What's in hacker’s backpack?
(2016)
Photos by Martin Haburaj
Location Progressbar - Bratislava hackerspace
“We want to show, that hacking is not just for coders with command line, but there are other kinds of people in this subculture too. Progressbar is a mix of many kinds of hackers and they were so nice and open-minded to show their bags. ”
An unassuming young man in a black sweatshirt with a hood over his head is in the corner of the room fixed on the screen, and the most worn keys of his keyboard are braces and semicolons. It's a hacker and right now is rifling your bank account. This is a common concept a ot of people has about hackers.
See the definition from a dictionary: "A person who circumvents security and breaks into a network, computer, file, etc., usually with malicious intent: A hacker got into my computer remotely and wiped my hard drive!" (Wikipedia).
The word hacker had in Middle English a similar meaning as a craftsman, who was able to make his own things (sometimes with negative meaning, when bantering things he does not understand). Only when those journeymen started to twit the first computers, they found its untapped potential and gradually expanded the idea of hackers, as we see them in movies.
The word hacker in modern-day meaning extended in the 1960s at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as a term for people who deal with hardware as a hobby and has spread to artistic circles. We refer to the people who use resources in an unconventional way, who look for imaginative ways.
One group of hackers works with software development, others are mainly into hardware, and there is a growing group of hackers - makers (these are mainly people from 3D printing), but there are also travelers (travel hacking) and cooks (food hacking). So what do hackers carry in their backpacks?
Take a look at the photo series from the hackerspace Progressbar in Bratislava, Slovakia. Concept and production were secured by me, a member of Progressbar, and young nifty photographer Martin Haburaj.
The story was published at Bored Panda and Tech.sme.sk.
Making of
How do you convince hackers, people who are extremely sensitive to their privacy, that they should show the whole world the contents of their backpacks? Simple! You invite them as their friend to a meeting in the hackerspace, where they come, and when they open the door, they find me and the photographer with an announcement: Show me your backpack (laughs).
We agreed that the names of the participants will not be published.
