McKenzie Wark uses “hacking” in two distinct ways: she says she is not a hacker in the familiar computer-security sense, but is one in her broader sense of creative work that produces information and seeks to free it from organizational control. In Kevin Townsend’s September 3, 2025 SecurityWeek interview, play, curiosity and game rules help explain that broader idea. This is a philosophical conversation about hacking—not a guide to breaking into computer systems.
What does McKenzie Wark mean by hacking?
Townsend opens with a direct question: “are you a hacker?” Wark’s answer depends on what the word means. “In the widely understood sense of the word, ‘No’,” she says. “But in my own, different sense of the word, ‘Yes’.”
In the common computer-focused meaning, hacking is associated with working on or breaking into computer systems. Wark does not claim that technical identity. Her wider interpretation treats hackers as creators of information who may try to free creative work from organizations that claim ownership over it. The interview extends this idea across fields including philosophy, economics, warfare and politics; it does not suggest that this interpretation replaces cybersecurity’s technical use of the word.
For Wark, the emphasis is on making and transforming information, and on the constraints around who can control it. The claim is hers, not a consensus definition of hacking.
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Why does the interview connect hacking with play?
Wark draws on Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, which treats play as foundational to culture. The interview uses that idea as a lens for thinking about curiosity and experimentation: curiosity can lead someone to explore how a system works, while play can make experimentation appealing.
Wark’s own creative medium is written language rather than code. “I really don’t have that level of skill; but in the wider sense, the thing I play with is written language.” The point is not that writing and computer programming are the same activity, but that both can involve making and reshaping information.
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Townsend’s discussion also invokes early computing and phone phreaking as examples of exploration and experimentation. Those examples illustrate the interview’s argument; they do not establish a universal explanation for why people hack.
What are the four roles in Wark’s game analogy?
Wark uses relationships to game rules and winning to question whether hacker behavior is best understood as a matter of morality. “I don’t think it’s morality. It’s law, or in the case of games, rules.” Her simplified analogy distinguishes four attitudes:
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| Role | Relationship to the rules | Relationship to winning |
|---|---|---|
| Rule-following competitor | Accepts and follows the rules | Wants to win |
| Cheat | Breaks the rules | Still wants to win |
| Spoilsport | Rejects the rules and the game’s terms | Disrupting the game matters more than winning |
| Trifler | Plays with the idea of the game | Does not care about winning |
Wark links the Trifler to Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia: “The Trifler simply wants to play around inside the game idea.” The categories are a conceptual analogy in the interview, not a tested classification of hackers or a guide to judging an individual’s motives.
How does the interview discuss neurodiversity?
The interview proposes that explicit rules and reduced ambiguity in computer work may feel affirming to some neurodivergent people. It also makes broader comments about ADHD, Asperger’s and hyperfocus, but does not cite a named study or provide quantified evidence for those claims. They should therefore be read as the interview’s framing, not as clinical guidance or a population-level finding.
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A postscript offers a hypothetical 1-to-100 scale with example ASD thresholds, explicitly as an illustration. It is not a diagnostic scale, prevalence statistic or research result.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Which books inform the conversation?
- A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark is the interview’s central work. Bidoun identifies it as a 2004 Harvard University Press book. SecurityWeek links to an Amazon US listing; product details and availability may change.
- Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga supplies the interview’s conceptual connection between play and culture.
- The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard Suits is associated with the Trifler concept.
The conversation appears in Kevin Townsend’s September 3, 2025 SecurityWeek interview.
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