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Just down the way from Chomsky’s office at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the Tech Model Railroad Club or TMRC. This was where the word “hack” jumped from model railways to computers. Founded in 1946, by the late 1950s the club members had built an enormous and complex 1:87 scale model.

Over time, the membership bifurcated into two complementary factions, differential interests if you like. One was emotionally connected to the historical aesthetic of the railroad. This group worked above the baseboard, hacking rolling stock and making scenery. The other group, the Signals and Power Subcommittee, worked in the tangle of wires and relays under the baseboard. The Subcommittee’s elaborate ARRC, Automated Railroad Running Computer, “The System” for short, was at first made from telephone system components, later computer parts.⁴⁵⁵

Just as Disney’s Railroad and Monorail^§AS2.5.1b spoke moral agendas to the world, the TMRC railroad also spoke in anticipatory transposition. There was a real world visible to viewers, faithfully represented in historical detail, and below there was an abstract world of electronic control – The System literally and metaphorically underneath the baseboard.

The process of The System’s evolution was via a series of innovations called “hacks.” The Signals and Power people called themselves “hackers.”

HACK: … an unconventional or unorthodox application of technology.

HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them. A hacker avoids the standard solution. The hack is the basic concept; the hacker is defined in terms of it.⁴⁵⁶

Signals and Power Subcommittee member Peter Samson documented the proliferating acronyms and invented jargon in 1959 in the TMRC Dictionary, including this definition of “hack.”

Here is Walter Benjamin^§MS0b on model trains: “the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with the image in reduced form.” The modeler reverts to the inventiveness of childhood. “[T]he most enduring modifications in toys are never the work of adults … but are the results of children at play.” The process: “Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior.” But this is not just copying: “Here it is not enough to think of what we understand today by the concept of similarity, … [of] microcosm and macrocosm.” Rather, we encounter “mimetic powers … residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples.”⁴⁵⁷

Or, in the terms we have been developing for this grammar, the transposition of meaning across scale is an act of design and thus transformation, where the lessons learned at one scale are transferred to another, though the meaning is never quite the same. And insights gained at one scale find their way back into the other. This repurposing and reimagining, this animism of mutual transformation of connected objects, we might call a “hack.”

By 1984, hacking had become a computer ethic, inspired by the title of Steven Levy’s book Hackers, whose narrative starts with the TMRC.⁴⁵⁸ The first Hackers Conference was held in that year, organized by Stuart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. Famously, at the conference he coined the expression, “information wants to be free,” though the full quote captures the tension and complexity of hacking – more than mere replication, but hardly revolutionary transformation.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable … On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.⁴⁵⁹

To which, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak replied, “Information should be free but your time should not.”⁴⁶⁰

The work of hackers has ranged from just-for-the-fun-of-it to the clandestine and illegal, striking at the heart of the global system of digital media. At the illegal end of the spectrum are leakers and whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, copyright avoidance systems such as BitTorrent and Pirate Bay, and “hactivist” groups such as Anonymous. Tactics include computer break-ins, website defacement, and Distributed Denial of Service attacks that shut down websites.⁴⁶¹

When he was arrested in 1986, a hacker known by the pseudonym The Mentor wrote the now-famous Hacker Manifesto:

This is our world now … the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore … and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge … and you call us criminals … You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals …

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity … My crime is that of outsmarting you …

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all.⁴⁶²

The practice of the hack also found its way into the heart of the system. At MIT, computer scientist and self-professed hacker Richard Stallman was incensed that key software code created in the university was being enclosed by copyright restrictions and finding its way into corporate hands as marketable private intellectual property. In response, he resigned his job, remaining at MIT as unpaid visiting scientist to create the free GNU operating system.⁴⁶³

Stallman’s system came with another hacker’s manifesto, the GNU Manifesto:

Many programmers are unhappy about the commercialization of system software. It may enable them to make more money, but it requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends … Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.⁴⁶⁴

Solidary interests in the writing and sharing of code could not, however, be left to goodwill – they would have to be enforced via the GNU General Public License that locks derivative software designs into communal ownership. Stallman was quick to say that people should not be paid for the products of their labor, but they could still be paid for the labor itself. “Don’t think free as in beer; think free as in speech.”⁴⁶⁵

Linus Torvalds followed with the Linux operating system. Less politically motivated, the “open source” software movement that it spawned was driven by the idea that open collaboration is a better way to build better software than closed and proprietary systems.⁴⁶⁶

Then for intellectual and cultural work generally came the Creative Commons licenses, and the promise of new, post-capitalist social relations. Here is Laurence Lessig, leading legal light behind the cc licenses: “If communism versus capitalism was the struggle of the twentieth century, then control versus freedom will be the debate of the twenty-first century.”⁴⁶⁷

In his play on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,^§AS2.3.2a Yochai Benkler spoke to the new “wealth of networks” and “the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts – peer production of information, knowledge and culture; … new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms.”⁴⁶⁸

And McKenzie Wark in the Hacker Manifesto: “In liberating information from its objectification as a commodity, it liberates also the subjective force of statement … Expressive politics … seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence, spreading the seeds of an alternative practice of everyday life.”⁴⁶⁹

However, the irony of the free software, open source, and creative commons licenses is that the public law of copyright, in which the right to intellectual property rights is by default private, is overwritten by individual copyright contracts and requiring that individuals cede their rights to the collective one contract at a time. This is just one of their many cascading contradictions.⁴⁷⁰

Some of the richest companies in the world today use open source software for their private profit – Google’s search engine^§AS1.4.7e was written in Linux, and the derivative Android operating system is open source, as by dint of contract it must be.

Open source software and free culture is a hack on capitalism, an incremental change and no more, because in their essentials the system of commodities and labor, and the authoritarian feudalism of the corporation, remain unchanged. Or, in Gabriella Coleman’s nice formulation, hacks turn out to be mere “microgestures within broader, deterministic forces.”⁴⁷¹

Software genius Robert Mercer^§AS2.2.1a was never a hacker. In railroad modeling, he was only ever a member of the faithful-to-historical-reality, above-the-baseboard, commercial-rolling-stock-and-scenery faction. His vision was realized in a meticulously accurate 1:87 scale model of an idealized capitalist past when the New York Central Railroad dominated the spaces and flows of the US northeast. When it comes to transformations, Mercer is a replication man.

And even then, Mercer is the kind of person who would rather pay others to realize his vision than replicate for himself. When RailDreams Custom Model Railroad Design billed him $2,694,833 for the model railroad it had constructed in the basement of his Long Island, NY mansion, he took them to court, arguing unsuccessfully that the bill should have been no more than $704,669.⁴⁷² “He is a hedge fund guy, part of the reason why the country is in the situation it’s in,” said RailDreams’ president, Richard Taylor.⁴⁷³

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⁴⁵⁵ Steven Levy, 1984 [1994], Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, London: Penguin, pp. 17–25; Joseph Onorato and Mark Schupack, 2002, Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT: The First Fifty Years, Cambridge, MA: TRMC, pp. 42–47, 66–68.

⁴⁵⁶ www.gricer.com/tmrc/tmrc-dictionary-intro.html

⁴⁵⁷ Walter Benjamin, 2003, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 100–01, 720–21.

⁴⁵⁸ Steven Levy, 1984 [1994], Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, London: Penguin.

⁴⁵⁹ Stewart Brand, 1987, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, New York: Viking.

⁴⁶⁰ https://medium.com/backchannel/the-definitive-story-of-information-wants-to-be-free-a8d95427641c#.y7d0amvr3

⁴⁶¹ Gabriella Coleman, 2017, “From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek,” Current Anthropology 58(Supplement 15):S91–101; Gabriella Coleman, 2014, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whisteblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, London: Verso; Harry Halpin, 2012, “The Philosophy of Anonymous: Ontological Politics without Identity,” Radical Philosophy 176(November/December):19–28.

⁴⁶² www.phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

⁴⁶³ Richard Stallman, 2002, Free Software, Free Society, Boston, MA: GNU Press; Richard Stallman, 2018, “Talking to the Mailman: Interview with Rob Lucas,” New Left Review (113):69–93.

⁴⁶⁴ www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

⁴⁶⁵ Sam Williams, 2002, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software, Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly.

⁴⁶⁶ Gabriella Coleman, 2013, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 74–78; Johan Soderberg, 2008, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement, London: Routledge.

⁴⁶⁷ Lawrence Lessig, 2002, “The Architecture of Innovation,” Duke Law Journal 51(6):1783–802, p. 1785; Lawrence Lessig, 2001, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, New York: Random House; Lawrence Lessig, 2004, Free Culture, New York: Penguin Press; Lawrence Lessig, 2008, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, New York: Penguin Press.

⁴⁶⁸ Yochai Benkler, 2006, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 5, 3.

⁴⁶⁹ McKenzie Wark, 2004, A Hacker Manifesto, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, §257.

⁴⁷⁰ Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, 2016b, “Geopolitical Structuring in the Age of Information: Imagining Order, Understanding Change,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 41(4):179–93; Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, 2017, The Work and Play of the Mind in the Information Age: Whose Property?, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave/Springer.

⁴⁷¹ Gabriella Coleman, 2017, “From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek,” Current Anthropology 58(Supplement 15):S91–101.

⁴⁷² www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2342560/mercer-v-raildreams-inc/

⁴⁷³ www.nydailynews.com/news/hedge-fund-hotshot-robert-mercer-files-lawsuit-2m-model-train-accusing-builder-overcharge-article-1.368624

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 328–332. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and the “Hack” §AS2.5.2a