HACKED OFF

Dick Pountain/19 February 2000/Idealog 67

Watching journalists on the dailies trying to figure out the motivation of the hackers who brought down Yahoo and other big sites in early February has been a source of some amusement to me this week. Theories I've seen put forward include sheer nihilism; quasi-religious hatred of Bill Gates; envy against the new net millionaires; a snobbish desire to exclude net newbies; or a trial run for future blackmail attempts. Now I don't know these hackers personally, and I'm sure that they have a mixture of motives, but if asked my opinion I would have said there is one overridingly powerful motive behind their hacking and that is self-esteem.

I can almost see you recoiling in horror: Oh my Gahd he's into psycho-babble! He's joined the touchy-feely brigade! Not so, please bear with me a little further. I realize the term self-esteem has acquired rather horrible connotations nowadays, conjuring up images either of an earnest social worker counselling a 13-year old ram-raider, or a narcissistic Californian gazing in the mirror while drooling 'I'm going to be the best me I can be today'. But that is not what I'm talking about here.

My conception of self-esteem means earning the esteem of others, while knowing that you have earned it. Self-esteem of that sort can only come from some sort of successfully shared enterprise, and in the case of the hackers that enterprise is outwitting the site owners, the National Security Agency, the FBI, in fact everyone in authority. These are people proving to the world that they are smart, and helping each other to do so. It is not the mentality of the lone terrorist who just wants to smash things, nor of the bank robber - if these guys wanted money badly enough they'd set up web sites rather than hacking them (after all, if the press is to be believed, anyone who's out of nappies can start a million dollar web company nowadays.)

This quest for esteem is also what drives the freeware phenomenon, people banding together to do something useful and clever, their only reward being the esteem of their colleagues (and before you write in, no I am not suggesting that Linus Torvalds is the Fu Manchu behind the hackers). The fact that I've sometimes been scathing about Linux in this column - because it is fundamentally outdated technology - does not mean that I can't appreciate the sentiment that produced it ('where it's coming from' as they say).

I know something of this hacker mentality because back in the late '80s, colleagues on the now defunct Byte magazine were involved in the Stone Soup group which wrote the freeware Fractint program that wasted everyone's CPU cycles drawing the Mandlebrot Set. The copyright notice distributed with Fractint included the sentence 'don't send your money, got money, want your admiration' which could hardly be more explicit.
A fortunate minority of people used to gain the sort of self-esteem I'm talking about from their job and from family life, but that appears to be less and less possible. The modern cult of celebrity means that a handful of Poshes n' Becks, Camerons and Leonardos garner all the available admiration unto themselves, but unfortunately this fails to fulfill the second part of my criterion. Merely having the esteem of millions bestowed upon you doesn't work unless you yourself believe you've earned it - and so it often all ends in anorexia, addiction and the Priory clinic. Meanwhile their flaunted celebrity lifestyles make the rest of us feel inadequate and rob us of, you guessed it, much of our self-esteem.

Those idealists who reformed our educational system with the 1945 Education Act hoped that universal secondary education would eventually enable everyone to gain mentally stimulating employment, but to say this goal has been missed would be an understatement on a par with calling the Titanic's safety record 'rather disappointing'. The mass media have made all of us very aware of what a creative job looks like, but only a tiny handful can actually get paid to do one. Contrary to popular myth, Sigmund Freud never believed that the only thing that matters in life is sex: he was quite clear that mental health is best preserved by two conditions, fulfilling work and love, but sometime in the 1960s this prescription got truncated to 'All You Need Is Love' and we are living with the consequences.

What the hackers and the freeware people know is that the Internet has the potential to make creative work available, if not yet to all, to far more people than now have it, and they have just set about doing it for themselves. However they also see this potential in danger of being snuffed out, swamped by a torrent of e-commerce, e-consumerism, e-greed. I find it difficult not to share a certain queasy nausea at the non-stop stream of TV ads for dodgy new '.com' services and the unwholesome worship of net millionaires in the popular press. The personal computer business itself followed a very similar trajectory - an early frontier-style free for all where anyone could pitch in and contribute was slowly wrestled under control, bought up and smothered by big corporate money. But I think I'd better nip this line of thought in the bud right now because I'm too old and wise to go around sounding like a hacker...