What Happens in Vegas Gets Hacked in Vegas: The Material Politics of DEF CON’s Place

Abstract

This article examines how hacker culture, often conceptualized as immaterial and virtual, is in fact materially and spatially constituted through its entanglement with physical places. Focusing on Las Vegas and DEF CON, this article shows the emergence of hackerspectacle, a place-bound mode of interfacing that enables the dual-direction seepage of form and power: subcultural acts leave material residues in policies and design, while the city’s spectacle economy filters back to script hackers’ style, memory, and self-understanding. The article traces how a three-decade coupling between DEF CON and Las Vegas co-produces both the conference and the city. By intervening in hotel systems, accessing controls, and displaying infrastructures, hackers appropriate Las Vegas’s visual language and spatial affordances to craft their placed identity. Conceptually, this case advances STS discussions on the materiality of digital cultures. Empirically, it shows a city-level co-construction. The article also diagnoses a drift from subversion to absorption as DEF CON mirrors Las Vegas’s streamlining, commercialization, and surveillance. The article is based on original archival research, ethnographic work, and media analysis. It draws on DEF CON programs, hacker zines, public and anonymized interviews, news coverage, and visual materials, and it situates hacker practices within Las Vegas’s legal, architectural, and economic history. It also offers a generalizable template for studying how technocultures take place, literally, and will interest readers of infrastructure studies, digital materialities, urban technopolitics, and the socio-spatial dynamics of subcultures.

Introduction

Omega Mart is an immersive Meow Wolf art installation disguised as a grocery store in Las Vegas. While appearing as a common shopping venue, it encourages visitors to hack its fabricated reality—opening hidden doors, exploiting loopholes, and uncovering concealed narratives. As in video games (Milburn, 2018), Omega Mart’s interactive environment encourages gamers to challenge and break the system, creating liminal spaces that become accessible only through transgression. Vegas takes this effect to another level: It is a real city that invites and amplifies hacking practices by offering a playground where visiting hackers can manipulate, repurpose, and expose the city’s systems. Las Vegas is to computer hackers what Omega Mart is to its shoppers.

Computer hacking is often perceived as an immaterial, ephemeral act confined to cyberspace, but I argue that hacking culture is deeply placed, shaped by embodied practices and material entanglements. The long-standing relationship between DEF CON—the largest hacking and security conference—and Las Vegas has fostered a distinctive mode of interfacing that I call hackerspectacle. The hackerspectacle is a way of interfacing with built environments, developed by hackers themselves. It is grounded in an understanding of their own identity and cultural affiliations and enacted through ongoing material interactions. To explore the emergence of this place-bound way of engagement, I draw on Malpas’s (2018) theory of topography, which situates culture and identity formation in the materiality of the place where the practices unfold. As Malpas (2018) puts it: “Our identities are thus bound up with particular places, or localities, through the very structuring of subjectivity and mental life within the overarching structure of place.”(p. 180) This framework has guided STS scholars to highlight the material conditions of technological entities that were once assumed to be immaterial. For example, when arguing for the materiality of virtual spaces, Fayard (2012) claims that space is not a neutral container but an active component that shapes and is shaped by the practices it hosts. Expanding on such works, I propose the term hackerspectacle to describe how DEF CON hacker identity and culture emerge through ongoing material, spatial, and symbolic interactions with the site of Vegas. In this case, Las Vegas does not merely host the event—it actively shapes the conference’s playful, subversive ethos, sharpens its cyberpunk aesthetic, and amplifies the paradox of visibility and anonymity (Murdock, 1995). Conversely, hackers have left their mark on Las Vegas—both materially, by establishing it as a rising cybersecurity hub, and symbolically, by embedding hacker values into the city’s spectacle-driven identity. DEF CON and Vegas thus exemplify the co-creation of space and subculture (Hebdige, 1979; Massey, 2005): a reciprocal formation that situates hacker culture not only in cyberspace but also in the built environment of Las Vegas.

Computer hacking culture, specifically the American grey-hat-leaning hacker community, represented by DEF CON, cDc (Cult of the Dead Cow), and the hacker collective (see Coleman, 2014; Menn, 2019), is the main character under analysis here. In recent years, much STS scholarship has analyzed such hacking groups and their curiosity-driven explorations, their public interest disclosures, and their quasi-ethical stances challenging traditional legal and ethical boundaries. For example, Coleman (2012) establishes hacking as a cultural practice and highlighted creativity, problem-solving, and the open exchange of ideas as pillars of hacking culture. Writing in the same year, Himanen (2012) argues that computer hackers represent a new ethos for the information age, with a culture that values passion, freedom, playfulness, meritocracy, and decentralization. I build on and complicate existing accounts of American hacker culture, by arguing that hacking culture is placed and that the values associated with hacker communities are not only expressed in cyber activity, but also instantiated in special physical configurations and embodied in local sociotechnical practices. Thus, the phenomenon of hackerspectacle offers a renewed understanding of hacker culture after its spatial anchoring in Las Vegas, where commercialization and the city’s spectacle economy have helped transform the contemporary hacker culture into something more performative, curated, and aestheticized.

The hacker conference under discussion—DEF CON, founded in 1993 and attracting global attention since the 2000s (Wang, 2027)—has been examined in studies of hacker culture. However, existing discussions of DEF CON, as well as of other hacker conferences such as Black Hat—a more industry-oriented conference series in Las Vegas organized by DEF CON’s founder and oriented toward corporate cybersecurity (Greenberg, 2012)—and the Chaos Computer Club (CCC)—Europe’s largest hacker association, known for its advocacy of digital rights and policy activism through events like the Chaos Communication Congress (Kubitschko, 2018)—in Berlin, primarily use these conferences to show how hacking activity is not solitary but thrives within community space. For example, Coleman (2014) showed that DEF CON helps hackers build solidarity so that they view their work as a part of a collective mission to promote hacker politics, including the empowerment of individuals. In other words, the existing analysis of DEF CON often focuses on its contribution to virtual space by examining how it aids in building hacker networks and imagined communities. Instead, I examine DEF CON’s materiality—the developments of its physical characteristics and its tangible impact on its surroundings. DEF CON is the ideal case study for examining the materiality of hacker culture and the emergence of hackerspectacle, not only for its long tenure in Las Vegas but also for its hands-on hacking emphasis. Unlike the CCC or Black Hat, DEF CON engages deeply with physical space. This is exemplified by events like the badge hacking contest—the unofficial practice of creatively and technically manipulating the DEF CON electronic badges—and the lock-picking village, where participants experiment with physical locking mechanisms.

Spectacle and Subversion: Vegas-inspired Hacks

Las Vegas and DEF CON share a long-standing hackerspectacle dynamic in which hackers subvert the city’s controlled environment into a playground for disruption. In 2023, hackers discussed ways to hijack Las Vegas’s entertainment arena The Sphere’s massive LED surface, contemplating inserting unauthorized, subversive messages into Vegas’s digital spectacle (Arnold027, 2023; Secure the Sphere, 2023). Earlier, in 2017, hackers at DEF CON’s voting machine hacking village installed Windows Media Player onto a WinVote machine—not to alter votes, but to play Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’—making a supposedly secure system broadcast a hacker subculture prank (Conger, 2017). Even outside DEF CON’s official spaces, hackers regularly manipulate Las Vegas’s spectacle by hacking hotel TV systems to manipulate what others see (Zetter, 2005) and by hijacking billboards to project unauthorized imagery. One online video, for instance, documents a billboard hack in which hackers displayed unauthorized furry-themed content on a digital billboard (Neon_Woof, 2024). Even criminal hacking activities (with no direct link to DEF CON) are attracted to Las Vegas to break the city’s spectacle. In the case of the 2024 MGM incident, hackers altered all slot machines to flash error messages, turning the casino floor into a malfunctioning spectacle of cyber-vulnerability, which was aptly described by the news media as ‘cinematic’ (Morrison, 2023).

These are not just acts of mischief, but reflect a deeper relationship between the hackers and the city. Rather than a passive venue or a backdrop to DEF CON, Las Vegas is active in shaping hacker identities and practices, and this is especially true when seen through actor-network theory (ANT). The city’s material spectacle—with its associations with neon-drenched illusions, high-tech security, and corporate control—becomes a site for hackers to perform subversion and test its boundaries through playful and technical interventions. In return, the corporeal city ‘translates’ the intangible hacker spirits into physical—and often visual—reclamations of Las Vegas. As Latour explains, the processes by which non-human actors mediate and materialize human actions and intentions are kinds of ‘translations’ (Latour, 2005, pp. 108–110). In this sense, Las Vegas’s engineered spectacle invites hackers to manipulate its systems and, in doing so, hackers’ ethos gets translated into the city’s altered material and symbolic landscape, further shaping the hackerspectacle.

When hackers stumbling upon Las Vegas, the city already embodied the kind of hyper-commercial spectacle that Debord (1967/1994) describes—one designed to maintain the power of modern society through immersive media, dazzling imagery, and sensory overload, encouraging visitors to lose themselves in illusion. This version of Las Vegas was transformed from the original collection of mafia-run casinos, through the building of mega themed resorts on the Strip—a process completed by the 1990s and termed ‘Disneyization’ by scholars (Bryman, 2004; Schmid, 2009). Observing this transformed Vegas, some scholars have also highlighted more subtle characteristics. For example, Belk (2011) suggests that Vegas’s worlds create a farcical, liminal space and time to ‘infantilize their adult patrons’, while Hell and Steinmetz (2014) analyze the resorts and their derelict surroundings to show Vegas as a ‘hyper-ruinous’ city built for simulacra. Plato’s cave has not only been recreated in the built environment of Vegas, but also in its entertainment logic. Schüll (2012), for instance, has shown that gambling in Vegas has involved an increasing implementation of new technologies and media. As a result, slot machines have turned the activity into a more solitary and addictive game, luring gamblers to stay in a sleepwalking state that intensifies Vegas’s immersive logic of simulation and control. Overall, Las Vegas, as an active agent, embodies the hyper-commercialized pursuit of fabricated sensations, immersing visitors in a world of engineered spectacle. While some succumb to the passive consumption and illusion that Vegas offers, as Debord (1967/1994) and Baudrillard (1981/1994)—who discusses Disneyland as an example of hyperreality, suggesting it creates an illusion that conceals the absence of reality—describe, others recognize the spectacle as a materialistic system ripe for ironic manipulation, one that allows them to showcase the deconstruction of control. Hackers, in particular, seized on this artificial environment as a playground for subversion, transforming commercial space into a stage for their ethos. Rather than merely navigating Vegas, they reclaim and repurpose its materiality, embedding their subculture within the city’s spectacle.

This hackerspectacle dynamic—in which hackers appropriate and reconfigure Las Vegas’s spectacle economy to materially inscribe and perform their subcultural identity—began to take shape in the earliest iterations of DEF CON. Some evidence is to be found in early DEF CON materials, where hackers documented, ridiculed, and actively hacked the narrative of Las Vegas. For example, Figure 1 shows a meme from the 1994 DEF CON program page dedicated to Las Vegas that is making fun of having dream-like experiences in Vegas. The quote beginning with the question, ‘Should I tell …’, signals an awareness that the Vegas experiences are detached from real life: Bodily experiences in the city are so surreal that they can only belong to a spectacle. The same program also included efforts at revealing the logic and systems underneath the city’s façade. Jeff Moss (handle: ‘Dark Tangent’), the founder of DEF CON, invited a fellow hacker, Tagger, to write an introduction to Vegas for this program. Tagger’s subversive critique of the then-new Luxor hotel, written with inappropriate language, mocked its ostentatious display and undermined its grandeur. He wrote:

Figure 1.

Screenshot of comic picture of a girl waking up from a dream. Originally published in DEF CON 2 Program, next to the article ‘Vegas Stuph’ (DEF CON 2, 1994, pp. 12–13).

[The Luxor] sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s also the biggest piece of shit on the Strip. This place is not only dull inside, it’s also structurally unsafe. … From what I hear from a construction worker I know in LV is that it is sinking into the ground. … Right now it’s popping 1 to ?? glass tiles a day out of its outside frame. (Tagger, 1994, p. 13)

Furthermore, Tagger (1994) dissected the hidden structures of Las Vegas’s spectacle by revealing which casinos were unionized, who owned them, and the labor dynamics at play—noting, for example, that one casino was ‘a NON-UNION casino, the only one in LV of its kind’ (p. 12). By exposing these underlying power relations, he unveiled the economic and structural forces the city’s spectacle had sought to obscure, turning the illusion of seamless luxury into a system suitable for subversion. Tagger (1994) even offered concrete strategies for hacking Vegas’s materiality, noting that ‘as far as food goes, it’s cheap or free if you’re a good scammer’ (p. 13). His suggestion to social engineer casino managers into providing complimentary food serves as an entry point into the manipulation of the city’s spectacle: exploiting its excess, bending its rules, and reclaiming its resources as part of the hacker subculture.

Las Vegas’s material translation of hacker culture extends far beyond comped steak dinners, however. As DEF CON hackers immersed themselves in the city, they moved beyond exploiting casino perks to hacking the core infrastructure sustaining the spectacles of Vegas (e.g., surveillance networks, access controls, and gaming algorithms) not just as obstacles to bypass but as raw materials to repurpose. DEF CON participants have a history of hacking controlled access. For example, the lockpicking village, which started in 2010, teaches attendees to find physical vulnerabilities in various locking mechanisms (DEF CON Communications, 2024). Building on top of the lockpicking village, in 2022 a select group of hackers were invited into a hotel room to hack the room’s hardware. Among these hackers, Ian Carroll and Lennert Wouters chose to work with the hotel keycard lock, which led to the later discovery of the Saflok RFID Lock Exploiter, exposing security weaknesses in around three million doors across 13,000 properties in 131 countries (Greenberg, 2024). Cases like these show that the DEF CON hackers have repeatedly turned the high-security megastructure of Vegas into a site of contestation by undermining the hotels’ seemingly promised privacy and security. Similar subversive performances that claim Vegas’s rich materiality for hacker subculture messages are central to the interactions between DEF CON hackers and other materialized algorithms. For example, during DEF CON 16, a group of hackers demonstrated how to hijack digital billboard networks (DEFCON Conference, 2014). The previously mentioned 2017 ‘voting machine hacking village’ is another playful example. So is the act of ‘Rickrolling’ which infuses the original hacker mischief from 4chan into the serious task of uncovering vulnerabilities in the machines safeguarding democracy— Coleman (2014) traces hacker communities’ playful and subversive tactics back to their 4chan roots, where pranks, trolling, and internet memes fostered a culture of digital mischief. One of the voting machine hackers, Nick, shared an observation that ‘there’s no control’ over what software could be loaded on the WinVote. This comment also underscores the deeper symbolic subversion at play. DEF CON hackers lay bare the system’s illusion of control, expose the fragility behind the spectacle, and reclaim the system’s materiality to broadcast their own media and message, in effect turning Vegas’s commercial spectacle into a subversive hacker performance during the liminal time.

Outside of DEF CON’s official channels, Las Vegas’s material entertainment algorithms remain prime targets for hacker subversion and reclamation. As seen from examples of the unofficial ‘Capture the Sphere’ contest to hijacking billboard screens and visitors’ cellphone displays, hackers have repeatedly repurposed Vegas’s high-profile spectacle into sites of contestation (Hawkins, 2025; Neon_Woof, 2024; Secure the Sphere, 2023). These events show that the hackerspectacle might have started with DEF CON, but its effect has since expanded and diffused out of the DEF CON structure and time, and into the broader Vegas urban stage.

Existing theories of spectacle and analyses of Las Vegas’s control-through-illusion help explain why hackerspectacle emerged there: The city presents a contained system for hackers to infiltrate and disrupt. By engaging with Vegas as a spectacle, hackers deconstruct, repurpose, and reclaim its engineered illusions. Their interventions go beyond playful rebellion; they transform hacking into a public performance, shifting it from an obscure digital act to a material intervention that shatters the seamless façade of Vegas’s dreamworld. When Vegas is studied as an actor, this hackerspectacle becomes legible as an ongoing loop of spectacle and subversion: Las Vegas translates hacker culture into material forms, while hackers, in turn, re-script the city’s spectacle.

Hacker TAZ: Vegas-permitted Hacks

While DEF CON hackers seize Vegas’s spectacle as a perfect target for subversion, the city’s other unique affordances—from legal flexibility to relaxed morals—offer deeper opportunities. These conditions provoke rebellion, and also enable hackers to move beyond playful disruption, turning Las Vegas into a material playground and a Transient Autonomous Zone (TAZ)—temporary, self-governed spaces that evade control by existing outside dominant structures, often emerging through resistance or escape—where they can experiment, disrupt, and thrive (Bey, 1991). As Levy (1984) explains, ‘Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned … by taking things apart … and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things.’ The permissive structures of Las Vegas—already likened to a medieval carnival and described as a venue for unapologetic fun (Belk, 2011, pp. 106, 118)—align neatly with this hacker ethos, providing an environment where barriers are low, rules are malleable, and experimentation is not just possible but encouraged. In this context, hackerspectacle emerges not only from transforming the city—both as raw material and as target—into subcultural spectacle, but also from the mutual translation between place and practice. The hacker ethos is enacted in amplified, place-specific performances that Las Vegas’s own sociotechnical conditions help to script.

This relationship between place and practice is illuminated by Bey’s (1991) concept of the TAZ. While DEF CON aligns with this concept, it also complicates traditional notions of a TAZ due to Las Vegas’s unique affordances. The city’s legal flexibility and material excess allow DEF CON hackers to experiment freely with various systems, often without significant opposition. As such, a TAZ can emerge not only through defiance but also through the strategic repurposing of a system’s existing permissiveness. A prime example is DEF CON Shoot, an annual event where hackers gather at a public shooting range near Las Vegas to fire weapons, many doing so for the first time. According to hacker Deviant Ollem, the event began when his hacker friends noticed a ‘shoot a machine gun’ advertisement at the Vegas airport (J. Scott, 2013). What started as a casual outing evolved into a formalized ritual, with organizers eventually renting tents, targets, and firearms to accommodate growing interest (J. Scott, 2013, 11:07). Las Vegas’s promotional excess and lax firearm regulations not only inspired this tradition but also enabled its smooth development, a freedom unavailable in many other cities. As Ollem notes, ‘there’s a libertarian undercurrent to a lot of our membership, so being able to treat guns as, well, that’s this piece of equipment, if you use it the right way, it’s great. It percolates through most minds’ (J. Scott, 2013, 12:27). His observation highlights how Vegas’s permissive environment supports both the inquisitive spirit of hackers (Levy, 1984) and their desire for attention and autonomy (Pfaffenberger, 1988). Similarly, Las Vegas’s gambling-driven environment reinforces hackers’ self-image of risk-taking and living on the edge. Hacker zines like Phrack—one of the most iconic and long-lasting hacker zines started in 1985—often published DEF CON stories featuring distinctly ‘Vegas-style’ system exploits, namely, gambling, which are acts of subversion to the general social norms, but legal in Vegas. For instance, a Phrack editor wrote about his gambling experience in Vegas, where he won big at a Blackjack game. He portrays himself as a risk-taking system exploiter with impressive self-control. He keeps playing when losing but stops immediately after he wins big—an exploit of the system counter to the stereotypical gambler behavior of playing after winning (Phrack Staff, 1998). In all, through engaging with unconventional activities offered by Vegas and hosting events like DEF CON Shoot, hackers transform Las Vegas into a TAZ, leveraging its materiality and legal culture to create a space where experimentation and subculture flourish.

Although DEF CON Shoot and many other official DEF CON events operate within Nevada state law and rely on Vegas’s permissive rules, some convention-related, non-official activities—especially in the early years—pushed the boundaries of legal and regulatory structures. Even so, Las Vegas’s unique affordances, including its transient population, moral flexibility, hyper-commercialism, and hospitality culture, enabled DEF CON’s hacker culture to navigate and even evade these legal control mechanisms. A vivid example of this permissiveness, where the very notion of legality comes into question, is captured in a story from Deth Vegetable—a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, an influential American grey-hat collective. Recalling his 1997 DEF CON experience, he described returning to his hotel room to find that the maid had not only cleaned up, but also neatly organized drugs left in the room, creating ‘a little pile of acid, a little pile of ecstasy, and some other pills’ (J. Scott, 2013, 13:13). The exact motivations of the cleaning staff remain unclear—whether out of ignorance, a desire for tips, or a learned discretion—but the outcome was the same: a non-intrusive hospitality that allowed hackers to maintain a sense of autonomy. Such behavior is emblematic of a broader Vegas hospitality culture that often turns a blind eye to activities beyond norms or even legal boundaries, providing hackers with a liminal space with relaxed rules to build their TAZ. This permissive nature extends beyond individual interactions to institutional policies. From 1999 to 2004, the Alexis Park Resort hosted DEF CON and adopted an innovative approach to managing the hacker shenanigans. Rather than imposing strict rules, the hotel set affordable replacement fees for hotel items, effectively acknowledging and accommodating hackers’ practice of experimentation. This policy treated unofficial hacking and experimenting as expected and manageable aspects of the conference, showing Vegas institutions’ willingness to accommodate hacker culture’s need for autonomy (Levi, 2023; J. Scott, 2013, 48:11).

In addition to the sense of hospitality, Las Vegas also provides DEF CON hackers with a unique set of possibilities for constructing their cultural identities on top of the established Vegas reputations, such as hyper-commercialism and 24/7 entertainment. In this sense, the city not only permits hackerspectacle through its flexible rules, but also amplifies it by supplying the material resources and iconic imagery that fuel its performance. As the hacker community under discussion consists mostly of young males, their identity construction leans on the rebellious activities that Vegas offers this demographic (see also Dunbar-Hester, 2020; Hicks, 2017; Misa, 2010). The DEF CON 2 program, for example, featured a guide to strip clubs and adult entertainment (Tagger, 1994). While this might seem like a mere provocation, it could also be an identity-building performance. By publishing a guide to Las Vegas’s adult entertainment scene, DEF CON organizers tapped into the city’s hyper-commercial, libertine reputation to amplify hacker culture’s rebellious image. This strategy embraced the transgressive pageantry of Vegas to reinforce DEF CON’s TAZ as a space where norms could be bent and redefined. As Pfaffenberger (1988) notes, ‘A successful hack would be resource-intensive and short-lived but the talk of town.’ Hackers seek not only technical powers, but also peer recognition. The TAZ, aided by Las Vegas, offers abundant opportunities to achieve this ‘talk of town’ status, enabling hackers to craft their rebellious identity and construct their head-turning performances not only through digital exploits but also by engaging with the city’s material offerings.

Overall, what makes Las Vegas the promised land for hackers is its permissive structures and active role in co-constructing the DEF CON TAZ and the hackerspectacle. The city’s legal flexibility, cultural excess, and libertarian undertones provide a rare material and social framework where hackers can break, challenge, experiment, and perform safely and with aid. By turning Las Vegas into a material extension of hacker culture and including the city’s signatures into their cultural identity, DEF CON hackers built a unique hackerspectacle in which place and subculture co-create one another.

Assimilated Visuals: The Cyberpunk Aesthetics of Hackers and Las Vegas

The most visual outcome of hackerspectacle’s rise is the development of cyberpunk-adjacent aesthetics, or ‘hackerspectacle aesthetics’, shaped during Vegas’s third and fourth building boom (Al, 2010) alongside the rapid growth of the U.S. hacker community in the 1990s. The city’s drive for a renewed visual identity and the subculture’s parallel quest for self-expression converged, producing a shared look shaped by both the place and the community. Before DEF CON’s arrival, Las Vegas’s neon-lit streetscapes of the 1940s and 1950s had already inspired cyberpunk imagery. Yet it was the third building boom of the 1980s–1990s that turned the city into a full-fledged template for cyberpunk urban spectacles (Abbott, 2007; Al, 2010). With newly installed LED façades, immersive themed environments, corporate mega resorts functioning as microcities, and intensified urban layering, the reinvented city offered a living blueprint for the genre’s visual codes. Blockbuster works of the 1980s, such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy (1984–1988), drew on Vegas-like environments where engineered experiences blurred the line between reality and simulation. For example, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson (1988) features an AI-run, neon-soaked, and hyper-commercialized entertainment zone reminiscent of Vegas’s casino-driven artificial reality. By 1993, when DEF CON began anchoring its community there, the city was nearing its transformation into a realized cyberpunk metropolis (Al, 2010, p. 2).

During this pivotal phase, the hacker community was also actively shaping the visual expressions of its culture through the lens of cyberpunk aesthetics, as seen in the pages of Mondo 2000 (from 1989) and Wired (from 1993), which codified and circulated a cyberpunk look within the hacker community (Stevenson, 2013; Turner, 2006). In fact, from the earliest days of digital play, sci-fi cyberpunk culture has served as a provocation. Previous scholars have argued for the genre’s role in articulating broader norms of identity in an increasingly technological world (Bukatman, 1993; Cavallaro, 2000). More specific to hacking culture, Milburn (2018, p. 27) notes that the hacker Jude Milhon—who was involved in the 1962 Spacewar! project, often cited as one of the earliest, playfully hacked video games created on the DEC PDP-1—defined hacking as ‘the clever circumvention of imposed limits, a spirit mirrored in science fiction’s capacity to defy social and natural laws’. By the 1980s and 1990s, the cyberpunk genre is argued to have become a key element of hacker identity formation. Milburn (2018, p. 28) identified films like Tron, WarGames, and The Matrix trilogy, among other cyberpunk works, as shared cultural touchstones among hackers, informing both technical experimentation and social belonging. This thematic alignment between hackers and cyberpunk quickly took on a tangible form, producing distinctive cyberpunk hacker materiality in the 2000s. These include the use of the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks during the 2008 campaign against the Church of Scientology, the deployment of imagery from The Matrix during the 2011 ‘Free Topiary’ event, and the adoption of phrasing from the cyberpunk game Silver Wing in hacker meme-protests against the Snowden case in 2013 (Milburn, 2018, pp. 14–15, 16, 41–42).

Against this backdrop, DEF CON’s early years in Las Vegas coincided with a pivotal moment in hacker image-building. Sustained interaction with the emerging neon-saturated, thematic environment of the city helped DEF CON hackers craft a distinctive cyberpunk visual language that draws on Las Vegas’s cyberpunk-like urban landscape. The result is the hackerspectacle aesthetic born of mutual amplification. The cover art for the DEF CON 26 program is a clear example (Figures 2 and 3). The artwork, themed ‘Underground Network’, foregrounds iconic landmarks—the ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign, the Statue of Liberty replica atop the New York, New York hotel, and the Eiffel Tower of Paris Las Vegas—set against a backdrop of neon-lit screens, surveillance cameras, industrial wires, and ominous prying eyes. These visuals do more than display cyberpunk style or hackers’ acute awareness of Vegas as a surveilled, controlled space. They reinforce the connection between Vegas’s materiality and cyberpunk control systems—especially when Dark Tangent, in the DEF CON 26 program introduction titled ‘Underground Network’, asked, ‘what if you could go back in time to 1983, frighteningly close to George Orwell’s 1984?’ (Moss, 2018, p. 3). Admittedly, 1984 isn’t cyberpunk, but dystopian. Hacker culture’s and cyberpunk’s shared theme of building an underground network against control systems is thus linked to the city’s existing aesthetics, design elements, and established symbolism, showing that DEF CON media not only embraced Vegas’s stylistic language but also used it to enhance the city’s image as a cyberpunk battleground where hacker rebellion could thrive.

Figure 2.

Screenshot of DEF CON 26 program front cover.

Figure 3.

Screenshot of DEF CON 26 program back cover.

Beyond representational forms such as program covers, hacker engagements have acted on the city-as-medium itself, making hackers visible elements of the city and layering new cyberpunk signifiers into its urban fabric. The conference poster displayed on the giant LED screen (Figure 4) offers one such example. Its composition merges cyberpunk motifs such as robots with distinctly Vegas-inspired elements like a vivid neon color palette, while its public display transforms Las Vegas’s digital infrastructure into a subcultural canvas. Integrating Las Vegas’s cyberpunk imagery into hacker visuals showcases how hackers locate stylistic identity within the city. But projecting these hacker designs onto commercial screens does something even more: it asserts the presence not only of cyberpunk aesthetics in Las Vegas, but also of the genre’s living content and theme—real hackers and acts of rebellion. In other words, while Las Vegas provides a cyberpunk visual language for DEF CON, hackers have made the city look even more like the cyberpunk dystopias it inspired. A city that once shaped cyberpunk fiction now reflects the subculture it helped visualize, blurring the line between media fantasy and material reality to produce a fully realized hackerspectacle aesthetic.

Figure 4.

DEF CON poster displayed on LED screen (Bret, 2024).

The hackerspectacle aesthetics have pushed both Las Vegas and the hacker community toward a more overtly cyberpunk identity, each absorbing and amplifying the other’s visual and material cues. A survey of hacker-gathering photos over the years reveals the gradual adoption of a Vegas-inflected, neo-cyberpunk aesthetic within the community. For instance, Figures 5 and 6 reflect the transformation in clothing styles among R00t hackers between 1996 and 2021: Plain, everyday attire and conventional hairstyles have given way to bold neon colors, elaborate accessories, and outfits adorned with rebellious imagery. While the two pictures do not represent a complete shift in hacker clothing styles, they undeniably show the growing visibility of Vegas-inflected cyberpunk attire. This closet shift mirrors Las Vegas’s hacker-inflected cyberpunk turn. The continued presence of the cluster of major hacker conferences held annually in Vegas, nicknamed ‘hacker summer camp’, anchored by DEF CON, Black Hat Briefings, and BSides, has sustained Las Vegas’s cyberpunk expressions and enabled the city to emerge as a preeminent cyberpunk site. The city’s importance in the genre is now visible in mainstream cultural representations: Whereas Blade Runner originally drew inspiration from Tokyo and Hong Kong in the 1980s (R. Scott, 2007), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) imagines Las Vegas as the dystopian future (Villeneuve, 2017). Similarly, Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment, 2010) reimagined the city as a tech-noir wasteland, underscoring its cyberpunk evolution. Such reciprocal transformation is no accident; it is the cumulative result of DEF CON’s media, hacker presence, and material interventions continuously reframing how the city is perceived, while the city’s own spectacle reshapes the hacker community’s visual culture. In this way, Las Vegas and the U.S. hacker scene have come to share an intertwined, ever-intensifying visual language in which the city stages more hacker culture expressions, while hackers adopt more of Vegas’s showmanship and glamor.

Figure 5.

Three R00t hackers.

Figure 6.

Two R00t hackers.

From Accident to Archive: DEF CON’s Merged History With Las Vegas

In early 2024, an incident underscored DEF CON’s long-lasting tenure in Las Vegas: Caesars Hotel canceled its 25-year contract with DEF CON (Seeman, 2024), leaving the conference in need of a new venue just seven months before the event. While some speculated that DEF CON might leave the city, the organizers only searched for alternative local venues. As Dark Tangent recalled, ‘we immediately scrambled a venue strike team to Las Vegas’ (Moss, 2024a, para. 5). As I’ve shown, over the past three decades, DEF CON hackers and Las Vegas have co-authored the hackerspectacle—providing and reclaiming commercial spectacles, enabling and building TAZs, and crafting distinctive cyberpunk visuals. The relationship has reinforced the hackerspectacle through layers of nostalgia and history embedded within the built environment. This place-specific history is consciously recognized within the community. In his 2024 DEF CON opening remarks, Jeff Moss twice recalled the event’s origin in Las Vegas (Moss, 2024b, 4:32; 17:57) and emphasized the long relationship and natural compatibility between the city and the conference (Moss, 2024b, 12:46). Although the first DEF CON—initially planned as a farewell party for a friend—landed in Las Vegas for practical reasons, such as ‘plenty of hotels and conference rooms, and if the conference failed, a trip to Vegas wouldn’t be too bad’ (J. Scott, 2013, 2:31), three decades of shared history have since entangled the event with the city’s material and cultural landscape. Hackers have turned physical locations into cultural landmarks of the hackerspectacle, and the entire city into a living archive of hacker memories and history.

The emplacement of a hacker culture began immediately after the 1993 inaugural party, when enthusiastic participants persuaded Dark Tangent to make DEF CON an annual event (Hacking Stories, 2021). Since then, specific sites in Las Vegas have been woven into the fabric of DEF CON’s cultural history. For example, during the Alexis Park Resort era (1999-2005), the long-standing prank of doormat stealing became a beloved tradition (J. Scott, 2013, 50:16). It was more than a mischievous game; it was a material practice that inscribed the resort into hackers’ collective memory. Even after DEF CON moved to casino hotels, hackers returned to Alexis Park to continue the ritual. One hacker, GRIFTER, stated that ‘the Alexis Park is part of the DEF CON Legend. … It’s probably the closest thing DEF CON has to a home’ (J. Scott, 2013, 46:25). Dark Tangent echoed this: ‘I know, I wish it was still at The Alexis Park’ (J. Scott, 2013, 46:22). Alongside pranks, underground hacker parties also repeatedly occupy familiar sites. The longstanding Toxic BBQ at Sunset Park’s Foxtail Pavilion (Toxic BBQ Organizers, 2021) exemplifies how ritualized return creates a layered network of unofficial hacker spaces across Las Vegas. In this way, Vegas’s landscape and materiality become more than a stage, but also an archive, enabling hackers to inscribe their histories on the city. These accumulated, place-based memories do more than preserve tradition—they actively feed the hackerspectacle, transforming the city’s spaces and symbols into roots of hacker identity. This layer of the hackerspectacle is also an apt illustration of Halbwachs’s (1992) claim that collective memory grounds group identity: Las Vegas functions as an externalized mnemonic scaffold whose urban streets and buildings cue and stabilize hacker memory, while hackers, in turn, re-script the city to house their narratives.

That coupling is hardly surprising: The hackers’ memory-work syncs with Las Vegas’s own history of calculated deviance. The material memories and spatial practices of DEF CON are thus less intrusions than continuations of the city’s ethos of risk-taking, subversion, and reinvention. Las Vegas has long thrived on loopholes and lightly-policed boundaries (Faiss & Gemignani, 2011; Herold & Prosser, 2020; Moehring & Green, 2005; Schwartz, 2006). DEF CON updates this repertoire of Vegas with a digital toolkit: By testing limits and exposing vulnerabilities, hackers inscribe their subculture onto the cityscape and extend the space’s disruptive history into the 21^st century. As Murdock (1995) poetically described in her DEF CON 2 report, hackers are ‘electronic cowboys’, blending into the neon sunset of Vegas. This metaphor captures how hackers’ digital rebellions are a new-age sequel to the city, both inhabiting and amplifying Las Vegas’s cultural memory. What began as a pragmatic venue choice has become a reciprocal shaping: hacker cultural memories and Vegas’s spatial history are co-constructed and continually evolving, adding the historical layer to the hackerspectacle.

What Got Truly Hacked in Vegas?

On the surface, the emergence of hackerspectacle appears to mark a successful hack of the city over their three decades of interactions: Vegas’s spectacles have been reclaimed by subculture; its institutions, businesses, and individuals have grown accustomed to accommodating hackers’ mischief; the city’s cyberpunk aesthetics have been repurposed and reshaped; and its landscape has been turned into an archive of hacker spatial memories. However, the supposedly hacked city seems to have been benefiting from the growth of hackerspectacle. Over the years, DEF CON has positively influenced the city’s materiality. First, hackers’ interactions with Vegas’s material environment have helped the city to integrate security measures deeply into its infrastructure and entertainment logic. Hotels, aware of DEF CON attendees’ inclination to test system limits, adapted their protocols accordingly. More significantly, technical revelations—such as the Saflok RFID Lock Exploiter—prompted widespread hotel upgrades to enhance room security, reflecting how hacker challenges become concrete redesigns for the built environment (Unsaflok, 2024). Second, DEF CON’s influence allowed the city to market itself as an aspiring cybersecurity hub, and even local education strategies took advantage of it. For example, the University of Nevada started a cybersecurity course in 2024, and the course introduction specifically mentioned the city’s importance in cybersecurity and even advertised tickets to DEF CON as a draw for the program (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2024). These developments demonstrate how DEF CON’s challenges to the city’s systems contributed to commercial advancements, bringing new opportunities and tangible changes to the city and enhancing it physically for future developments and challenges.

The evolving landscape of Las Vegas, which shows DEF CON’s construction of the city’s materiality, in turn, has affected DEF CON hackers’ practices. Some of these impacts could be considered positive: As Vegas hotels and venues increased surveillance and tightened security, hackers responded by turning these limitations into further opportunities for playful resistance and teaching moments. One prime example of DEF CON hackers responding to limitations creatively is the ‘Spot the Fed’ contest. What began in 1993 as a reaction to the growing presence of law enforcement at the conference evolved into a game where participants could publicly identify suspected undercover agents. The playful distribution of T-shirts—‘I am the FED’ for identified agents and ‘I spotted the FED’ for those who exposed them—not only subverted surveillance but also created a visual display of rebellion (see Figures 7 and 8). By 1997, the ‘Wall of Sheep’ extended this tradition by displaying the usernames of attendees caught using unsecure connections. This public shaming was not merely a prank but reinforced the ethos of security awareness within the community. Both traditions highlight how DEF CON hackers materialized their subculture within changing material and social spaces, turning increasing external surveillance into subversive performances.

Figure 7.

‘I am the FED’ t-shirt at.

Figure 8.

‘I spotted the FED’ t-shirt.

However, DEF CON hackers could not digest all of Vegas’s increased surveillance policies. As the conference’s ties to the city grew stronger and hacker identity became placed in Las Vegas, they were increasingly subjected to these shifts in the city’s security system. By the 2010s, it seems the once-safe TAZ co-constructed by both DEF CON hackers and Las Vegas had begun to show cracks under pressure, hinting at the question of ‘what really got hacked in Las Vegas?’ In 2013, for instance, the once-fun ‘Spot the Fed’ contest became a sore spot in the hacker community because of increased surveillance of hacker activities. Dark Tangent called a ‘time-out’ and asked Feds to take ‘some time apart’ in his post that year (Moss, 2013). He lamented that the conference, built to be ‘an open nexus of hacker culture, a place where seasoned pros, hackers, academics, and feds can meet’ and to uphold ‘the spirit of openness, verified trust, and mutual respect’, was under threat (Moss, 2013). By the 2020s, the cooperative relationship between Vegas and DEF CON hackers had further deteriorated. As mentioned before, Caesars Hotel abruptly canceled its contract with DEF CON after 25 years of working together, without providing a clear reason (Roeben, 2024). In the same year, controversies arose when Resorts World Las Vegas implemented mandatory daily room inspections during DEF CON, highlighting the evolving tension between safety measures and hacker autonomy, and signaling a new chapter of the hackerspectacle (mguz4063, 2024).

Conclusion

The most recent image of the hackerspectacle also seems to drift towards conformity, as DEF CON has begun to reflect more of the city’s logic—streamlined, commercialized, and surveilled. What was once an autonomous zone for digital mischief now resembles a corporate tech event, with sponsorships, branded spaces, and institutional partnerships. This commercialization has been noticed by most hackers, especially those who frequented the conference in the 80s. Some have said that DEF CON today feels like a ‘hacker-party-turned-industry-extravaganza’ where subversion is curated and transgression staged; others simply conclude that ‘the old scene is dead’ (Makuch, 2019). An anonymous interviewee, for example, shared a lot on the topic of commercialization. ‘What the hack is DEF CON anymore?’ was an exclamation from a friend of the anonymous interviewee, to which the interviewee agreed strongly. (Interview, April 2, 2025). Public commentary echoes this view: Hacker Marc Rogers stated that DEF CON has become more like an alternative recruitment fair, highlighting its commercialization (Kuchler, 2014). At the same time, practices around surveillance have loosened; Lee (2014) observed that organizers kept very tight control over cameras until the mid-2000s, but their later openness to media and documentation shows a compromise with year-round surveillance. The culture that once proudly defied boundaries has been partially absorbed by the very structures it set out to resist. The surface hacker characteristics remain, but it is increasingly packaged, performed, and folded into the entertainment economy of Las Vegas.

In this sense, the co-construction between DEF CON and Las Vegas is even more mutual than argued above. The city gave DEF CON a stage, and the hackers gave it new stories, but over time the spectacle that hackers once subverted has subtly reasserted its control. The line between hacking the city and being hacked by it has blurred. Las Vegas, the master of illusion, has not been simply hosting hacker culture—it has been reprogramming it. The ultimate hack may not have been performed by the hackers at all.

This trajectory reinforces the article’s central claim: The hackerspectacle is a place-bound mode of engagement through which hacking culture is staged, circulated, and sedimented in Las Vegas. Drawing on a 30-year mixed archive—programs, zines, talks, photos, press, and selective interviews—I trace the pipeline by which repeated public performances produce identity, consolidate aesthetics, organize perception, and at times harden into infrastructure. The contribution is threefold: Conceptually, I offer hackerspectacle to frame hacking as an analytic of placed techno-culture. Empirically, I document urban scale co-production. Diagnostically, I track signs of recapture in the recent commercialization of hacker culture. As the DEF CON-Vegas relationship enters its fourth decade, the blurred line between subversion and absorption reveals the complex politics of place-based subculture. Whether the hackerspectacle can resist capture by a city that now anticipates rebellion remains an open, material question.