

This exploration repurposes a new media theory which itself borrows from the field of geology. Erkki Huhtamo describes “archaeology of the media” as “a way of studying the typical and commonplace in media history—the phenomena that (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again and somehow transcend specific historical contexts.”” Media archaeology offers a more flexible model for considering the past’s relationship to the present than Foucauldian genealogy: “media archaeology is first and foremost a methodology, a hermeneutic reading of the ‘new’ against the grain of the past, rather than a telling of the histories of technologies from past to present.”* Nevertheless, Lisa Gitelman cautions that in this methodology, the past is too often “represented discretely, formally, in isolation,” while the “present retains a highly nuanced or lived periodicity.”*In short, media archaeology can recover which technologies were new at which periods, but must also fight against seeing this technology in isolation. Clearly media archaeology offers an invigorating way of examining the past, but as with any technique, it must be used cautiously.

In this book, I develop the idea of media archaeology further and extend its use of the geologic analogy. In so doing, my method reads the new against the grain of the past more thoroughly than some others because I employ this method as a medievalist, a twenty-first century scholar at the bottom of the trench, looking up and out at the strata, rather than down and in as do modernists practicing media archaeology. Medievalists develop nuanced pictures of the premodern world and desire to reveal connections between that world and the modern, practices that fight the romanticizing tendency in media archaeology. Medievalists grapple expertly with the difficulties (even impossibilities) inherent in attempting a warts-and-all recreation of ancient culture.

? Erkki Huhtamo, “From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes Toward an Archeology of Media,” Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture, 1996), 300 [296-302].

> Geert Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (New York: V2 Publishing, 2003), 11.

‘Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2006), 11.

One might think of medievalists as rigorously schooled in cultural calculus. Before the seventeenth-century scientist, Isaac Newton discovered how to calculate the area under a curve, astronomers strove mightily using the best mathematical tool at their disposal: trigonometry, which finds the areas of triangles. So the pre-Newtonian astronomers labored to estimate as closely as possible the area under a curve by dividing that curve into thinner and thinner triangles. Eventually they reached a number past which they could no longer figure: we can call this number .9 (that is, “.9 repeating,” or “nines all the way down.”) Because .9 is not a whole number, impossibly tiny portions of the area under the arc remained unmeasured. The magic of calculus was, and remains, truly radical: the scientific community agrees to call that .9, ONE, to use it as though it is one, because calculations using the fiction of the whole number work. Calculus, the very foundation of modern science and technology, rests on this fiction. Today scientists call this fiction “tolerance,” and a particular project’s tolerance is based on assessments of that project’s margin for error. Historians of all sorts are used to working with “cultural tolerance,” and any project which “read|[s] the new against the grain of the past” must be especially aware of that margin for error.

When discussing archaeology, the vocabulary of paleontology and geology becomes useful. To practice media archaeology, media theorist Siegfried Zielinski speaks directly of using “certain conceptual premises from paleontology.”* He expresses clearly the usefulness of the stratigraphic model: “if the interface of my method and the following story are positioned correctly, then the exposed surfaces of my cuts should reveal great diversity, which either has been lost because of the genealogical way of looking at things or was ig-

° Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward and Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: M.LT. Press, 2006), 7. See also his very wide definition of media, at 33.

nored by this view.” For Zielinski, culture accumulates over time as do layers of the earth’s crust. Whether for paleontological or archeological purposes, or for oil exploration, modern earth science rests (literally) on the premise of geological stratification. The surface layer, including dirt, plants, dwellings, and mobile phones, is eventually covered, and slowly the surface layer becomes stone due to compression and the chemical exchanges caused by pressure and time. Moreover these stone layers are not static. Strata can be ‘lost,’ drawn down into the mantle and reheated, and there are other more visible options as well. As the Grand Canyon demonstrates vividly, wind and water can cause erosion, and this can reveal ancient strata. In the form of earthquakes and volcanoes the shifting of the plates making up the earth’s crust can uncover hidden strata (and create new strata) quickly and violently.

Of note is how conscious earth scientists are of using “stratigraphy” as a fiction, such as .9 = 1. Strata are made of different types of sediment or volcanic rock, accumulated over time, and strata are identified by the type of rock characteristic of individual strata. Yet strata do not always separate from one another with a thin line, but express relative positions and physical (chemical) compositions. Generally, deeper strata are older than shallower strata (the law of superposition). Individual strata meet at transitional zones, and these can be of great interest to scientists. Like the fiction of 1, stratigraphy allows for a tolerant, two-dimensional representation of four dimensions—the three dimensions of space, and time.

“Cultural stratigraphy” recognizes that our technological landscape of mobile phones rests on top of computers and land-line telephones and telegraphs and letters and messengers going back deep into time. Zielinski’s model of media archaeology is quite static, however, as it makes just one cut in motionless strata, and it may not correct for the processes over time that have fossilized deep strata: the medieval mesê Zielinski, Deep Time, 7.

senger we dig up is a pale reflection of the living courier. In a further complication, letters and messengers may be medieval, but they are also modern phenomenon. Even more than geologic strata, cultural strata are shifting and complex. Unlike most modernists, as a medievalist, I am accustomed to working in lower strata and looking up and out to see how younger layers are influenced by older layers in complicated, rather than simple ways. I am practiced at explaining how time has altered a layer from what it once was.’ That stratigraph of the mobile phone cannot be considered in isolation, but is related also to developments in technology, manufacturing, and globalization of industry and culture.

In this way I am borrowing consciously from the Annales school of social history, at the same time as I am informed by the methods of a new generation of scholars. The annalistes developed the practice of social history and promoted the use of methods borrowed from the social sciences. One of the fathers of the annalistes, Fernand Braudel spends much of the first volume of his magisterial La Méditerranée connecting the geology of the Mediterranean basin with its peoples, and I draw from this tradition.’ Just as the sources I shall rely on throughout this book show topography characteristic of their times and places, they betray also the shifting of strata beneath them. A similar methodology is used to excellent effect by critic Martin Foys in his recent study of the Nunburnholme Cross.’ In my investigation, translation of texts, additions to them, and methods of copying them reveal stra-

7 Coleman voices concern that hacker ethics are diverse and have changed even inside a few decades: E. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 18. When viewing hacker cultures through history this diversity must be recognized, but I would argue also that looking for commonalities over the long timeline is also worthwhile. 8 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen, 2nd edn. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966).

°? Martin Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

ta, or layers of accretion, over time. In media archaeological terms, the interaction of hackers with the information commons is today exceptional, but I argue that this same interaction appears to be cultural bedrock underlying, and therefore influencing, all of Anglo-American media culture, at times indirectly, and at times with immediacy.

WHAT IS A HACKER?

The Oxford English Dictionary implicitly admits to an untraced origin of the word “hacker.” The OED defines “hacker” as “a person with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself,” and it lists the first recorded usage in a passage from 1976: “the compulsive programmer, or hacker as he calls himself, is usually a superb technician.” Such a description attests to a well-established folk tradition already in place in 1976. (The first recorded instance of “hacker” to refer to illegal programming occurred in the same year.)'! Yet the word itself is quite old. In fact, the earliest record of the noun “hacker” is medieval: a type of chopping implement was known as a “hacker” from the 1480s.” Evidently, over time the term moved from the implement to the person wielding the implement." Today the grammatical slippage remains, as “the hacker hacked the hack” is grammatically sound, if stylistically unfortunate. Notably, even its earliest uses, “hacker” and “hacking” referred to necessary disruption. Arboriculture required careful pruning (with a hacker) to remove unwanted branches and cultivation necessitated the regular breaking up of soil and weeds in between rows of a crop (with a hacker). Such practices broke limbs and turf in order to create beneficial new growth. Such physical hacking resembles the actions of com-

0 “hacker,” n. 3a, Oxford English Dictionary Online [OED], March 2014, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com.

1 “hacker,” n. 3b, OED Online.

2 “hacker,” n. 2a, OED Online.

13 “hacker,” n. 1, OED Online.

puter hackers who claim to identify security exploits (breaking into software) in order to improve computer security, not to weaken it.

As the OED asserts, hackers explore and develop: they make things functional the way they wish them to be. Hacker Eric Raymond distills the definition of “hacker” thusly:

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.

2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming...

6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind.

7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. ... The correct term for this sense is “cracker.”

The definition moves from the strictly computer-related to more general ways of experiencing and expressing expertise. It ends with a defense of the legality of hacking: for Raymond criminal hacking is something else, is “cracking,” and we will consider this distinction further below. One of the earliest explorers of hacker culture, journalist Steven Levy adds to Raymond’s definition and describes what he found in hacker communities in the early 1980s thusly: “it was a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost to improve the machines and

“ Eric S. Raymond, The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 3rd edn. (Cambridge, MA: M.LT. Press, 1996), 234-235.

to improve the world.” Hackers such as Richard Stallman and Larry Wall go so far as to describe the decision to be a hacker as a “moral choice” and their rhetoric has been described as evangelical.'®

Most of the time hackers act within legal bounds, but they can also infringe on proprietary interests (including copyright), sometimes doing so in the name of functionality, and sometimes with larger political goals.” Levy explains the thought process behind the actions which hackers sometimes take that run counter to social norms:

just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works.'®

The recent actions against censorship legislation, in support of file-sharing websites and improved cyber-security by hacker groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous, and of the

I Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: O’Reilly Publishing, 2010), ix. (This is an updated twenty-fifth anniversary edition, though unmarked as such in its bibliographic details.)

"© See Stallman’s and Wall’s essays in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, eds. Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman and Mark Stone (New York: O’Reilly, 1999): Richard Stallman, “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement,” 53-70, and Larry Wall, “Diligence, Patience, and Humility,” 127-148. Bradley claims Stallman and Raymond have “taken upon themselves to play an evangelical role with regard to [open and free software]”: Dale A. Bradley, “The Divergent Anarcho-Utopian Discourses of the Open Soure Software Movement,” Canadian Journal of Communication 30 (2005): 587 [585-611].

17 Coleman, Coding Freedom, 16. In a sense, exploring the intersection of these activities is the heart of Coleman’s recent ethnography of F/OSS hackers, Coding Freedom.

18 Levy, Hackers, 95

II website WikiLeaks, and even of the leaks by whistle-blower Edward Snowden demonstrate such motivation clearly. Displaying classic hacker culture, the first two of these groups blend a folkloric playfulness with technical expertise and a sense of social justice. Hacking “for the lulz” captures in modern leetspeak (internet chat idiom) the exuberant, frequently dangerous playfulness of trickster figures Coyote or Loki. Though unconfirmed, the recent, reported hacking of computer systems belonging to Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization provides a fine example of this enthusiasm and sense of play. Whether hacked by an opposing government, opposition group, or hacktivist organization, the computer systems were deactivated, but also began playing a song by metal band AC/DC at top volume.” Recent hacker ethnographer Gabriella Coleman finds humor to be central to hacker culture, as it is deployed to negotiate a culture both egalitarian and at times hierarchical.”

Anonymous’s use of the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol of their organization expresses keen awareness of this ancient tradition of hazardous play. The historical Guy Fawkes was what we would today call a religious extremist and a domestic terrorist. Famously, his plot to blow up the Parliament building and kill most of the members of parliament and the royal family was foiled and he was executed. A national holiday, this event is memorialized even today with bonfires, effigies, and masks on 5 November. Anonymous’ use of the Fawkes mask hurdles its association with seventeenth-century Catholic domestic terrorism, however, and accepts as its origin Alan Moore’s 1980s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, and the Wachowskis’ translation of that comic to film in 2006.”!

1 Announced by F-Secure, July 23, 2012, http://www.f-secure.comweblog/archives/00002403.html (accessed May 18, 2014).

2 See especially Coleman, Coding Freedom, especially Chapter 3.

1 Both Moore and the Wachowskis gesture toward the historical Fawkes, a rather organic decision for Moore, given the anarchism of his V, but both necessarily and oddly denatured in the Wachowskis’ version of the narrative.

In Moore’s comic, the Fawkes-mask-wearing main character, V, is a radicalized, violent anarchist, while the Wachowskis’ V is a more box office friendly social activist. Anonymous members’ use of the mask exploits the space between the two versions of V. While hackers may hack purely in their own interests, larger groups have gained notoriety for their actions on behalf of citizens. Nevertheless, the methods Anonymous and other hacker groups use even in social activism reflect this culture of dangerous play: citizens who find their hacked account information online in plaintext may not feel the “lulz” or the justice. Those aided by Coyote do not always, either.

A hacker himself, Stallman clarifies the distinction between “hacker” and “pirate”: “the use of ‘hacker’ to mean ‘security breaker’ is a confusion on the part of the mass media. We hackers . . . continue using the word to mean, ‘Someone who loves to program and enjoys being clever about it’,” or as I myself have heard it generalized: “hackers make things. Bored kids break things.””* While in modern French, “pirate” is the sole term to express both “pirate” and “hacker,” conflating the two obscures the workings of power and property: a pirate steals by definition, while a hacker may not.” The annual hacker conventions DEF CON and Black Hat put point on the need for such clarifications. The conventions developed to explore the limitations of computer and network security, and these limitations are demonstrated at presentations during the conventions: attendees must decide on their own how to act on such knowledge. Legal attempts have been made to suppress these demonstrations in the past, but the current trend in DEF CON and Black Hat attendance finds an increasing number of federal and corpo-

2 Stallman, “The GNU Operating System,” 53. Much thanks to Jon Singer for the quip. See also entries under “hacker” and “cracker” in Raymond, Dictionary, 234, 130.

3 Laurent Latrive makes a similar remark in discussing cyber- and bio-piracy, and notes that in French, “hacker” is translated as “pirate”: Laurent Latrive, Du bon usage de la piraterie (Paris: Exils, 2004), 25-26, 115n24.

rate agents attending in an attempt to stay abreast of the information security field.

As early displeasure with DEF CON and Black Hat attests, corporations and government may associate such customary community behavior as sharing with crime and demonize these practices with the criminal term “pirate.” Discussing proprietary software development in the early 1980s, Stallman gives this ominous description: “the rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, ‘If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate.”” Yet as Snowden’s revelations of pervasive hacking by the NSA and DCHQ remind us even more than the attendance changes at DEF CON, the line between hacking and piracy is both a legal one and highly contested: “the trope of piracy has always been highly mobile, a marker of the very instabilities of those lines that define social and ethical standards.”” Lawrence Lessig is quick to point out that “neither our tradition nor any tradition has ever banned all ‘piracy. ””

4 See for example Kim Zetter, “Feds at DefCon Alarmed after RFIDs Scanned,” Wired, August 4, 2009, http://www.wired. com/2009/08/fed-rfid/ (accessed May 18, 2014). In 2012, the head of the National Security Administration attended as a speaker: Jim Finkle, “Defcon 2012 Conference: Hackers to Meet with US Spy Agency Chief,” Huffington Post, July 7, 2012, http://www.huffing tonpost.com/2012/07/20/defcon-2012_n_1691246.html (accessed May 18, 2014). A comparison of the attendance of the two over time can be found at Daniel Nowak, “The Graying of Black Hat, DEFCON, and InfoSec Industry,” TechSource August 1, 2012, http://www. techsource.ironbow.com/articles/cyber-security/the-graying-of-black -hat-defcon-and-infosec-industry/ (accessed May 18, 2014).

2 Stallman, “The GNU Operating System,” 54. For a meditation on the development of popular understanding of “hacker” and “pirate” as synonymous, see Helen Nissenbaum, “Hackers and the Contested Ontology of Cyberspace,” New Media and Society 6 (2004): 195- 217.

% Erin Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Countercultures,” Cultural Critique 59 (2005): 29 [24-62].

7 Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New

As Raymond’s definition makes clear, hackers are characterized both by expertise and enthusiasm. The affiliation of the translators we will study in this book with higher education, their enthusiasm for their work, and the importance of communities of translators to them place these translators squarely within a medieval information culture which we today call hacker ideology. Modern or medieval hackers are associated frequently with institutions of higher learning. Levy traces early computer hackers to MIT. John Wyclif and his early followers were all affiliated with the University of Oxford. John Rastell and other early law hackers were trained at the Inns of Court, the legal college of its era. Hacker ethnographer Pekka Himanen recognizes the similarity of hacker culture to academic culture and to medieval work ethics: “openness may be seen as the legacy that hackers have received from the [medieval] university.” More than money, hackers are motivated by peer recognition: “for these hackers, recognition within a community that shares their passion is more important and more deeply satisfying than money, just as it is for scholars in academe.”” A PhD himself, Himanen has worked in and near academia most of his life, and one must recognize the knowing wink in this statement. In the end, neither Anonymous members nor most medieval translators are or were paid for their hacking directly, and so both are motivated by nonmonetary reward.

Some medieval translators were marked with an enthusiasm so zealous that they risked martyrdom for their efforts, and while this may not be identically true of modern hackers, the past few years have seen a string of high-profile arrests. As we shall see in Chapter 4, William Tyndale argued that the Bible was common to all Christians, and that its text should be openly available in English, and free to pass from believer to believer: Tyndale was a hacker. He was tried for his hack-

York: Penguin, 2004), 66.

28 Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic (New York: Random House, 2001), 6, 18, 181.

2 Himanen, The Hacker Ethic, 51.

ing, however, and executed for his activities. Even today the hazardous play characteristic of hacker culture can harm the hackers themselves, and not just their targets. New members of the 4chan community can experience all manner of hazing, but the whistle-blowing and attempts to find asylum of Edward Snowden (2013), defection of Sabu from LulzSec (2011), Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s flight from prosecution (2010), and a steady series of arrests of people involved in Anonymous actions (2010-2012) serve as reminders that very real-world consequences remain for hackers who act against the law today.

No less than their medieval counterparts, computer hackers are translators. Analog or digital, translators exercise control over media. Computer code is perpetually translated. Coders translate human languages into computer languages, and then computer language is translated into machine language, the language of zeros and ones in which computers work: one incorrect character and a computer cannot read a program. Levy recounts in detail the great leap forward that occurred as hackers developed more and more robust assemblers (and later compilers) to accomplish these feats of translation, allowing people to program in languages (FORTRAN, BASIC) that were more similar to English than machine language.*’ Like computer hackers, medieval translators were insiders: they had the language skills to open texts, scriptural or legal, into other languages, and thereby make them more accessible.