Societas anonymous: a construção política e social do hacker

Abstract

This work presents the construction, the political and social influences underwent by the Hacker Culture in its two main branches (divided in two chapters): through the exploration of telephone lines since 1878 until its evolution to phreaking around the decade of 1960. Afterwards, the Phreaking was absorbed by counter-cultural movements in the United States, becoming a protest tool against the Vietnam War after 1970, period on which this practice rose on popularity, causing a great loss to phone companies, becoming, thus, a social problem. The second branch of the Hacker Culture is related to the development of the first computers by the end of the First World War, initially restricted to scientific and military organizations with great influence of the Cold War and the so-called “post-nuclear myth”, until it starts to spread out to the rest of the population during the second half of 1970, due to the sales of personal computers, which made such practices like Phreaking and Hacking to converge during this period. In order to present a differentiated approach, we researched the challenges related to the construction of the Hacker Culture in Brazil, introducing the country in a context that developed itself in many other countries in the end of 1980. With the growth of the World Wide Web in the beginning of the 1990, the number of internet users started to skyrocket and, between 1994 and 1996, comes up the hacker-activism – that was an activism made by hackers in order to ensure anonymity and the their own freedom of expression, along with the freedom of the cyberspace. In the third part of the work, we analyze how the group Anonymous expanded the limits of this “hacktivism”, showing what the reasons that initiated its actions are, basing its activities on the idea of the “Projective City”, designed by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.