Conversation

If there's any part of Hackers that seems unfamiliar to you or inaccurate to your experience with hacking or hacker culture it's because the characters aren't living in some hypothetical hacker culture they've read about on the internet, they're participating in a living, breathing hacker culture that they themselves are continuously influencing. They build their own tools, invent their own fashion, and speak the language whose meaning they've collectively defined. They hack culture just as much as they hack computers.