Tuckered out after three days of prayer and sermons, attendees at the National Evangelist Workshop this summer thought they could slip out of Las Vegas with souls unscathed. In a town known for leading even the most pious into temptation, these teetotalers had managed to enjoy nothing but wholesome fun. And they had chosen a gambling-free, off-the-Strip hotel, the Alexis Park, to ensure that the wicked would not intrude on their holy powwows.

Sin City, however, has a knack for sordid surprises. One morning this summer, as they toted their luggage through the lobby, the preachers discovered that their quiet hotel had been overrun by youths sporting the reputed accessories of amoral hedonism: black leather pants, goopy makeup, and hair colors never conceived of by the Creator. At 11 AM many were already guzzling screwdrivers and cheap draft beers.

The evangelists' bane were the thousands of hackers in town for DefCon, the annual highlight of the digital underground's social calendar. This year's convention was a three-day blur of technical lectures and heavy drinking, punctuated by conspiracy theorizing and frat-boy pranks (including a pipe-destroying concrete-down-the-toilet gag that may spell the end of DefCon's run at the Alexis Park). As one besotted character nicknamed Unstable Boy slurred to me, "This is a weekend-long party. With a T1 connection. What more could you ask for?"

DefCon may sound like an icky affair, a geekified version of Daytona spring break without the alluring jiggle factor. Yet the nihilistic, evangelist-scaring posturing belies a culture whose optimism borders on cockeyed -- a culture that, according to programming sage and The Mythical Man-Month author Frederick Brooks, "attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers." Though many hackers embrace the trappings of fashionable morbidity -- narcotics consumption, black-helicopter paranoia, bondage gear -- they also harbor instincts that can best be described as virtuous, even spiritual. Hackers generally disavow belief in the Man Upstairs, but they maintain a peculiarly unwavering faith in their fellow man. Professed fans of Nietzsche's gloomy indictments, these post-ENIAC craftsmen actually embrace a radically sunny ethos. Their commitment to open systems is blissfully free of the cold Darwinist leanings that mar cyber-libertarian thought -- as The Cathedral and the Bazaar author Eric S. Raymond has noted, hacker philosophy is based on the concept of "radical sharing justified by sound market economics, but not really founded on an economic impulse." The onset of a borderless digital realm, hackers hold, will elicit admirable reactions from meatspace users; vested with the power of network guardianship, human beings will act responsibly, even gallantly.

Analyzing hackerdom's philosophical nuances is a tricky proposition, not least of all because it is difficult to answer the fundamental question: "What is a hacker?" It is an epithet applied to a vast array of geeks, from Linus Torvalds to the snarky kids who deface Web pages with pro-LSD graffiti. But the elder statesmen of the computer underground, top-tier programming prophets from Raymond to spotlight-shy characters like "rain forest puppy" and "Simple Nomad," shudder at the term's broadening. To them, hacker is an honorific that has been corrupted by no-goodniks and mainstreamers. Nothing chafes them quite like headlines that brand "Love Bug" author Onel de Guzman a hacker. At his DefCon presentation, "Nightstalker," the self-designated "official crusty old guy" from the hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow, railed against such simpletons: "Anyone can throw a brick through a church window. But it takes an artist to make that stained glass."

The underground now recognizes an opportunity to reclaim their favorite title. As in the Internet's formative years, when university-based coders first fiddled with network protocols, technology is being advanced primarily outside the confines of corporatized testing laboratories. In this nascent post-Napster, post-Linux world, "true" hackers consider themselves crusaders for digital libertation who should be embraced, not feared.

To those unfamiliar with computer lingo, of course, hacker is synonymous with "criminal," someone who trespasses on private networks and revels in creating pointless chaos. Ask the man on the street to define the word and he'll describe kids who swipe credit card numbers, monkeywrench eBay, and knock NASA satellites out of orbit. Hacker is almost a slur, akin to "carjacker" or "crackhead."

The media shoulders most of the blame for perpetuating the hacker-equals-criminal misconception, but the underground is also rife with wannabes who have poisoned the semantics. Enticed by the outlaw image-drummed up most recently by the bizarre arrest of alleged Yahoo! crasher "Mafiaboy"-technical dunces are flocking to the culture. In Las Vegas, there was an abundance of such wannabes strutting the halls, masters of the disaffected adolescent sneer but oblivious to the intricacies of Perl; by my unscientific count, a good quarter of the attendees were in town solely for the abundant drugs and fashion-show atmosphere, and their computer lexicons stopped at BASIC. Alongside the trade-show tables selling genuine hacker paraphenalia -- DoC T-shirts and Blowfish algorithim stickers -- were an equal number of vendors hawking drum-and-bass 'zines and how-to books on poppy cultivation. "Everybody should have to pass a programming test before they can get in," grumbled one veteran hacker, Hubert Chang, as he surveyed DefCon's Day One crowd. "Of course, that would eliminate about a third of the people here."

Purists, however, dismiss both thieves and poseurs as undeserving of the hacker label. True hackers -- those who have defined the culture's core tenets -- trace their origins back to the model-train enthusiasts of Eisenhower-era MIT. In his classic 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy details how these young men evolved from electric-coil tinkerers into altruistic programmers, whose chief pleasure is problem solving. Hackers, by Levy's definition, are simply technology-obsessed folks in love with the "Eureka!" moment. The hacker ethic, he writes, developed as "a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hand on machines at any cost-to improve the machines, and to improve the world." The selflessness of that credo sounds outlandish in this age of dot-com optionaires, so it's easy to forget that many pillars of the wired world were perfected by uncompensated hackers. Take, for example, the classic story of UNIX, still the nerd's operating system of choice. When Bell Labs released the operating system to educational institutions in 1976, part of the distribution license mandated that any additions or changes by users would have to be shared with the entire UNIX community. Despite the lack of financial incentives, hundreds of hackers developed UNIX's broad functionality, porting it to a variety of platforms and enabling it to support network protocols like UUCP and TCP/IP.

Today's hackers still maintain that Mammon should be excluded from the creative process as a matter of principle. If one needs proof that money corrupts technology, they contend, merely examine the bugs that have riddled such flagship Microsoft products as the IIS server. At DefCon, the distaste for profiteering was palpable -- thus the abundance of "Fuck Red Hat" T-shirts, protests against corporate co-optation of open-source systems. The underground's latest heroes are the directors of software projects based on 4.4 BSD Lite, the free operating system pioneered at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1970s. The gratis software churned out by projects like FreeBSD and OpenBSD is inarguably superior to most mainstream Linux distributions, both in terms of security and portability. Compensation for these coders is virtually non-existent-OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt, who milled about DefCon slapping pro-cryptography stickers on attendees chests, ekes out a living on T-shirt sales and donations. (He recently saved up enough to purchase a small house, but his infrequent social outings still consist primarily of pizza dinners in downtown Calgary.)

By favoring intrinsic rewards over extrinsic, hackers find themselves in bizarre philosophical company. Though decidedly antagonistic to organized religion, these money-eschewing technophiles share spiritual terrain with the world's most prominent faiths. The terrified evangelists who fled the Alexis Park would find the hackers' lack of avarice heartwarming -- the love of money, after all, is one of the Good Book's biggest no-nos. And Buddhist renouncers, though potentially put-off by the enthusiasm for blood-drenched games like Quake, would admire the hacker penchant for spiritual fulfillment through psychic exploration. Raymond compares this insatiable intellectual curiousity to that of instinctual artists, hailing the hacker drive to cherish the "pure artistic satisfaction of designing beautiful software and making it work. People for whom [that] is not a significant motivation never become hackers in the first place, just as people who don't love music never become composers."

Andrew Sullivan has noted that the antiprofit ethos closely parallels that of another, more contemporary value system: Marxism. In a New York Times Magazine article this past June, he termed the sentiment "dot-communism" and pointed to MP3 swapping as proof of communism's cyberspace rebirth-Marxism 2.0. "By turning physical property into endlessly duplicable e-property," Sullivan wrote, "the ancient human problem of 'mine-thine' has been essentially solved."

Indeed, hackers deride the attempts of private interests to fashion cyberspace into an archipelago of fortified e-commerce islands. Part of this feeling stems from the hacker faith in what The Economist has termed "the Internet's founding myth" -- that the Internet was created outside the scope of government control, and its commodification amounts to an illegal, immoral capitalist coup. This origin tale excludes the Pentagon's prominent role in ARPANET, as well as Cisco's trailblazing development of routers. Hackers, however, conveniently disregard those "minor" details. To them, the wired world should be an unruly Eden, free from authoritarian constraints, and they've bought into a legend that backs their view.

But Sullivan overstates the underground's ideological fervor. Heavily influenced by the laissez-faire doctrine of libertarianism, hackers have little taste for imposing a dictatorship of the proletariat -- or any other cogent political order, for that matter. Instead, hackers simply accept that the freedom of information is inevitable, and that debating the merits of such a system would be a titanic time-waster.Think of that subversive slogan : "Information wants to be free." The 1s and 0s that inhabit the world's hard drives are yearning to roam and breed. Information is akin to a feral biological entity over which no one can claim exclusive dominion.

Media bigwigs mindful of copyright protections may dismiss the paradigm, but there is ample precedent for the outlook. Humanity has a poor track record when it comes to corralling knowledge, even in those rare cases when there is general consensus that such limits are a good idea. The global community tried hard to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example, but North Korea still built the bomb.

Similar regulatory efforts in cyberspace are proving futile. The Clinton administration relaxed its ban on the export of strong encryption when it realized that efforts to keep such tools out of criminal hands were doomed to failure, since other nations were not bound by the same edict. And the unpoliced nooks and crannies of cyberspace are the perfect incubators for gestating Freenets, destined to make file-sharing anonymity a near-inalienable right.

Authorities plead that an unregulated Internet will become a hotbed of nefarious activity, that everyone from Islamic fundamentalists to neo-Nazis will somehow manipulate modems to further their antigovernment crusades. Art Money, chief information officer for the Department of Defense, used the DefCon podium to drive home that point: "Our friend Osama Bin Laden doesn't necessarily have to use physical means to get his way."

Hackers, however, have a derisive nickname for such assertions -- "FUD," shorthand for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." When Money spoke of a hypothetical world in which everyone had "unfettered access to strong encryption," the applause was deafening; when he responded, "Wait, wait -- I'm not just talking for legal things, but [for] illegal things, too," real cheers broke out. Hackers contend -- correctly -- that security can be tightened without government intervention, and that the vast majority of users are online not to foment jihad, but to increase their knowledge and communicate with their fellow man.

And that's precisely why hackers, more so than any other community, do not fear an unruly cyberspace. There is an anarchic streak that runs throughout the culture, an implicit trust in the individual's capacity for making moral, nonharmful choices. Regulatory bodies exist to keep human tendencies in check; hackers, on the other hand, believe that humans are far from the nasty bastards imagined by antiquated political philosophers. In cyberspace, that bred-in-the-bone goodness will emerge; everyone will follow the hacker ethic and produce knowledge for the sheer joy of accomplishment. Network technology holds the key to uncovering man's fundamental decency.

Critics scoff at this outlook as woefully myopic. They question how producers of intellectual property can feed their families in world where copyright and patent laws mean squat. They lambaste the founding myth favored by hackers, which conspicuously excludes the vital contributions of the Pentagon. They fear that privacy will be destroyed should every hard drive be rendered scannable in a barrier-free cyberspace.

Yet hackers pish-posh these concerns -- not so much because they have figured out solutions, but because they have blind faith that the Internet is predestined to become a perfect beast. They haven't yet figured out how Napster and Metallica can peacefully coexist, but they do not fear a future without speed metal. As the Internet follows its organic path toward full maturation, they argue, all of the little details that inspire so much present-day hand-wringing will iron themselves out.

Cyberpunks as the Pollyannas of the twenty-first century? The same paranoid kids who obsess over Masonic conspiracies and the National Security Agency? The same geeky outcasts who shimmy robotically to self-loathing industrial tunes? Hard as it may be to swallow, instead of "Information wants to be free," the hacker mantra of the moment could just as easily be "Faith shall be rewarded." The evangelists would approve.