Re-defining and Understanding True Hacking
In order to understand the hacker mind-set and ethical underpinnings, it is vital to establish the underlying beliefs that ground attitudes towards capitalism and the wider modern economic system surrounding it.
The network society in which hackers fundamentally operate, organise, innovate and disrupt can be traced back to through proceeding scientific revolutions and emerged at a very specific moment in history. Thomas Kuhn describes technological paradigms as a conceptual pattern that sets standards for performance by organising the available range of technologies around a nucleus that enhances the performance of each [Kuhn, 1962]. In his view the industrial revolution firstly enabled humans to generate power and distribute energy via human ingenuity and artefacts without being solely dependent upon the natural environment in its existing natural state. Energy generation in this sense enables activities by powering-over nature and overcoming the limiting conditions of own individual existence. Water, steam, electric and nuclear power allowed for new forms of production, consumption and social organisation for the evolving industrial society. The avant-garde today being the post-industrialist knowledge economies found in the West in which hacking primarily functions.
The industrial society is comprised of factories, corporations, bureaucracy, and the phasing-out of traditional agricultural labour in place of large-scale urbanisation; international transportations systems, centralised social systems, mass-media and-mass communications. The rise of mass communications and the Internet in particular made fundamental changes to the control of knowledge and information and have challenged the way in which wealth, power and meaning is generated. Information processing, communication and innovation technologies (computer micro chips, network connectivity and associated costs) essentially impact upon the industrialist paradigm itself; specifically on how the generation, control and application of knowledge occurs.
The value in the Internet today comes from linking-up of artefacts in the virtual and real world into new combinations, built upon and extending the configurations of its original architect in modular forms. This re-combinatorial and reconfigurable nature of intellectual property artefacts provides a key source of innovation in the post industrialist networked society. The process of innovation is also subject to recombination and reconfiguration, particularly in the latter stages of the product life cycle (PLC) via acts of hacking to create new artefact combinations or arrangements that in turn support further spirals of meaningful knowledge and information for the system as a whole. The hacker entity freely facilitates this recombination and reconfiguration irrespective of prior intellectual property rights and law that are perceived as a perverse abstraction unto itself; a concept claiming private ownership rights over nature, whether supported and justified by post-industrialist legal regimes or not. In this sense, the configuration of social structures supporting the organisational arrangement of human relationships to production, consumption and power (framed by culture) is unrestrictedly subverted, distorted and reconfigured by hackers.
