struggle in the underground is not over
sociological definitions--who cares?--but for power, knowledge, and
status among one's peers.

When you are a hacker, it is your own inner conviction of your elite
status that enables you to break, or let us say "transcend," the rules.
It is not that ALL rules go by the board. The rules habitually broken
by hackers are UNIMPORTANT rules--the rules of dopey greedhead telco
bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests.

Hackers have their OWN rules, which separate behavior which is cool and
elite, from behavior which is rodentlike, stupid and losing. These
"rules," however, are mostly unwritten and enforced by peer pressure
and tribal feeling. Like all rules that depend on the unspoken
conviction that everybody else is a good old boy, these rules are ripe
for abuse. The mechanisms of hacker peer-pressure, "teletrials" and
ostracism, are rarely used and rarely work. Back-stabbing slander,
threats, and electronic harassment are also freely employed in
down-and-dirty intrahacker feuds, but this rarely forces a rival out of
the scene entirely. The only real solution for the problem of an
utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike hacker is to TURN HIM IN TO
THE POLICE. Unlike the Mafia or Medellin Cartel, the hacker elite
cannot simply execute the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers among
their ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing frequency.

There is no tradition of silence or OMERTA in the hacker underworld.
Hackers can be shy, even reclusive, but when they do talk, hackers tend
to brag, boast and strut. Almost everything hackers do is INVISIBLE;
if they don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then NOBODY WILL EVER
KNOW. If you don't have something to brag, boast, and strut about,
then nobody in the underground will recognize you and favor you with
vital cooperation and respect.

The way to win a solid reputation in the underground is by telling
other hackers things that could only have been learned by exceptional
cunning and stealth. Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic
currency of the digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand
Islanders. Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon it
obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk and talk
about it.

Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession to TEACH--to spread
the ethos and the knowledge of the digital underground. They'll do
this even when it gains them no parti