The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen

Author:Pekka Himanen [Himanen, Pekka]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-52958-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

The Ethics of the Network

Among the seven values we have discussed, stability is the closest to the old ethical values. Nevertheless, it differs from them in ways that aptly demonstrate the difficult time real ethics have in the network era. A network is stable when it does not crash and bring the activities pursued within it to a halt. Similarly, our new ideal is a society that is stable in that it does not interfere with the financial market’s functioning in the global computer network.

Let’s see in more detail what the application of the network metaphor to people and society means for ethics. Network logic requires constant optimization by connecting and disconnecting resources as needed, the only limitation being the need to keep the network stable. In practice, it is difficult to realize this without at the same time replacing ethics with a philosophy of survival. Business enterprises optimize their networks in order to survive in economic competition, and the ones that cannot keep up are left outside the networks. The ironic culmination of this survival logic derives from the fact that the more networks end up incorporating only the information elite, the more that elite itself must also be concerned about survival. The information professional can be reminded of this survival aspect when some excluded person unexpectedly threatens him with violence in the street or in front of his own home in broad daylight. For a moment, the outcast from the network society has power: the professional finds his information-processing skills seriously challenged as he searches for the right words to extricate himself from this physically threatening situation. Facile solutions to this problem rely on a reinforcement of “stabilizing” factors: more police officers are hired, and the high-level elite resorts to its own bodyguards. At a global level, the most developed countries “stabilize” the wars among the outcasts depending on how important each conflict is to the global economy.

To connect this logic of exclusive networking, some hackers defend the goal of inclusive networking. The case in point is the hacker institution at the heart of the Net’s development, the Internet Society. Its ethic is expressed by the principle “No discrimination in use of the Internet on the basis of race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”33 The Internet Society supports the diffusion of the Net and the teaching of network skills to all who have been left out of the development of enterprises and governments. This is an enormous task. At the moment of this writing, only about 5 percent of the world’s people have access to the Net (of which about half are in North America; Africa and the Middle East together have fewer users than there are people in the Bay Area), and half of the world’s adult population has never even used a telephone.34 Thus, in practice, hacker endeavors have not made much of a difference as yet, but NetDay, kind of a new Labor

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