The archetypal hacker. Although the hacker world is predominantly male and no records of the exact numbers of both genders exist, the percentage of women engaging in hacking and cracking activities seems to be greater than the single-digit range typically reported for the technical professions.

In the United States, the hacker community is predominantly Caucasian, with strong pockets of Jewish hackers on the East Coast and strong pockets of Oriental hackers on the West Coast. Among hackers, ethnic distribution is understood to be simply a function of which groups tend to seek and value education, particularly in cyberspace. Hackers say that prejudice—whether gender, racial, or ethnic—is notably uncommon among them. In fact, prejudice, they affirm, tends to be met with freezing contempt in the computer underground (CU).

Hackers’ notorious umbilical ties to Artificial Intelligence (AI) research writings and science fiction literature may have helped them to develop a “personhood” concept that is inclusive rather than exclusive.

Geographically, in the United States hackerdom seems to center along a Bay Area–to–Boston axis, with about half of the hard-core hackers living within a hundred miles of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another hacker magnet is Berkeley, California. Other hackerdom clusters include university towns such as ones in the Pacific Northwest, as well as Washington, D.C.; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Princeton, New Jersey.

See Also: Artificial Intelligence (AI); Hackers.