Hacking and Counter-cultural Rebellion

Hacking and countercultural rebellion

Hacker innovation is based on a set of cultural ethics and behaviours designed to deviate and oppose the mainstream via rebellious acts or rejection of incumbent values and supporting institutions, by enabling a technology to do something it was not originally intended to do. It could be argued that hacking actually occurs in the first place because of this countercultural rebelliousness –infringing laws, copyright and claims for intellectual property ownership. Sony’s suppression of the ‘Other OS’ firmware feature for example served to further motivate and militarise hacker communities because of its anti-hacker policy. The corporation went to great lengths to protect and control its proprietary information resulting in potential piracy impacting shareholder value. If Sony had successfully found ways in which to incorporate and absorb homebrew and amateur software development into its content value ecosystem, then a countercultural hacking (and cracking) backlash would have been arguable less counter-culturally significant. Whilst at the same time allowing the firm profit from increased platform content available to all consumer types. The main battle for firms dependent upon property rights rent appropriation is in preventing piracy and not the potentially useful generation of complementary end-user hacker innovations. However the over simplistic and somewhat romantic dichotomy of hacking vs. (open, socially minded, constructive, honest.) cracking (secretive, malicious, dangerous) posed by Levy, does not simply imply allowing one type of generative hacking whilst preventing non-generative piracy. Hackers can easily carry out cracks and piracy concurrently and one type is not bound to being either generative or non-generative but may be a combination of the two. The resultant reaction for firms not dependent upon hacker innovation sources is a general blanket policy blocking all external hacking and cracking activities altogether.

If firms took a more progressive stance, how would generative hacker innovation activities change if the firm were openly prepared to integrate and absorb external outputs? How would legitimising essentially countercultural acts affect the generative outputs of collaborative hacker innovation networks? How and when should firms strategically open up and integrate with hacking generativity? And what are the strategic possibilities and consequences of opening up and incorporating generative innovation activities from external hackers? These are just some of the many questions and research problems that inevitably emerge once hacking is viewed as potentially important, valuable and essential to innovation within firms.

References

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