Hacks at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Cultural Aspects

Cultural Aspects

At MIT, the terms hack and hacker have many shades of meaning, though they are closely linked historically and culturally with computer hacking (in its original non-computer-cracker sense), collegiate practical jokes, and even culture jamming. The origin of this usage is unknown, but it seems to have been widespread at MIT by the 1960s, and the hacker ethic has since spread into cyberculture and beyond. Over time, the term has been generalized to describe anybody who possesses great technical proficiency in any particular skill, usually combined with an offbeat sense of humor. The manifestation of hacker culture in the form of spectacular pranks is the most visible aspect of this culture to the world at large, but many hacker subcultures exist at MIT, and elsewhere. This article focuses mostly on prankish aspects; for a fuller description of hacker culture, see "Hacker (term)".

Roof and tunnel hacking, a form of urban exploration, is also related to but not identical to "hacking" as described in this article. Some hacks do involve overcoming barriers to physical access (e.g. placing a half-scale Apollo Lunar Module atop the Great Dome), but many other stunts do not require such specialized skills.

Viewed from an anthropological perspective, hacking is a cultural tradition affirming group solidarity, but some hacks can also be viewed as individualistic creative or artistic expression. For example the "Massachusetts Toolpike" hack was a clear instance of installation art or environmental art. Hacks which involve staged public actions (e.g. a Zombie march or the Time Traveler Convention of 2005) are clearly a form of performance art, often combined with body art and cosplay. Still other hacks have a strong conceptual art flavor, often satirizing other purported works of conceptual art. Sometimes the boundaries have been deliberately blurred, for example when a satirical work of "conceptual art" (No Knife: a study in mixed media earth tones, number three) was surreptitiously added to a "serious" art gallery show at the List Visual Arts Center.

"Tribute", "memorial", or "commemorative" hacks note the arrival, passing, or anniversary of some noteworthy person, tradition, institution, or idea (e.g. the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia). Another broad category of hacks contains strong elements of social commentary or street protest (e.g. "Nth Annual SpontaneousTuition Riot") about events on campus or in the world at large. But the strongest element of many hacks is the sheer joy of conceptualizing something new, and then reifying it with effective engineering, both technical and social (e.g. installing a full-sized mockup solar-powered subway car on the parapet wall around the base of the Great Dome, and then driving it back and forth under remote wireless control from Killian Court, some five stories below, after sundown).

Like most art exhibitions, the great majority of hacks are temporary installations; most are removed within a day or so by MIT Physical Plant, the MIT Confined Space Rescue Team (CSRT), or occasionally by the hackers themselves. It is a traditional courtesy to leave a note or even engineering drawings behind, as an aid to safe de-installation of a hack. Sometimes, the hacks have been de-installed so quickly that members of the MIT community and the general public have had little opportunity to view them. On very rare occasions, community protests have caused the MIT administration to quietly allow a hack to be re-installed and left for a proper viewing interval. The results of certain hacks (often wall murals) have been considered "permanent improvements" to the campus environment, and have been left in place indefinitely, most notably the "Smoot marks" on the Harvard Bridge. The MIT Museum maintains an extensive collection of original hacker artifacts and documentation, and displays some larger items semi-permanently in the Stata Center.

Although many traditional college pranks have involved maximizing embarrassment or inconvenience for a victim or target, such antics are usually disparaged by MIT hackers as "unimaginative" or "boring". Often the target of a hack is an abstract concept (e.g. bureaucracy or "political correctness", or entropy), and the prank may or may not be aimed at any specific individual. Even when an individual is targeted (e.g. the "disappearing office" of newly arrived MIT President Charles Vest), the jest is good-natured, often eliciting admiration rather than anger from the "victim".

Writers for the third-party, independent Internet prankster site Zug once compared humorous responses at MIT and Harvard, by posting similar banners over main entrances to their respective campuses which proclaimed "Institute of Nowlege". Regarding Harvard, they concluded, "The question: is the sense of humor still alive in modern-day Harvard students? The answer, it turns out, is no." Regarding MIT, they said, "So it's official: MIT students have a better sense of humor, hands down, than Harvard students. MIT students are more imaginative, more fun-loving, and probably smarter as well. Truly, MIT is the Institute of NOWLEGE." The Zug pranksters also noted and documented great differences in the reactions of campus police, maintenance workers, and passersby, upon seeing the ironically punned banners.

MIT hacks can push the limits of technical skill, and sometimes fail in spite of meticulous planning. Even these engineering failures have been acknowledged to have educational value, and sometimes a follow-up attempt succeeds. One hack on the Great Dome is documented as having finally succeeded on the fourth try, after a complete re-engineering of both the installed artifact and the installation method.

Smaller projects that can be completed by an individual student are sometimes accorded the honorific "a great hack" by other students, if they combine technical elegance with a hackish sense of humor. For example, an MIT undergrad transformed an ordinary grocery shopping cart into a high-performance electric vehicle, and has been frequently seen riding around campus in his "LOLrioKart". The shopping cart has a claimed top speed over 45 mph, and also has a complex steering wheel linkage and a low turning radius for maneuverability in tight spaces. The student is a strong advocate of the Open Source Hardware philosophy, and incorporates detailed documentation of his projects and a tutorial on building custom wheel hub motors in his blog. The ersatz vehicle has been prominently displayed at many MIT events, as well as the Cambridge Science Festival. As a crowning mark of recognition by the outside world, the LOLrioKart driver once received a traffic ticket from the Cambridge Police, a copy of which is now proudly displayed online.

Some of the best large-scale hacks (e.g. the Caltech cannon heist) have involved multiple teams of hackers working on coordinated but diverse subtasks such as fund-raising, "social engineering", rigging, transportation logistics, gold electroplating, and precision numerical controlled machining, calling on a wide range of technical and management skills. Not surprisingly, some hacker teams have gone on to found start-up business ventures, though they may be reluctant to reveal their earlier exploits until many years have passed.