Long ago humans discovered that everything on Earth runs in cycles. Human groups do the same: start with intent, become distracted by a debate over methods, then lose sight of the goal or the reason why, and at that point, becoming paint-by-numbers going through the motions.
Sadly that is the stage that “information security” (the hacking industry) has become. Everyone is a hacker now, a life hacker or reading Hacker News, or something. Hacking just means using a workaround instead of doing things the same way everyone else does or chasing trends for your pointy-haired boss.
This is too bad because the implications are often missed. Hacking restores the chain of intent to cause to action to effect where most humans shorten it to the workplace logic of being assigned a task and having a tool to do it. The latter mentality has taken over infosecurity at this point.
It is hard to fault people for wanting a career where you show up, run the tools, make a few recommendations based on what is in your textbooks, and then then go back to the cycle of meetings and water cooler chats that seems to define the average job.
The problem with being a “jobber” of course is that it makes you oblivious. You become the pointy-headed boss telling people that they should do things the way everyone else does, mainly so stuff looks good, instead of peering into technology to understand its cause-effect relationships.
To get into cause-effect relationships — why the gadget does what it does, and how this is a wider range of possibilities than how it is normally used — is to understand the why and therefore, understand your responsbility to use the gadget well.
Most people rely on simple moral rules based on methods. Use the gadget only in the prescribed ways, and you are “good,” but you have artificially limited your potential, which delights the pointy-haired boss because he wants to limit your thinking by limiting your methods.
In other words, he has centralized the process of technology. It is now a linear procedure instead of an understanding of how and why. Whatever succeeds will rapidly become centralized and then repetitive, as some of our favorite redecentralizers remind us:
NNTP and Email were higher level federated application protocols.
The web then came along and turned out to be very usable, but of its nature as a client/server protocol, the successful companies built on top of it have centralized servers (e.g. Google, Facebook).
On the good side, the web is fantastic and decentralized publishing, and made the Internet accessible to all. On the bad side, it naturally leads to central architectures.
Centralization is like any symbolism: it takes disparate intents, causes, and effects, and instead lumps them all into one method. For example, instead of doing research, just go to Google or Facebook and do a search for whatever results their algo ranks above the others.
The pointy-haired boss dislikes hackers because they are not obedient to this process. Instead of just going to Google, they think about what they actually want to achieve, learn about the technology or history, and come up with “unorthodox” solutions.
The centralization process continues not just in infosec but on the net itself as the “Big Six” companies further centralize control:
There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It’s something that’s kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links.
If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal… That was a real epiphany to me, because the argument against one form of this legislation was, “My God, you’ll destroy this fundamental way of how the internet works.” I’m like, dude, these companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how the internet works.
Your average citizen starts out at one of the big sites and looks no further than that. Google is the new Sears Catalogue, Facebook the new New York Times, Reddit the local hipster bar where everyone complains, and Amazon the department store.
But this has crushed the promise of the internet, which was decentralized information:
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
In the same way, hackers decentralized technology by removing the bond between procedure and result. Hackers find another way to reach the same goals, or find new goals and new ways to reach them, interrupting the calcified.
This places us beyond regular morality and forces upon us the question of the results of our actions. If any action produces a better world than whatever existed before, it is better than refraining from doing it. Sometimes those actions involve borrowing equipment that is technically owned by others.
I think it a mistake to hide from the dark side of hacking. In the 1980s, we stole phone services, telecommunications, and access to big iron because that was the only way to find the information we needed. Now most of that stuff is free, so what does a hacker do?
Answering that question requires looking into the nature of hacking. Most jobbers operate by checking off checkboxes; a hacker has to know why the checkboxes are there. This causes us to resemble an ancient archetype rather than a modern one:
This is comparable to the state of a knight in ancient cultures. The knight was above all laws made for normal people, as he was trusted to do what was right according to the whole of civilization and nature, even if it meant that some unfortunate would be deprived of life, liberty or happiness. The knight did what was necessary to push his surroundings toward a higher state of order, avoiding the entropy caused by those who were doomed to the world of appearance and could thus see only binaries: living/dying, money/poverty, right/wrong. The knight transcended these boundaries and “hacked” his surroundings by pushing them to do things that otherwise could not be done, replacing previous designs with better ones.
Design and logical structure are the “hidden world” in which hackers, philosophers, artists and knights operate. The world of appearance deals with physical objects, but not the underlying structure which connects them. Similarly, users see the appearance which computers are programmed to show them, but have no idea of the workings of networks and operating systems. A knight must know how to manipulate this hidden world, and must have the moral strength to be destructive only when it is constructive to do so.
Infosecurity/hacking has become inverted, or the opposite of what it set out to be. We live in a good time for reinventing it, instead of repeating the recent past. Maybe it is basic human thinking that most needs redecentralization.