Excerpt from ' Networked: The new Social Operating System' Hackers , the second group, are not the bad actors who try to steal, wreak havoc, or bring down the network. (In common parlance, “hacker” is often used to mean “bad guys,” but those are more properly called “crackers.”) Hackers, Castells argues, are the programmers who contribute to upgrading the internet through work not tied to corporate or institutional assignments. As innovators, the hacker community is devoted to expanding software that is able to run on all kinds of machines and internet servers. They aspire to reinvent ways for people to communicate using computers and believe that convergence between humans and machines is a good thing that is fostered by unfettered interaction. They believe in innovation without prior permission. The hacker culture’s central value has been articulated by Castells as free speech in the computer age, and later had its meaning expanded to become “freedom to create, freedom to appropriate whatever knowledge is available, and freedom to redistribute this knowledge under any form and channel chosen by the hacker.”
