ECrime
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
Hacking in general as well as the recent traffic overload on e.commerce firms
on the internet have set me to thinking.
Why would someone deliberately set about to create problems for e.commerce?
The answers are varied, complex, interwoven and, usually, personal to the life of the
individuals who do so.
I would like to suggest some answers not so personal.
A. The first answer, if one is a revolutionary, is that this information over-load is a
good way to attack capitalism in general and/or an exploding branch of it.
One could not persuade thousands of revolutionaries to sit-in at Macy's, Meijers or
Harrod's but one could program thousands of innocent computers to do so.
B. A second answer, this one coming out of the complex and historic emnities between Islam
and the Western World, is that a bright Islamic student somewhere in London, Buenos Aires,
San Francisco or Auckland has found another way to bedevil the Western Devil on behalf of
his/her god.
And, from the point of view of the Islamic World, there is reason enough. We have degraded
their culture, seduced their children, corrupted their women and have bombed their
cities...we in the West who, again from the Islamic point of view, scorn the True God and
worship false gods.
I doubt if the first two explanations have much truth value.
This is an American crime committed by nice, middle class young men, well socialized to
their religion, highly educated and not at all product of dysfunctional fathers or
smothering mothering.
C. I think that, for most such hackers, a fairly simple explanation is more relevant.
If we treat information as capital...as many postmodern economists insist we do...then
what we have is the profligate use of information...the conspicuous consumption of private
capital if one wants to use Veblen's happy phrase.
Hackers can create a very 'expensive' piece of information and then spend it in ways which
bring public celebrity and private pride.
In these terms, 'expensive' refers to how much the information costs the firms...again,
not in dollars but in complex behavior required to deal with this new and expensive
information...to buy it and to own it and to control it...all to the 'profit' of the
hacker.
In this case, 'profit' is not dollars but rather notoriety; and one can 'display' that
notority much as one would display every consumptuous purchase from a 90 foot Yacht to a
marble driveway.
'Display' in this case, comes from the media coverage of the deed rather than from cars,
mansions, clothing or objet 'd art.
D. There is a technical sense in which all money, all wealth, can be seen in terms of
information. The dollar, mark, yen or pound is simply a unit which informs both buyer and
seller how much value is embedded in a given form of behavior.
One may think one is buying a car but what one really buys is all the labor which went
into producing that car. One may think one is buying a haircut but what one is really
buying is a set of behaviors of a barber for a set time period. One may think one is
buying food at a restaurant but what one is really buying is all the labor-time which went
into the construction of the restaurant, the growing of the food, the transport,
preparation and serving of the food.
All this reduces to behavior...all wealth comes from behavior...and belief.
And all behavior can be translated into information; into information bits if you will.
Shannon, Marayama, Cadwallader, Campbell, Timothy Lukes, Donald MacKay and Mandelbrot have
taught us that...information theory is the key to the wealth of nations.
Thus if we re-think the notion of capital...as does Lukes...then we can better understand
the nature of hacking in general and computer crime in particular.
This is not to say that there are more personal, more special, more private reasons why a
hacker may chose to hack into the pentagon, the local high school or into the files of a
credit card company.
Amazon.com may have been selected for private purpose...anger, revenge, jealousy...one
could round up the usual private motives but one would lose sight of the larger political
economy in which these forms of crime are possible.
The point of this analysis is that we have to think of the internet as an economic
institution...much as we do when we think of housing, transport, health care, farming or
mining.
And, instead of dollars as the unit of exchange in this economic endeavor, we must think
of information bits as unit of exchange...we can convert them into dollars, yen or pesos
if we wish but that is only habit.
If we think of wealth in terms of information bits and bytes, then we have an entirely new
measure of personal wealth and, with this new measure, new forms of conspicuous
consumption and of vulgar display of wealth.
The Rockefellows, Mellons, McArthurs and Johnsons are not the billionaires in this
medium...Bill Gates is, to be sure, but so are thousands of newly rich trillionaires not
now known to Forbes, Wall Street or the WS Journal.
The Internet and the information explosion has forced us to expand our understandings of
wealth, inequality, crime and, centrally, the measures of social status.
In Cyber-space status, power and wealth take on entirely new forms not imagined by Adam
Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber or Thorstein Veblen. It is for our generation of critical
scholars to build on their work and to help fashion this new world of wealth to the human
project...rather than private wealth and private state.
TR
Young, Scholar in Residence
The
Red Feather Institute