"hackerism" has in a lot of ways been confused with piling onto technological acceleration - that a hack adds something to technological objects, but thats dumb shit. a hack has nothing necessarily to do with adding a new object into the world, it has to do with discovering relations within existing objects which often turn those objects on their head. in the MIT TMRC context, this meant wiring control circuitry in fucky clever ways that would make orthodox EEs cringe. in the AI lab context this meant plugging a monster calculator into a phone line for free calls and shit.

here is where i think we can find the difference between a positive and negative (not good/bad) technological development: the positive adds to the concreteness of the technology - a new architecture for RAM chips which increases memory capacity will bring computation asymptotically closer to the infinite memory tape. on the contrary, the negative disorganizes the technological body and challenges its identity - like pluralizing the computer system and the telecom system. the former is often tumerous growth, the latter is minimalist, anti-inflammatory, anti-bloat which destabilizes the technology's foundation. for this reason, i think that a hack is characterized by negative technological development which has nothing to do with "advancing" technology as it does destabilizing techno-capital.

in these terms, what is a smartphone? it is obviously the intersection between telecommunication and computation or phones and computers, but does its between-ness imply that it is a hack? no, but it wouldn't be possible without the hacked base matter of the computer-phone. a smartphone is a phone, but it has been hacked into and sap has filled the wound. its non-phone-ness has been reconciled with its phone-ness to create the positive development of a smartphone.

so what is hacking? what makes a hacker? earlier i said that hacking has to do with discovering relations within objects which turn themselves onto their heads. the role of the hacker in this relationship is not to create or innovate, it's to shatter the object in order to find what it consists of so that it can be laid bare. it is not the object itself which is disproven, it is the human subject the object has been embodied in which is demonstrated to be inadequate and bad. "what makes a hacker?" is then a literal question: inadequacy, humanity, humility, poverty. "what is hacking?": the rigorous, endless, painful, orgasmic experience of techno-sadism.