computer hackers - book - 2010 - Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600

Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600
Emmanuel Goldstein (ed.)
Wiley Publishing Inc.
2010
576 pages

Much of the writing by and for hackers has, since the beginning, been primarily electronic text distributed via networks and BBS systems. Relatively recently, as has been discussed elsewhere on this blog, hack/phreak e-zines such as Cult of the Dead Cow and Phone Losers of America are finding print publication via various self publishing platforms. 2600 Magazine (a name taken from the ‘blue-box’ phreaker technology that played a 2600hz tone into a trunk line to seize telephone operator status for the caller) has, since 1984, been the one consistent print publication for the computer underground.The magazine has always focused on the analysis of telecommunications and computer systems, although it has also always taken a libertarian-tinged leftist political slant as well. In 2009 2600 published an almost 900-page ‘best-of’ anthology of the magazines articles. The single largest component of each issue, however, is the letters section, and this volume anthologized close to 30 years of correspondence with the publication.

Dear Hacker is an enormous collection of the letters that appear in 2600 magazine, introduced by Emmanuel Goldstein, the magazine’s founder and editor-for-life, who notes his own history of writing letters to magazines. Goldstein noted the importance of a reader responding to something they read in print, demonstrating their engagement with the media and participating in the social life brought into being by writing and publishing. Dear Hacker includes the unedited letters of hackers writing about every aspect of hacker culture, with the original editorial responses. Each chapter focuses on a different component of the full range of hacker concerns, such as dealing with law enforcement, hackers in prison, questions about technology, and questions about the magazine itself. These chapters are subdivided according to years, showing similar concerns revolving around changing technologies and environments as time proceeds. The book is not simply a collection of correspondence, it is also a history of a print magazine operating as a medium of active information exchange to a subculture that is based on the use of computers.

Maybe next 2600 will edit a book of Goldstein's editorials that begin each issue.