Week 5 Topic: Guest Lecture - Sarah Gilder

Societies’ evolution through history, leads to the creation of inventions. “Moving energy, information, water, waste, food, goods, and masses of people, modern power, communication, and transportation systems” [1]. These inventions allow society to explore new concepts that enable it to create ideas that, “conceive and speak of physical things” [2]. It is the inventions of the past, including, “electric elevators – [which] made high-rise architecture feasible” [3] and, “extensive subways” [4] – [which] were made possible after the introduction of electric power. This allowed society to utilise “technology to create a physical environment suited to modern men and women” [5] of the present, leading to the alteration of current culture. This expectation correlates well with the notion that, “while not everyone is a hacker, everyone hacks” [6], as hacking “is to release the virtual into the actual” [7], thus, giving unseen information to the modern day men and women. Hacking may appear as negative, although it is simply information that is given to the outer world from an unseen source which may ultimately lead to knowledge advancements through the collaboration of ideas and interpretations. Of course there are barriers, particularly due to owners’ rights to copyright of personal information which therefore leads to the notion that “information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains” [8]. This lack of access to privatised information and knowledge, causes it to “distort and deform its free development, and prevents the very concept of its freedom from its own free development” [9], as, “[information] is chained to the repetition of the property form” [10].

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r e f e r e n c e s

• [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Hughes, Thomas P., “Chapter 3: Technology as Machine,” Human-Built World, How to Think about Technology and Culture (2004): Pp. 50, 48, 51, 74, 75.
• Wark, McKenzie, A Hacker Manifesto (2004)

          • [6] [7] “Hacking” Pp. 50, 44, 48.               
          • [8] [9] [10] “Information” Pp. 67, 69, 70.