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Since the very beginning of Internet the social perception of computer programmers (a.k.a. hackers) seesawed from admiration to criminalization.This thesis takes the mass-media's use of the term "piracy" seriously and goes deep in the study of the social structure of sea pirates of the Golden Age of piracy (1660-1720) and its historical connection with the XVII and XVIII's centuries revolutionary movements in order to shed light on the position of hackers.Like pirates, hackers are competent and skilful workers, in a specialized arena, who were necessary to the legitimized power to set up a web of power and knowledge. That same power did not hesitate to criminalize and to declare them illegal when the hard work of setting up was completed and new exigencies (e.g. safety of electronic transitions and so on) emerged.Labelled as "pirates," some hackers shaped their group identity using the counter-hegemonic image of piracy in order to fight the increasing power of big corporations through the [...]