not really disturbing, but rather expected. The price of freedom is disobedience. Here a headline from 2018 by The Guardian about RisingUp and Extincion-Rebellion:
> 'We have a duty to act': hundreds ready to go to jail over climate crisis
This article is more than 6 years old
> Rowan Williams backs call for mass civil disobedience ‘to bypass the government’s inaction and defend life itself’
performative disobedience, particular in an age of mass social media is the opposite of a change agent, it's a spectacle and the other side of the coin of the status quo, both of which usually feed on each other. Deleuze saw that very early:
"The social machine’s limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential component of its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the controversies they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate.[...] No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way."
Its the old question, chaos or stability? The bird or the cage? Freedom and justified fear, or stifling safety? Usually the young and disaffected are more on the side of chaos, with more to gain and less to lose, while the old and powerful prefer stability for the opposite reason.
Yeah, and rules and laws are never just, just because of their nature. Like dictators have laws… incompetent governments have laws… so law itself is a bad argument to follow it and a lot of socio-legal literature actually recognizes that social processes and to some degree social contracts that can include the exact opposite of the law are often at least as important.
On it's own this doesn't justify neither the abolishment of law nor its disregarding at-scale. That said, nor do I think anyone was actually going for that angle here, so I think we're getting side-tracked.
Not the case. Freedom is orthogonal to legality. To exercise freedom is to fundamentally admit the possibility of disobedience within any sort of rules based framework.
"At their best, hackers lift their heads up above the masses to see how the world actually works, not how it purports to work, and then take action to make the world a better place."
> 4. Naughtiness: Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> A chaotic good character does whatever is necessary to bring about change for the better, disdains bureaucratic organizations that get in the way of social improvement, and places a high value on personal freedom, not only for oneself but for others as well. Chaotic good characters usually intend to do the right thing, but their methods are generally disorganized and often out of sync with the rest of society.
If you're here, you're likely not just smart, but your brain likely works in a way where you can rapidly deconstruct a system or build a mental model of one up, understanding how and where all of the parts must operate for the system to function. Many rules matter, but some don't; you are outcome oriented while operating within the system you exist in. You are willing to operate outside of the system when the situation dictates.
"Hacker" is an interesting term, but overloaded from both a historical and persona perspective. I propose "Adaptive Strategist," "Outcome Engineer," or "Creative Resolver" to better describe this type of human. Someone highly capable, adaptable, and with the fortitude and grit to grind toward success in a morally directional manner.
> Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties.
That's how you end up with price-collusion-as-a-service for landlords to price-gouge. When you don't define "the big questions", every evil can just be something naughty and you can explain it away by saying that the person has "the big questions" in mind, and not these small ones. Is anyone surprised that most startups that "just ignore the small things" also ignore the big ones once they are big?
> Someone highly capable, adaptable, and with the fortitude and grit to grind toward success in a morally directional manner.
What do you mean by "morally directional"? What do you call a person with the same abilities and traits but concern for ethics? Are they not a hacker?
I would argue that your example of tech driven price collusion is unethical and a symptom of bad people implementing technology for bad purposes.
By “morally directional” I mean fundamentally a good person. Ethics are mostly easy imho although there are edge cases that are tricky or aggressively debatable due to nuance.
I agree that it's unethical, my point was that it's easy to say that it is the price for innovation and in the end if the innovation is large enough, the unethical action is fine ("they solved world hunger and brought us world peace, and you complain about a little bit of initial price gouging?"), and who knows what good intention they might have (probably none, but it's good PR to pretend).
Do you consider 'hacker' to be tied to some ethical concept? Makes it a difficult definition to work with because you and I will draw the line of "justified by the intentions" (e.g. invading privacy of 1, 100, 1m to draw attention to some big issue) in a different place, and on top of that a hacker will stop being a hacker when they overstep the line?
The below resources touch on some ethical considerations, but are certainly not all inclusive. It is, imho, a living concept and dynamic. Are there good or bad Hackers? Or Hackers (and how their brain operates) just humans who do good or bad things? Do you stop thinking and being such a way when you cross a line?
Yes, I'm aware of these, but to me that's not a requirement of being "a hacker" (not that I've ever heard anyone discuss whether someone is a hacker). I've always understood that to be more of a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing that suggests some ideas you can use to figure out your position on the moral value of something (but explicitly not as in "you must adopt this line of thinking or you're not one of us").
We have several groups like that in Germany, one of which became quite prominent for repeatedly blocking roads and other actions like that. On balance, they have probably done more harm than good by infuriating people and turning their attention away from the actual issue of climate change towards a discussion of the actions of these groups which have found very little support overall.
> 'We have a duty to act': hundreds ready to go to jail over climate crisis This article is more than 6 years old
> Rowan Williams backs call for mass civil disobedience ‘to bypass the government’s inaction and defend life itself’