vampire

Moving from the construct of the hacker as part of an ideology or group, to the individual, in The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquere Rosanne Stone seems to describe the hacker with her detailing of the vampire as a liminal figure. Like the vampire, the hacker lives on a borderland; the vampire between life and death, the hacker between the human and the machine. More accurately, probably, the hacker is the cyborg as Stone describes it.

One particular hacker experience is particularly poignant here: the sense of resolved alienation in the encounter with the computer. In an oft-quoted piece of hacker justification, Mentor writes that the solution to his adolescent intellectual frustration and social alienation was the encounter with the computer. Implicit here, as Sterling and others have pointed out, is the role of the hacking act in socializing the hacker.

Mentor’s discourse could be seen as a subset of Levy’s Hacker Ethic; the same general approach to the technology but from a different subject position. The term "hack" is a construct, but the process of construction and verification originates only from specific subject positions.