page_title: Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
section_title: Terminology
hierarchical_section_title: Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Terminology
caption_attribution_description: Residents of MIT's Simmons Hall collaborated to make a smiley face on the building's facade.
context_page_description: Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are practical jokes and pranks meant to prominently demonstrate technical aptitude and cleverness, or to commemorate popular culture and historical topics. The pranks are anonymously installed at night by hackers, usually, but not exclusively, undergraduate students. The actions of hackers are governed by an informal, yet extensive, body of precedent, tradition, and ethics. Hacks can occur anywhere across campus, or occasionally off campus; many make use of the iconic Great Dome, Little Dome, Green Building tower, or other prominent architectural features of the MIT campus. Well-known hacker alumni include Nobel Laureates Richard P. Feynman and George F. Smoot. In October 2009, US President Barack Obama made a humorous reference to the MIT hacking tradition during an on-campus speech about clean energy.
  Although the practice is unsanctioned by the university, and students have sometimes been arraigned on trespassing charges for hacking, hacks have substantial significance to MIT's history and student culture.
context_section_description: At MIT, the terms hack and hacker have many shades of meaning, though they are closely linked historically and culturally with computer hacking (in its original non-computer-cracker sense), collegiate practical jokes, and even culture jamming. The origin of this usage is unknown, but it seems to have been widespread at MIT by the 1960s, and the hacker ethic has since spread into cyberculture and beyond. Over time, the term has been generalized to describe anybody who possesses great technical proficiency in any particular skill, usually combined with an offbeat sense of humor. The manifestation of hacker culture in the form of spectacular pranks is the most visible aspect of this culture to the world at large, but many hacker subcultures exist at MIT, and elsewhere. This article focuses mostly on prankish aspects; for a fuller description of hacker culture, see "Hacker (term)".
  Roof and tunnel hacking, a form of urban exploration, is also related to but not identical to "hacking" as described in this article. Some hacks do involve overcoming barriers to physical access (e.g. placing a half-scale Apollo Lunar Module atop the Great Dome), but many other stunts do not require such specialized skills.
caption: Residents of MIT's Simmons Hall collaborated to make a smiley face on the building's facade, December 8, 2002.
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