Hacker Ethic and counterculture

The contemporary example using which I would like to discuss the hacker ethic and counterculture would be that of facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In his college days at Havard Zuckerberg was the quintessential definition of a hacker. The qualities in him were very typical of all the people belonging to this category, he was exceedingly smart and was very good at programming and he was immersed in programming to such an extent that early accounts of his life describe him as being one with the machine. But at the same time the relationship with human beings was the complete opposite of that seen with the machine. He failed miserably to in attempts to get a girlfriend, and generally had very bad and bitter relationship with other human beings. The main reason foe this can be attributed to the face that the he spent so much time with his work that he expected that feedback mechanisms with human beings to be similar to that with the machines he worked with, there was no specific boundary which separated the virtual and real worlds his world views were completely intertwined and interlaced with one another that his dominant world which was the virtual world was slowly taking over his real world and pouring into his real world.
Not only did he fail miserably in establishing intimate relationship with other people but he had absolutely no regard for human sentiment and other people’s feelings. This is clearly illustrated by his first website facemash where he hacked into the Havard registry and downloaded profile pictures of girls and put up profile pictures of any two random girls on his website and asked people who visited his site to rate who was better looking. This clearly shows that he had no respect for sentiments of other people. Following this he attained notoriety in his college and in a sense this made him feel empowered in a certain way because until now the no one knew him and he lead a low profile life but now he was infamous and people were actually scared of him, this gave him a sense of superiority, another instance which shows similarities to other hackers. Even when he had his disciplinary hearing for hacking into the Havard database his response was that he would like to be credited for pointing out the lapses in the security of the system, that he hacked into it for the pure joy of hacking and finding loopholes in the system.
In conclusion what is said here is that hackers like him are always in the middle of an inner conflict that of two worlds the virtual and the real and its not that they are anti social elements its just that they derive an immense amount of joy in beating the system and would go to any lengths to beat it again and again and at the end of the day beating the system is not a means ot an end it is an end I itself.
By
Vivek Subramaniam
AE09B031