The hacker ideals in the modern world

Hacker culture

The hacker culture has been around ever since computers came around, and even preceded them by a little – but do the culture's ideals hold up in the modern world?

The ideals

1. Unlimited access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works.

This has been a goal for most tech-literate people for a while now, and the world is inching ever closer to it. The practice of teaching kids to be somewhat versed in using a computer is fairly well-spread (although sometimes, the kids are already more experienced than the teachers!). This is also a pitfall in disguise – people tend to leave their young kids alone with their devices, open to the opportunities of the powerful Web, which is not exactly child-friendly in most of its content.

On the topic of "anything which might teach you something about the way the world works", while computers may be reaching ubiquity, information is not quite there.

2. All information should be free.

A lot of information has been made much more freely accessible with the Web becoming as widely used as it is today. Online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, which anyone can edit, may not be the best source for any scientific work, but they are great for acquiring general level knowledge about a lot of topics.

Obviously, there still is a lot of secret information, mostly related to manufacturing processes or other things that might compromise a company's lead in its field if leaked. Unfortunately, making this information publicly available is fairly improbable, although it could help pave the way to the mentioned Capitalism 3.0.

3. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.

The hacker ethic doesn't exactly mistrust all authority, but rather the misuse of authority. I think it is a good, if simplistic approach to a complex issue. On the topic of decentralization, the Internet has been quite decentralized from the start – and looks to be staying that way. New technologies, for example, blockchain and the cryptocurrency based on it, seek to expand the decentralization to the financial world. Judging by their success in the last few years, decentralization seems to be the way of the future.

However, social media along with a lot of the services people use online are often owned by a single tech giant parent company, which introduces concerns about privacy, data collection and more. The Internet isn't homogeneously moving towards decentralization at all.

4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.

This is how it should be. However, in a lot of cases, it isn't. The problem is that fake or bogus "hackers" that have close to no idea about these ideals are a lot more prevalent on the internet than real, ethical hackers, so much so in fact, that the general public associates the word "hacker" with them instead.

For example, the most famous/infamous hacker group in the world Anonymous is frankly hard to take seriously. Before the war in Ukraine, all they did was post scary videos sometimes, but I must admit that their contribution to the war was something I did not expect at all.

Additionally, the idea of the internet being more equal than other channels of communication does stand, however even this has started to deteriorate, with all kinds of "ironic" -isms becoming prevalent in modern Internet humour.

5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

Of course. Digital art is a large portion of the art being created today. Even I've tried my hand at it, and the power of computers in creating art is undeniable.

If you don't consider merely using a computer as a medium to create traditional art, actually "creating beauty on a computer", then I'd say a well-written piece of code is just as inspiring and beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

6. Computers can change your life for the better.

This is also very obvious – unless you are a Chinese sweatshop worker toiling away to assemble tech devices for a slave-like pay or a hopeless gaming addict, chances are computers already have affected your life in a positive way, whether you realize it or not.

Drastically changing one's life though is a little different, and I believe computers alone can't just "change" someone's life that deeply (unless you plop a person from a few hundred years ago into the modern times). The computer, in the end, is a tool, an extension with which you can change your life, but the existence of the computer alone won't.

Conclusion

The hacker ideals might not be prevalent in all of the general populace, but they still are relevant and absolutely followable in the modern world.