Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here.
Speaker 1: There was a time when the word hack was really
Speaker 1: only a verb meaning too roughly and indiscriminately chop at something,
Speaker 1: as with an axe. That meaning goes back to the
Speaker 1: eleven hundreds and seems to have spawned the concept of
Speaker 1: taking a hack at something, as in making a rough
Speaker 1: attempt by the thirteen hundreds. This may have led to
Speaker 1: the later expression can't hack it, as in someone not
Speaker 1: being able to cope with or accomplish something, by the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. Hack has also been used as a noun
Speaker 1: since around the sixteen hundreds to describe someone who doesn't
Speaker 1: particularly excel at their job, such as a writer who
Speaker 1: churns out mediocre material or a comedian who copies other
Speaker 1: performers jokes. But that noun comes from a different route.
Speaker 1: It results from the old word hackney, which was a
Speaker 1: type of horse drawn cab for hire. However, at some
Speaker 1: point in the twenty first century, the meaning of hack
Speaker 1: began to blossom, or perhaps converge into something yet again different,
Speaker 1: meaning a workaround, an innovative shortcut that increases productivity. These days,
Speaker 1: online articles might offer to help you hack your sleep
Speaker 1: cycle or give you ten hacks for starting a garden.
Speaker 1: But how does a word jump the tracks and change
Speaker 1: meanings like that? It happens all the time, but in
Speaker 1: the case of hack the most recent shift goes back
Speaker 1: to the dawn of computer programming as we know it.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about Ada Lovelace for once. Okay. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty five, the minutes of a meeting of the
Speaker 1: MIT Tech Model Railroad Club contain a record of one
Speaker 1: member requesting quote that anyone working or hacking on the
Speaker 1: electrical system turned the power off to avoid fuse blowing. So,
Speaker 1: in this case, hack on seems to have meant something
Speaker 1: civil to work on, but with presumably a different bent
Speaker 1: from the norm, a more creative perhaps. By the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the word had expanded out from MIT and out in
Speaker 1: meaning as well. A computer enthusiast might hack, and they
Speaker 1: might be a hacker. This could imply a lot of things,
Speaker 1: but above all, a hacker was someone who relished and
Speaker 1: excelled at hands on computer programming, and not just learning
Speaker 1: how to work with a computer system, but learning how
Speaker 1: the system itself works, and probably meddling with it a
Speaker 1: note that meddling here could be for good or ill.
Speaker 1: A hacker could come up with clever fixes for known
Speaker 1: problems with a computer system, or mischievously or criminally disrupt
Speaker 1: a computer system. In nineteen ninety five, the movie Hackers
Speaker 1: came out, a thriller about a group of scrappy, attractive
Speaker 1: teenagers with code names like Crash, Override, and acid Burn
Speaker 1: who save the world with their hacking skills. So over
Speaker 1: the space of about forty years, the possible definition of
Speaker 1: a hacker had transformed from a model railroad club member
Speaker 1: to a Vinyl cloud Angelina. Joe Lie and were not
Speaker 1: done yet. In the early two thousands, cyber attacks became
Speaker 1: more possible and therefore more common and commonly reported on.
Speaker 1: These are hacks large or small, that attack the security
Speaker 1: of a person, corporation, or even governments computer systems. The
Speaker 1: word hack became synonymous with attack to the non hacking public.
Speaker 1: We eventually got the descriptors white hat and black hat
Speaker 1: to distinguish between the helpful and the malicious types of hacking,
Speaker 1: but hacking was still being celebrated by some. In twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg's letter to Facebook investors was titled the Hacker
Speaker 1: Way and claimed that hacking makes a system stronger, not weaker. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the word hack was picked up by journalists, influencers, bloggers,
Speaker 1: and in social media channels to refer to any kind
Speaker 1: of non or resourceful way of doing something. A life
Speaker 1: hacks could include tips for packing light for a trip,
Speaker 1: cleaning with the magic eraser, or seasoning storebop pretzels, or
Speaker 1: want to gain muscle or improve your memory or feel happier,
Speaker 1: that's called biohacking. Online marketing professionals who say they can
Speaker 1: boost your business might call themselves growth hackers. The list
Speaker 1: goes on and on. It's possible the word hack might
Speaker 1: evolve again, but for now, all we can do is
Speaker 1: watch it spin. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: how the word hack became So Hacked on how stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com, written by Jesslinshields. Brain Stuff is production of
Speaker 1: by Heart Radio and partnership with how stuffworks dot Com
Speaker 1: and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my
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