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It was a hacker conference, so just about everyone was wearing a T-shirt. And most of the T-shirts had something to say.
“Know Your Enemy,” said one, just beneath that familiar Microsoft Windows logo.
“There’s no place like 127.0.0.1,” said another, recasting Dorothy Gale’s famous mantra with internet speak.
“Stop laughing,” said a third. “Computers are cool now.”
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Some proclaimed a deep devotion for things like open source software and public key encryption. Some carried rather clever inside jokes that spoke only to other hackers. Some railed against the corporate world. Some insulted the government. And, yes, most of them were black.
Brad Johnson was at the conference -- the fifth annual Hackers on Planet Earth, held on the west side of Manhattan in the summer of 2004 -- and when he decided to build a photo essay on these hacker T-shirts, it was bit a like shooting fish in a barrel — or squashing bugs in the Linux kernel. "It was what people were wearing," says Johnson, who co-wrote a book on the information revolution, Technomanifestos.
Hackers have always had a particular affection for T-shirts. "It's the ubiquitous fashion choice among hackers -- all over the world," says Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who spent three years living with software hackers and documented the experience in a book called Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.
A T-Shirt is what you wear when you don’t want to look like The Man -- particularly a black T-shirt or a T-shirt that's old and threadbare -- and if you’re a hacker, that’s one of your main objectives. This is true whether you’re working on the Linux kernel or busting into somebody’s top secret server. "It's a way for them to signal that they don't care about fashion status in the way mainstream society does," says Coleman. "Of course, it then becomes its own form of fashion and status."
Some hacker T-shirts are just T-Shirts, while others -- so many others -- are a way of proving your hacker credentials, a means of communicating with other hackers. This includes shirts from conferences and other meetups you've attended over the years, but it also includes shirts that deliver an added message. Sometimes, this message is built on humor — another indelible part of hacker culture. Sometimes, it carries at least the semblance of disgust, as it takes a swipe at someone like Bill Gates or Dick Cheney. And sometimes, it’s a mixture of the two.
The quintessential example is the “OS Wars” T-shirt that appeared at an Atlanta Linux conference in the late '90s (see above). Yes, the shirt recast the leaders of the open source movement as characters from Star Wars. Linux Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was Luke Skywalker. Alan Cox, his right-hand hacker, was Princess Leia. Eric Raymond, author of open source tome The Cathedral and the Bazaar, was C-3PO. And the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman doubled as R2-D2.
Naturally, this meant that Microsoft founder Bill Gates appeared as Darth Vader.
The shirt delivered the kind of inside joke that hackers so enjoy — and it took a swipe at Microsoft. But it also rearranged an existing cultural image — another common theme among hacker T-shirts. Hackers like to hack images in much the same way they hack software.
But this is just one shirt among so many. Here, we give you a list of our favorites, including everything from the iconic UNIX T-shirt to the inevitable “Keep Calm and Code On” (click on thumbnail images above). No doubt, you will wail in anger that we’ve missed some — or many. But that’s OK. We’ll do this again. Please e-mail us with your suggestions to cade_metz@wired.com.
You’re not a hacker? You’ll enjoy the list too. But you should brush up on your binary.
Photos: Russ Nelson
Additional reporting by Robert McMillan
Why Hackers Are So Much Funnier Than You Are
Greatest Geek License Plates
Greatest Geek License Plates: Part II
Some proclaimed a deep devotion for things like open source software and public key encryption. Some carried rather clever inside jokes that spoke only to other hackers. Some railed against the corporate world. Some insulted the government. And, yes, most of them were black.
Brad Johnson was at the conference -- the fifth annual Hackers on Planet Earth, held on the west side of Manhattan in the summer of 2004 -- and when he decided to build a photo essay on these hacker T-shirts, it was bit a like shooting fish in a barrel — or squashing bugs in the Linux kernel. "It was what people were wearing," says Johnson, who co-wrote a book on the information revolution, Technomanifestos.
Hackers have always had a particular affection for T-shirts. "It's the ubiquitous fashion choice among hackers -- all over the world," says Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who spent three years living with software hackers and documented the experience in a book called Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.
A T-Shirt is what you wear when you don’t want to look like The Man -- particularly a black T-shirt or a T-shirt that's old and threadbare -- and if you’re a hacker, that’s one of your main objectives. This is true whether you’re working on the Linux kernel or busting into somebody’s top secret server. "It's a way for them to signal that they don't care about fashion status in the way mainstream society does," says Coleman. "Of course, it then becomes its own form of fashion and status."
Some hacker T-shirts are just T-Shirts, while others -- so many others -- are a way of proving your hacker credentials, a means of communicating with other hackers. This includes shirts from conferences and other meetups you've attended over the years, but it also includes shirts that deliver an added message. Sometimes, this message is built on humor — another indelible part of hacker culture. Sometimes, it carries at least the semblance of disgust, as it takes a swipe at someone like Bill Gates or Dick Cheney. And sometimes, it’s a mixture of the two.
The quintessential example is the “OS Wars” T-shirt that appeared at an Atlanta Linux conference in the late '90s (see above). Yes, the shirt recast the leaders of the open source movement as characters from Star Wars. Linux Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was Luke Skywalker. Alan Cox, his right-hand hacker, was Princess Leia. Eric Raymond, author of open source tome The Cathedral and the Bazaar, was C-3PO. And the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman doubled as R2-D2.
Naturally, this meant that Microsoft founder Bill Gates appeared as Darth Vader.
The shirt delivered the kind of inside joke that hackers so enjoy — and it took a swipe at Microsoft. But it also rearranged an existing cultural image — another common theme among hacker T-shirts. Hackers like to hack images in much the same way they hack software.
But this is just one shirt among so many. Here, we give you a list of our favorites, including everything from the iconic UNIX T-shirt to the inevitable “Keep Calm and Code On” (click on thumbnail images above). No doubt, you will wail in anger that we’ve missed some — or many. But that’s OK. We’ll do this again. Please e-mail us with your suggestions to cade_metz@wired.com.
You’re not a hacker? You’ll enjoy the list too. But you should brush up on your binary.
Photos: Russ Nelson
Additional reporting by Robert McMillan