Hacker Perspective: Kolloid
It's interesting to look at the names we choose for ourselves and dive into their meaning. I chose mine when I was 16, but I never openly used it until recently. The funny thing is that it still represents the essence of what makes me a hacker all these years later. There was a naive wisdom in my choice of a name, but even that is part of my conception of what it means to be a hacker: we unexpectedly tap into something larger that we may not even fully comprehend at the moment.
It's not by our ability alone that things happen for us. Despite our talents, or maybe because of them, we more often find ourselves oppressed by the systems around us. Contrary to the way we are told things ought to go, we somehow gain access to something beyond ourselves that we weren't meant to have, and we get the system to do something it wasn't meant to do. That breaking of the system allows us to see how the system was already broken, and that sets us free from the artificial limits the system has placed upon us. That is the essence of hacking.
My chosen name is a corrupted form of a substance that contains properties of two different states of matter. Smoke appears to be solid, but it's something you cannot grasp. Both the corrupted nature and the undefined state denote something undergoing a transformation. It is something doing what it shouldn't be able to do, so it passes through where it was not meant to be. The intermediary is an exception, creating possibilities where there were none before.
My teachers gave me the name of a troublemaker as a child, so I was never meant to succeed within the school environment. My teachers even told my parents that I was gifted, but that I was not permitted to be in the gifted program. I was deemed too disruptive, so I was excluded. My teachers saw potential, but they saw it as something to be suppressed.
Even as a child, I could see that I was embedded in a broken system. I knew when I was rightfully being punished and when I was being scapegoated out of laziness. I learned justice through experiencing injustice. I learned that a title of authority does not automatically make one a legitimate authority. A report card from those younger years had the comment that I questioned everyone, even adults. Curiosity was renamed as rebelliousness and became justification for punishment.
Strangely, it was the brokenness of the system that allowed me to experience the system more fully than others. I was sent to the high places (the principal's office) and the low places (the janitor's room) that most never see. I was once even made to wander to every single classroom in search of my stolen belongings after my teacher made me leave them outside the classroom on our way to the auditorium because she couldn't be bothered to unlock the door for me to put them inside safely, and they were gone when we got back. It was as if the system didn't know where to place me, so I was being sent to all the places.
Despite not having a proper place within the system, it was still my teachers' intention for me to fail within it. My fifth grade teacher explicitly made sure of that by failing me in one subject for not submitting a workbook to be graded while I was in the principal's office, and my teacher refused to accept it afterwards when I noticed the pile of others behind her desk. She never asked for my workbook, so I had to ask her. I was being forced to question the system to get it to do what it should have already been doing by itself, but those attempts failed. They were made to fail. I pleaded with her to accept my workbook, but her response was only to tell me that I should have known.
I was off to a bad start with a bad name in the system, but something happened that wasn't supposed to happen. My mother spoke on my behalf with my soon-to-be junior high, and I was placed in the advanced track instead of the remedial track. She saw the potential within me as something good, and that potential was more real than whatever it is that my teachers saw within me and tried to suppress, so she made something happen that wasn't supposed to happen. In that sense, my mother was a hacker by making the system do what it was supposed to do when the system would not do it on its own.
I was made an exception and started actually do well in school. I was thriving in a place where I wasn't meant to be, experiencing a life that I wasn't meant to have but should have had all along. I encountered many teachers who went out of their way to support me, including my shop teacher, who created an after-school computer curriculum when I asked him about the old computers he had lying around his class. I caught a glimpse of what it looks like when things go right in the system. More than just feeling that it was wrong, I could now see how things were wrong for me when I was younger.
It was during this time that I also started gaining my conventional hacking skills. My older brother was building computers and making simple websites. I looked up to him, but he wouldn't teach me. Instead, I learned HTML and JavaScript by viewing the source of websites I liked, modifying a little bit, and seeing what changed. I learned intuitively by the way things behaved and how the parts functioned together, not by what they were called. However, this was just a digital extension of a behavior already instilled within me from my father of taking things apart to see how they worked beneath the surface. My brother's refusal to teach me was inadvertently a greater gift than I could have realized because I learned more by engaging directly with the code unmediated than what could have ever been taught to me by another. That was not his intention, but it still was a gift.
Things were good for a while, but I started to diverge from the system again in high school. I became friends with students whose talents were not suppressed when they were younger, so they were ahead of me in several subjects, and I desired to be in the same classes as my friends. I thought I had an opportunity to join them in one when my geometry teacher said that we would be taking a diagnostic test and that we could skip the class if we scored high enough. I was naturally able to visualize the solutions to most of the problems, so I was able to meet that threshold. However, I was then told that I couldn't skip because it was required for graduation. I had hit a limit of the system, which once again was holding me back.
Being blocked from naturally rising within the system caused me to expand throughout all the cracks I could find to get the credits that I needed. Once again, the brokenness of the system caused me to experience it more fully than intended. While still nominally a high school student, I was simultaneously an adult school student, a community college student, and a trade school student. I was in classes where I was years younger than everyone else and others where I was out of place for being older. I became asynchronous from who I was supposed to be, which exposed me to people I was never supposed to meet. I was supposed to be one thing, but I became many things, inadvertently turning me into a more complete representation of the system itself. Diverging from the system caused me to merge with the system.
Using all these ways to accelerate the pace at which I gathered course credits so that I could be with my friends had the side effect of not needing a full course load by my junior year. I overshot what the system could provide, so I was now looking for a way out. The school allowed seniors to leave for the day after lunch if they were on track to graduate. I asked my counselor if I could leave as well and drop my two unnecessary electives. Unfortunately, she said I was required to be there for the full day by the California Education Code but was unable to provide the exact statute. That answer was unsatisfying, and I knew something was off.
I went home that day and found the actual regulation online, which contradicted what my counselor told me. I printed it out, scheduled another meeting with her, and was finally given the sticker on my ID that allowed me to leave. The system administrator had failed, causing the system to fail me. Instead, learning the true code of the system allowed me to literally pass through walls meant to keep me in. A rumor started circulating among the staff that I was related to some high-ranking official, explaining how I was able to do what I did. However, it was really just the system trying to reconcile the discrepancy between who I really was and the name the system had for me. I was an exception.
Despite scoring well when finally unbound, there was still something about the school system that was trying to reject me. I finished high school with an over 4.0 GPA and an SAT score in the 90th percentile, but I was only accepted into one college. Maybe the system was directing me to that particular place because I also received a full tuition scholarship there. Still, it seems that no matter where I go, I can't help but notice the ways that the systems that surround me are broken. One such instance was the way that the school bookstore intentionally hid the ISBNs on their website to make it more difficult for students to find cheaper alternatives online. It was a casual observation of corruption that I wasn't expecting to change, but I would stumble on a way to counter it by doing what I always do.
While doing my usual inspection of the website source, I discovered that there was an API being called in the bookstore's code that was being used to load the book information into the page. The script that constructed the API call had a variety of parameters showing, which allowed me to see how the API worked, including a disabled one to show ISBNs. I sent my own API call with that flag turned on, expecting it to return a blank field, but it actually returned the ISBN. The ISBNs were in there all along, hidden until someone could set them free.
The discovery of a method to retrieve the ISBNs directly from the source allowed my friend and me to start a website where we enabled students to put in their class schedule, and the site would output the required textbooks, the school's price, and the price of other online stores. We received a commission if anyone bought from the other stores. The corruption of the bookstore was an opportunity for us to fill the gap they created that never should have existed in the first place.
Much like my name, all hacks are transient, and our solution was unstable. Our server's IP was routinely blocked while iterating through the course catalog for making too many requests. Although I still believed that this information should be freely available and our cause was fundamentally right. Fortunately, I just happened to know the student regent of the school system, and he was able to point me to the office of the ombudsman to mediate with the school. Much like in high school, I found another law, in the form of the California Public Records Act, that supported my claim, and I was told that we were the first to receive digital records from the school under the Act. We didn't make much money, but we inadvertently became digital rights activists and set in motion the events that would eventually lead to the bookstore starting to display the ISBNs on their site. That experience of creating a business was also leveraged into becoming accepted as the youngest student in my MBA class, finally allowing me to succeed where I was never meant to succeed.
A corrupt system is meant to degrade people by transforming them into lesser beings than they once were. I was labeled as a troublemaker as a child and sent to the place of authority (the principal's office) to be punished and conformed into something I wasn't. The hacker creates an exception so that the thing that was supposed to happen doesn't happen and the thing that wasn't supposed to happen does happen. As an echo of being transformed in my early life through the intervention of my mother, I once again went to the place of authority (the office of the ombudsman) as a result of the system's corruption, but this time I did so willingly so that the system would be transformed. Contrary to degrading me, the corruption of the system inadvertently made me a hacker, an entrepreneur, and an activist. Its own corruption caused it to do what it wasn't supposed to do.
It is those who are marginalized by the system who contain within them the precursors to transform the system. I was already very familiar with the office of authority because I was often sent there as a child, which also taught me to distinguish between the metaphorical and physical office. It is often those who routinely suffer under the injustice of the law that come to know the law the best, and it's a more intimate knowledge that cannot be taught in a classroom. They can point to the precise spot where it's broken because they've been there and they've lived it. It is also the reason why they become conscious that the name given to them by the system is wrong, even if it's not something they can fully articulate at the time.
It's interesting to examine the names we choose for ourselves, and "2600" is another one of those interesting names. In a sense, it represents something physical that died a long time ago. The phone system that allowed phreaks to use the infamous 2600 hertz tone to gain access typically reserved for insiders is no longer around in that form. However, the death of the physical leaves the spirit. "2600" reminds us that the blind can have an advantage to see beyond what is normally seen or that a children's toy found in a cereal box can have the power to seize control over a global system. The oppressed within the system may discover ways to gain authority over the system. Legends may even arise of people who could even launch nuclear missiles by simply whistling because those people were the ones who could not be grasped.
Although the physical system may no longer exist as it once was, phreaks helped to identify the vulnerabilities of a centralized telecommunication system, which gave rise to a decentralized system we call the Internet. The monopoly was broken apart, and the cycle begins again. All hacks are transient, but something lives on. That thing is a hope for transformation, and the hacker is the mediator for that transformation, arising out of all the ways the system is broken.
Kolloid just got back from HOPE_16 - Sponsored by Pfizer®, continuing to meet people he was never meant to meet and seeing others doing what they weren't meant to do. He's otherwise navel-gazing, constantly trying to make sense of himself, the systems around him, and how they fit (or misfit) together.