Though I like to destract and play, I'm a "homo ludens", but I do not consider machines as a playmate... but sometimes I like to use machines and logic in a way they were not built for. That was our difinition of hacking in 1990. One can hack an autocratic system, but people hacking Internet, the most democratic network today, do not know what they are doing or are pure criminals! I think this is clear. The hackers in the nineties reacted against the myth of the allmighty computers. Many did find no jobs. Margaret Tatcher and Ronald Reagan ruled the world. A lot of them were also social activists. They had neither commercial nor malicious purposes. As a system manager I had a lot of friends in that scene. The hackers knew exactly what they were doing. No trial and error. No destructive boredom. They knew the systems, they learned me a lot. They had read the manuals. They wrote the scripts themselves. Internet was still an island for academics and computerfreaks then. Today you can find scripts to hack internet anywhere on the net. It's a peace of cake. But today Internet is used intensively. It's becoming more and more a channel for social networking and collaborative communities. For some people it's the only link outside when they need help. It's the biggest postoffice in this galactic. You do not mess with the postman, you give him a drink.
|