Summary Of 'Hackers And The Contested Ontology Of Cyberspace'

In the article, Hackers and the Contested Ontology of Cyberspace, Helen Nissenbaum examines the shifts in the conception of hackers over the past fifty years and in particular whether these shifts are a natural change in public perspective as a result of public debate, or if instead they are a deliberate attempt by societal institutions to manipulate the culture, referred to by Nissenbaum as the “ontology of cyberspace”, with the intention of creating a negative image of hackers due to the potential threat they can pose to the interests of government, media and corporate entities (Nissenbaum 196). The article investigates this topic by looking at why the word ‘hacker’ has taken on a negative connotation from its initial use by early computer

One reason offered by Nissenbaum, is that hackers due to their very adherence to the hacker ethic have given themselves the status “as agents who willfully defy the rules” within the social ontology of cyberspace (203). It is this hacker ethic that puts them at odds with powerful interests in society. In particular, the beliefs that information should be free and that authority should be mistrusted, as this clearly represent a challenge to authorities such as the police, military and national intelligence agencies. What if everyone else adopted this ethic? Surely it would erode the authority of law enforcement as well as private property rights. As a response to this threat pressure is exerted through multiple institutions like the legal system and the media to paint the hacker as a problematic element in society. One example illustrated by Nissenbaum is that of Napster, a popular file sharing service from the late 1990’s. The creator of Napster, Shawn Fanning, was later taken to court in a costly court case over the service, something could be interpreted as warning to anyone else who tried to share music in a similar way. This is likened by Nissenbaum to “pushing protestors to the margins of good society where they can be dealt with as deviants”. Open-source software was faced with a similar hostility by

One is that while both hackers and the technologies they utilize have changed over the years, they will continue to be affected by the stigma caused from the conflicting views of hacker culture. With the hacker ideal and their free and open software on one side, and societal institutions with a vested interest in controlling information on the other. That the deliberate attempt to portray hackers as problematic or undesirable element of society has negative consequences as hackers have things to offer both in terms of their technical skills but also in the area of culture and politics (212). And that by portraying the more extreme fringe hackers in a negative light, they are essentially poisoning the well, making it more difficult for the voices and contributions of the non-criminal hackers to be