Hacking the 'Code': Tracking the Ideational Roots of Web-based Humor

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has been associated with humor and language play more than other media (Vandergriff 2010). As part of a broader study on the ‘geekization’ of discourse, the present essay aims at tracking the ideational roots of web-based humor. More specifically, it focuses on the connections between on-line communication and hackers’ discursive practices and ethos. The reason for this is that many of the “practices and conventions of digital writing originated in hacker usage” (Danet 2001: 17). The essay starts from the analysis of a few examples of hackers’ irony and then concentrates on the conceptualization of code as language, “one of the central metaphors around which the discipline of computer science has been built” (Nofre, Priestley, Alberts 2014: 44). Finally, the essay looks for traces of this conceptual metaphor in the Jargon File / The New Hacker’s Dictionary, the comprehensive compendium of hacker slang published on the website of the Tech Model Railroad Club, a celebrated cradle of hacker culture (Isaacson 2014).