You have skills, your have capabilities, you could be decorated soldiers of the revolution, destroying the structures of capitalism, breaking the strangleholds of liberalism and fascism over the consciousness of the proletariat and peasantry. A sledgehammer to their servers, a knife in the back of their drones, a spy stealing their databases for your comrades.
But as it is, I fucking hate you
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:
that whole thread is a 'zzone classic that should probably have all deleted posts restored and take its rightful place on the front page amongst the other dead children threads
HenryKrinkle posted:genuinely communist hackers Do Not Exist
you say that as though they can't exist
anyway, professional hackers (i.e. those getting paid), whether white or black hat, are lumpen, with all the negative connotations that come with that. politically most of them sit on a scale somewhere between penn gilette and a toilet bowl
HenryKrinkle posted:genuinely communist hackers Do Not Exist
i hope that was a joke krink
heres a prowatch:
nf-24WuN--Y
ill write a thing about global peoples war on the internet and its importance
Petrol posted:HenryKrinkle posted:
genuinely communist hackers Do Not Exist
you say that as though they can't exist
anyway, professional hackers (i.e. those getting paid), whether white or black hat, are lumpen, with all the negative connotations that come with that. politically most of them sit on a scale somewhere between penn gilette and a toilet bowl
I don't think that's true at all, the hacker community is very political and constantly obsessing about privacy and transparency and openness of information and blah blah blah. Like Marianne says though it's all libertarian garbage. It also tends to get tied in with technological eschatology like believing in the singularity.
There are also hackers who take a sort of practical view of reality as it is and think, well, it's fucked anyway, I might as well "hack" the system by getting paid well for bullshit even if I can't improve anything.
There are some communists. Like anywhere.
Actually I do think that the forceful ramming of compsci into public school education is a direct retaliatory response against the relative high pay of tech workers by their employers, to make so many amateur white hat coders developing and QAing software on spec - there are lots of white hat hackers who find vulnerabilities that the company doesn't even acknowledge. I used the widely known example of pacemaker vulnerabilities which have been a scary issue for eight years without any significant security standards added since... the companies know there is nothing to worry about, statistically speaking. The random white hat gets mad that they didnt get a thousand bucks and a Computer Smartness Award
tears posted:Swamp, thats a pretty liberal line of questioning and u pretty much answer ur own question imo
I have 30+ years of extensive, hands-on experience with liberalism so I'm quite good at asking things from a liberal perspective, which aids the revolution by allowing bourgeois allies to identify with my hardline Leftist persona
drwhat posted:Petrol posted:politically most of them sit on a scale somewhere between penn gilette and a toilet bowl
I don't think that's true at all, the hacker community is very political and constantly obsessing about privacy and transparency and openness of information and blah blah blah. Like Marianne says though it's all libertarian garbage.
So we agree,
The problem i see is that hacker culture, like internet culture in general, is overwhelmingly american-influenced, and because hackers are outlaws, they are naturally antiauthoritarian. So libertarianism fits them like a disgusting sweaty glove. Also the really good ones tend to stop paying attention in high school or drop out altogether which means they're much less likely to read and more likely to get their political education from youtube so even the ones that tend towards anarchism rather than libertarianism have little chance of evolving in the right direction
I'm being facetious but I kind of mean it. I mean look at weev
tears posted:im going to throw it out there that hacking as we see it in the 1st world is very different from hacking as it is used in the global south against oppression, c.f. redhack, syrian elecronic army
can we be precise about the differences tho? the differences are not in technique so it's in the targets, the actors... but what does that tell us about the politics of these actors? not necessarily much, if they are actually employed rather than volunteer groups. just saying.
icecrystal posted:I read some old text files about hacker conventions from the bbs system days, and it seemed like there was a lot more ideological and religious diversity in the subculture back then, still mostly anarchist of course, but I don't think it would've been that crazy to meet a communist hacker then.
in my experience it's really still not. i don't know a lot of active people anymore but some and the ones i know are somewhere on the spectrum between anarchism and communism constantly in their beliefs but participating in capitalism to get paid just like we all do. and it's not like actual irl hacking is easy, it takes major amounts of brain power and time and it's not often you're so financially secure that you have a bunch of time to concentrate on some target of your own political choice. and obviously becoming financially secure takes years and lets you sip from the grail of bourgeois life and suddenly a lot of those people are a lot less radical ...
it's pretty cool how capitalism rewards revolutionary skill and passion with power and thereby subverts it into maintaining the status quo. it's gotta be one of its most stabilizing traits.
drwhat posted:it's pretty cool how capitalism rewards revolutionary skill and passion with power and thereby subverts it into maintaining the status quo. it's gotta be one of its most stabilizing traits.
yeah iirc the american hacker scene changed irrevocably when the clinton administration actively recruited in the 90s from prolific and visible groups like the CDC etc, there was a whole publicity thing about it. it reshaped the hacker fantasy and created deep establishment ties in old circles of camaraderie/mentorship.
and of course now those recruits are cushy senior officials. an acquaintance of mine's experience of defcon recently was that its just a CIA jobs fair.
Petrol posted:I'm being facetious but I kind of mean it. I mean look at weev
catchphrase
shriekingviolet posted:and of course now those recruits are cushy senior officials. an acquaintance of mine's experience of defcon recently was that its just a CIA jobs fair.
has been for some time despite its reputation as the edgier cousin of black hat. all the big money in infosec comes from intel/security work, particularly contracting. if you are talented and want to make good reliable money without going down that path your options are extremely limited
Petrol posted:shriekingviolet posted:and of course now those recruits are cushy senior officials. an acquaintance of mine's experience of defcon recently was that its just a CIA jobs fair.
has been for some time despite its reputation as the edgier cousin of black hat. all the big money in infosec comes from intel/security work, particularly contracting. if you are talented and want to make good reliable money without going down that path your options are extremely limited
i guess we should look at how woke haxx0rs compelled to work for the oppressive spook bureaucracy can corrupt that somehow; maybe with leaks or bugs or backdoors or being double agent for the people somehow?
(is this what revolutionary defeatism meant, or are their other theories or bodies of knowledge to compare and use for this situation?)
i get the sense there is potential to politicise and organise hackers and engineers, despite their typically horrible politics and role at the moment.
i know that techies & the tech industry constantly pump the bubble of their own ego about how smart and important they are, but tech & info are important to the functioning of empire & capitalism and i hope opening this as a new front would help the broader struggle
xipe posted:i get the sense there is potential to politicise and organise hackers and engineers, despite their typically horrible politics and role at the moment.
probably wise to focus on the engineers side of this, as in people who can use arduino or like, fix a truck. auto mechanics probably be better target. i mean, there is probably potential to politicise cops despite their horrible role, if you focus on the ones doing a second job off hours. at least those jerkoffs can be picked out at the pharmacy and approached every day.
HenryKrinkle posted:genuinely communist hackers Do Not Exist
The EFF is all libertarians according to boots on the ground but there are many communist hackers, they just don't usually use spookbook ime.
Edited by Urbandale ()
US intelligence knows about far more hackers than it chooses to act against, and allocates its considerable but still limited resources by prioritizing. lone hackers that intend to pose a genuine threat to the state are singled out and neutralized early and organized groups receive significant attention and resources dedicated to subverting or destroying them, and the state chooses not to make bragging press releases about these operations because that would contaminate the public conception of hackers with genuine political dissent.
compare the joke that is Anonymous which is allowed to continue sitting in the corner making armpit farts because they serve as good PR: the state gets to justify its colossal cybersurveillance infrastructure with a convenient harmless punching bag while countercultural types are sold a hacker mystique of laughably ineffectual flailing.
We have a group n of leftie techies in my locality with generally decent skills and politics... Unfortunately a bit in hibernation due to personality clash between communists and anarchists.
We were talking about ways of organising our own workspaces as well as developing technology support for worker and social movements.
I will probably ask the group if they want to work on something for the housing struggle which is starting to take off here
Unfortunately none of the unions were very arsed to help us organise ourselves or our workplaces, but I'm sure we could eventually get some sort from them if we knock on the right door
swampman posted:Actually I do think that the forceful ramming of compsci into public school education is a direct retaliatory response against the relative high pay of tech workers by their employers, to make so many amateur white hat coders developing and QAing software on spec - there are lots of white hat hackers who find vulnerabilities that the company doesn't even acknowledge.
there are a lot of forces right now doing their best to push that wage down, or extract surplus labor in some other way. mark ames or someone wrote something about how big tech firms had non-poaching agreements to keep wages from going up. on top of that theres the competitive angle of doing lots of unpaid labor for open source projects being good for resumes. not to be super sympathetic of course, but Software Engineer as a more or less direct route to middle class lifestyle is gonna be over in 10-20 years at the latest