The recent global incidents on the Internet come as no surprise. Clearly the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more it lends itself to acts of terrorism. It was easy to deal with the hijacker of a propeller aircraft with an unpressurized cabin: the door could be opened and the hijacker ejected. On an intercontinental jetliner, even a madman with a blank pistol can keep everyone on tenterhooks.
The problem here is more that technological development is accelerating. Once the Wright brothers had attempted the first flight, decades passed before Louis Blériot, Baron von Richthofen, Francesco Baracca, Charles Lindbergh, and Italo Balbo could adapt to the subsequent improvements in aircraft technology. The car I drive today does things that were unimaginable for the old Fiat 600 in which I passed my driving test, but if I had started then with the car I’m driving now, I’d have crashed it in no time. Fortunately I have grown with my cars, adapting gradually to their increased power.
With computers, on the other hand, I don’t get enough time to learn all the possibilities of one machine and its software before a new machine and more complicated software appear on the market. I can’t even opt to continue with the old computer, which would perhaps be adequate, because essential updates are available only on the new machines. This rate of acceleration is due first of all to commercial imperatives—the industry wants us to scrap the old and buy the new, even if we’re happy as we are—but it also depends on the fact that no one can stop a researcher from inventing a more powerful computer. The same is true of cell phones, video recorders, personal organizers, and digital equipment in general.
Our reflexes would not be able to keep up with cars that increased their performance every two months. Fortunately cars are too expensive and highways are what they are. Computers cost less and less, and the highways on which their messages travel impose no restrictions. As a result, the latest version appears before we’ve come to grips with the full potential of the previous one. This is a problem not just for the ordinary user, but also for those who ought to be monitoring data flow, including FBI agents, banks, and the Pentagon.
Who has the time, twenty-four hours a day, to work out the new capabilities of their personal equipment? The hacker. He’s a kind of stylite, a desert father, who devotes his entire day to meditation—electronic meditation. Have you seen pictures of the hacker who recently found his way into Clinton’s message system? All hackers look like that: fat, clumsy, malformed people who have grown up in front of a computer screen. Having become the only complete experts in an innovation that moves at breakneck speed, they have the time to understand everything their machine and the Web do, without developing any new philosophy or studying its positive applications. So they devote themselves to the single direct action their inhuman competence allows: hijacking, interfering, destabilizing the global system.
In doing so, many of them may well believe they are acting in the “spirit of Seattle,” and are thereby combating the new Moloch. In truth, they end up being the system’s best collaborators, since to counteract them requires further innovation, carried out ever more swiftly. It’s a vicious circle in which the hacker strengthens what he thinks he’s destroying.
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