Hacked by Kevin F. Steinmetz

Author:Kevin F. Steinmetz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC004000 Social Science / Criminology
Publisher: NYU Press

In this way, capital is said to deskill the domains that provide the best return on surplus value without the need for skill and to proliferate skill in areas where it is necessary. This strategy is, as Harvey (2014) describes, to essentially saturate the market with skilled labor so as to prevent its monopoly power.

Hacking then presents a two-folded reaction to capital’s efforts. First, it is a clear reaction to the deskilling of labor generally. By embodying many characteristics of craft, hacking runs against the banality of modern work environments and seeks a return to a time when the craft was worth pursuing in and of itself—developing one’s skill in a trade and seeking satisfaction through that labor. From the hacker working on the edges of programming development to the security researcher seeking new and innovative ways to bypass or obliterate digital security systems, the phenomenological objective is to find satisfaction in ones work—through flow, excitement, or other emotional outcomes. In many ways, it is a struggle against the tedium and banality of late modernity.

The other reaction is to the erosion of monopolizable skills. Hacking is not just about developing skill. In its emphasis on doing inventive and unorthodox things, it pushes ahead—each hacker thus developing a kind of niche, a specialty. The problem is the moment they solve a particular problem or figure out a new approach and that knowledge becomes shared, it is open to proliferation among other programmers. For instance, the moment an innovative new program in Linux is created, others may be similarly crafted for proprietary operating systems.3 In the domain of security, when one person finds and publishes a new exploit, it can be appropriated into the literature used to train new security engineers and programmers.4 Or when a malware writer codes a new and inventive virus and releases it into the wild, that code is open for study by security researchers and potentially replication by other enterprising coders. When considered in tandem with the ever-expanding body of knowledge in these domains and the need for workers to continuously keep abreast of current developments in their fields—lest they fall victim to “skills extinction”—it becomes clear that the skills hackers develop are not “durable possessions” (Sennett 2006, 95). The continual emergence of new technology similarly threatens to antiquate accrued skills. In this way, hackers and similar laborers are always in a rush against their own obsolescence, seeking to stay on the cutting edge. In the workplace, this approach could be seen as a way to prevent their skills from becoming devalued through the mass training of other programmers. Such efforts are also necessary for hacker-laborers to prevent being rendered useless in late-modern capitalism and thus be relegated to the ranks of the surplus population (Marx [1867] 1967; Sennett 2006). These threats are all the more intense when considering that the growing pool of skilled labor domestically in the West is increasingly displaced by cheaper skilled labor in the areas of programming and human services elsewhere in the world through globalization of the market (Fuchs 2014; Sennett 2006).

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