It seems I accidentally hit a raw nerve yesterday by suggesting WikiLeaks and Julian Assange represented why the hacker mentality was bad for democracy. Stephen Collins was kind enough to explain why I was profoundly misinformed and making a fool of the Lowy Institute and myself. Normally it takes much less than 200 words for people to realise that about me, but I digress.
The gist of Collins' argument is that all hackers are not equal — there are evil hackers (script kiddies and crackers), sure, but most hackers are ethical, trying to understand the world through a commitment to open government and a collaborative effort to 'chip away at the edges of a closed system'.
For the sake of the argument, let's accept that premise, noting that the hacker community itself hasn't quite resolved this definitional dilemma. What is it that lies at the core of all of these groups, then? It's right there in Stephen's post where he derides the Lowy Institute for only hiring insiders and suggests his colleagues are 'chipping away at the edges of a closed system'. And it's all throughout the hacker manifesto that Stephen referred me to, with the hacker's sense of alienation from the mainstream and persecution by a world that 'murders, cheats and lies'.
In today's SMH, Tanveer Ahmed has an interesting psychiatric analysis of 'anomia' — a sense of alienation or dissatisfaction with the system which seems to underpin both hacking and conspiracy.
The hacker manifesto describes the electronic world as a 'refuge from the day to day incompetencies'. But the hardest work in government, particularly diplomacy, is building consensus by managing those incompetencies and accommodating them as differences in opinion.
For hackers, it's all about a quick shortcut into a complex system, and WikiLeaks is the purest embodiment of this mentality. The system sucks, so let's lob a grenade over the wall and see what happens. Hacking is a lot like Victorian era medical care — just let fresh air in to improve circulation and all your diseases will be cleared up.
I'm happy to accept that Stephen and his online colleagues are patiently committed to reforming democracy by working within the system. I know all too well how traumatic it can be when a simplistic analysis overlooks the complexity of a group. I was still a serving military officer when WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video and painted all soldiers as baby killers. That's what concerns me most about WikiLeaks — that in our quest for simple truths, we overlook the complexities of a democratic system.
Photo by Flickr user Robert Marin.
