What a day... how fortunate I am to be able to spend a day inside my head, with my body on the beach warmed right through by sunshine and sand, my soul calmed by the breaking waves.
I find myself again returning to 'problems' of 'our' society. (Hmm.... I have starting using these quotes in an attempt to indicate emphasis, or commonly questionable definition of a given term, but I fear that most definitions are questionable, consequently, in order to somehow progress, I should stop the formation of such a habit.) Okay, so, I'm reading way too many books, which means I'm not finishing any of them, however, one book I am hooked to, and have not yet finished simply because it is on my computer only (for now), is "
Underground" by
Suelette Dreyfus (cool name, huh?). It's fascinating reading about the act of hacking, possibly the reasons people hacked, the process, their successes and of course generally their stories. Wonderful book.
Hacking always fascinated me. I have always been and am on very good terms with computers, both their hardware and software. Dad decided early on that that should be the case, after forcing me through a touch typing course by the time I was in third grade, I then started learning QBasic. Hahaha :)
For all of this (and perhaps because of this... :)), it never occurred to me to 'hack' into a system. The drive for that was simply absent. My worst attempt at a prank, was to use the POP3 protocol to send my uni friend a friendly email from the 'Vice Chancellor'. Unfortunately, from memory I got her email address wrong, and then spent a few days thinking what would happen if my email bounced into the Chancellor's inbox.
But reading this book: the advent of computers, and computer hacking necessarily raises a few questions of 'why'? Was the attraction - the process of discovery? These people were cognizant (as I definitely wasn't!) at a time when the artificial (perhaps more apt - silicon) fabric of our society was starting to grow. (What could be brought up as an analogy to that time? The discovery of electricity - and it's gradual penetration into every household? I do not recall reading of any electricity hackers.) Their hacking was the act of breaking into computer systems that were ultimately built by individuals: engineers, scientists pushing the frontiers of knowledge and thereby creating a new cognitive process (existence/space). Why? What motivated these people? Instead of enrolling into colleges, unis or whatever means were available then, so as to become part of this new foundation and accelerate with it forward. To not only learn (and not by trial and error), but to write this new dialect, why instead did they choose to drive its evolution from the underground, the shadows?
What would these people have done (as others of their nature must have), had they not come across computers? Would they have become HAM radio operators? :) TV hackers? :) and before then?
Essentially, I do not think that it was the attraction to bits and bytes, to the hardware or software that motivated many of them. It seems to me, that it was for them simply a chosen medium of protest against authority, expression of dissent, and a means to understand ... (I want to say reality, but that seems a little facetious, undercutting the life believed, and lived, by the majority of people)...their world (?).
Perhaps, I shall attempt an analogy - that these people are themselves bugs, a viral infection in the fabric of society, and computers/internet was just a new weakness/backdoor of the organism which we call society? (Now, I am aware that by using words such as 'bug', and 'virus' I am necessarily evoking feelings of distaste. However, that is not my intent, nor is it applicable to these social protesters. I am also assuming that the understanding is that I am talking of hackers who had the intellect for introspection to ask themselves 'why'? and the motivation and decency to answer.)
Okay, and were is this drive to undermine: governments, corporations, big business etc coming from? All these systems are comprised of individuals, and yet, as we all know, or at least have an intuition (there is a little communist it all of us! :)) that the amalgamation of humans, the dissemination of their creativity, creates something something less than human. It's like back in the day when I was entertaining notions of studying medicine/genetics after my PhD, I read about a bacteria (?) whose cells will form 'secondary structures' (I don't remember much now, but the idea was that the same bacterial cells would, depending on their relative location, become different parts of the bigger structure.). The actions that these systems take (actuated by 'human' individuals!) in instances lead to intense suffering of other parts of our global society.
Where does this drive come from? and I think more importantly, is this drive simply reactive, intuitive due to social frustrations (which at least many of the people in this book seem to have experienced in an acute form)? or is it proactive (
Wikileaks for example) and remedial in its quality. There is an effort here necessary to distinguish what would constitute as criminal behaviour and what would not? However, I find this difficult to answer, as I see most of these actions as an attack on the system, not attacks on the individual. Launching such an offensive attack is sometimes a healthy work out for the cogs of society. Without such actions women would still not be allowed to vote for example, and I am sure I do not need to mention others.
I think here, perhaps it is appropriate to mention the other book that I am reading -
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by
Douglas Hofstadter. In the very first chapters, he talks of the merit/mark of intelligence as 'jumping out of the system'. To identify perhaps simply a level of discomfort and act on it, or: "there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive the system which governs many peoples' lives, a system which had never before even been recognised as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be existed from!"
So, is this what motivated these people? Perhaps. Hopefully and most importantly, they have answered this question for themselves.
