Reviewed by: Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes ed. by Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel Maxigas (bio) Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, eds., Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, Springer, 2014. Hacking Europe fills a glaring hole in the history of computing. In my experience, at the moment it is virtually impossible to write historically informed ethnographies of European computing cultures because all major treatments refer to what happened in the United States. This is despite the fact that Europe produced a vibrant and, in many ways, more varied set of scenes than the US. Just to take the most obvious example, the largest hacker organization on the planet (Chaos Computer Club, Germany) has not received any substantial attention in the scholarly press since its inception in 1981. In contrast, an ethnographic account of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI scene have set the tone for all future works in hacker studies, and a string of subsequent books built ever-expanding contextualizations around it.1 Studying European computing cultures, one often has to fall back on primary sources or the more recent wave of native reflections.2 Therefore, the Hacking Europe enterprise opens a whole new area of research, one that could strengthen many adjacent areas of investigation. Contributions in the book follow a remarkably consistent theoretical framework. The analysis is grounded in the science and technology studies literature on users, asking how US computing hardware (the personal computer) and engineering culture (the hacking tradition) was appropriated in specific European countries from the 1970s to the early 2000s. This is a useful perspective because both often appeared without much context in these societies, and in fact it was often through common awareness of US computing cultures that hackers from different countries could first communicate and empathize with each other. At the same time, national governments, local manufacturers, technical publishers, and language communities struggled to counter US hegemony by developing as well as maintaining national computer industries and native computing cultures. In its wider gestures, the chapters in this book show an appropriate sensibility to world-systems theory, mobilizing structuralist concepts such as political economy (as a major influence on culture), center-periphery relations (based on the global division of labor), technological dependency (as a central instrument in globalization), and so on. Most articles in the volume rely on published magazines and fanzines as the textual residue of computing cultures and, as a result, emphasize the role of these mediators in meaning making. Early European computing cultures were strongly collective and often highly politicized in character. Autonomist political movements such as squatters (in the Netherlands) and alternative cultural movements such as the new wave (in Yugoslavia) were highly influential in shaping popular perceptions of computing. The subcultural connections between cybercultures and countercultures celebrated in US treatises appear isolated and sporadic in comparison. Self-organized users had an important role to play in the absence of hegemonic actors—even where politicization was not on the agenda, such as in Greece. Thus, European developments were enabled by the relatively small global competitiveness of local industries and the often supportive (or at least permissive) government policies (in the UK and Poland, respectively). These results can inspire a reevaluation of the understanding of hacktivism, the relationship between industries and users, and the socioeconomical mechanics of technological hegemony. Despite these virtues, this collection falls short of presenting European hacking in at least three significant ways. The most important for a history of computing that engages with hacker studies is that the broad selection misses out on some genealogies of groups and scenes that wrote history. The Chaos Computer Club (1981, Germany) is featured, but major collectives such as Hippies from Hell (1989–1993, the Netherlands) and Autistici/Inventati (2001, Italy) are missing.3 The demoscene is represented, but essential movements such as the hacklabs of South Europe (like Forte Prenestino/Avana BBS, 1986, Italy) or the hackerspaces of North Europe (like c-base, 1995, Germany) are nowhere to be found.4 For readers interested in a detailed history of hacking, few chapters are truly valuable. This is all the more disconcerting because the volume positions itself as a counterbalance to hegemonic US narratives...