Phreaking Politics in Modern America

Abstract In the 1970s, activists in the Youth International Party transformed new technologies and techniques in the American telephone system into tools for advancing the political aims of the New Left. The Yippies adopted new practices of telephone “hacking” or “phone phreaking” and developed these practices to manipulate, defraud, and protest the AT&T Bell System. Appeals to and protests of “the system” invoked the image of a broader American state. The practice of phone phreaking bridged the technical exploitation of AT&T with critiques of monopoly capitalism, state surveillance, postwar conformity, and American empire. By the late 1970s, as the New Left faded in prominence and the Bell System was itself broken up, the vernacular of system changed. Within an emerging “computer underground” of phreaks, hackers, and users connected through electronic bulletin board systems, the Yippie vernacular of system was reinterpreted as a critique of the state in the language of ascendant conservative and libertarian politics.