How critical can we expect computer users to be? (Part 2)
Shortly before I hit the "publish" button on my previous entry, I read through the November 2014 issue of APC Magazine (yes, in October). The feature article, How to Hack Everything (p. 29 ff.), espoused a view aligned with mine in that it encouraged computer owners to put in the effort required to understand and customise their devices, but also quite different in that such hacking was promoted with "unlock extra features, better performance and more with these hardware secrets". Customisations of the latter sort are of great interest to computer technologists — especially when it got to learning "how Wi-Fi and the Web are hacked" with packet sniffers, cross-site scripting and the like — but surely of little direct interest to anyone else.
This is all to be expected from a magazine whose main business is reviewing and investigating computer technology for readers with a high level of technical expertise. But it did cause me to pause before I published my entry, add "Part 1" to the title, and make a note to come back for a "Part 2" that contrasted the hacker's view of customisation with what I was imagining.
For APC and others wanting to assert the more mythologised meaning of the word, "hacking" is about understanding computer technology and bending it to one's will, more or less for its own sake. The goal of APC's hacks, for example, include overclocking CPUs, installing software on WiFi routers, and automating one's "online life" to no clear purpose.
Some of these, such as obtaining root access to smartphones, may be precursors to achieving something that is (or perhaps should be) of interest to ordinary people. I recently installed CyanogenMOD, for example, in order to remove the numerous applications that my phone's manufacturer had pre-installed on my phone, but for which I have no use. Surely no one (apart from a phone manufacturer, I suppose) would say that such a situation is ideal: the folks who produced CyanogenMOD, and people who use it, need to employ a deep understanding of computer technology in order to achieve something that anyone can do using the standard install/de-install facility of a desktop operating system. (In fact, while searching for the reasons that phone manufacturers install these applications in the first place, I discovered that South Korea has recently issued guidelines forcing manufacturers to make almost all apps removable, which may do more for ordinary users than any amount of hacking.)
So all this may be a means to an end, even if it's an awkward one used only because better means aren't available. (This is actually the sense in which I most often use the word "hack" in describing a piece of engineering.) But what is the end? Understanding how technology works is a fine thing for engineers, and I'm sure no one would complain if others understood something of it as well. But people ultimately build technology to be used, not merely to be understood.
With this in mind, I can refine my concept of "critical computing" to be concerned primarily with the use of technology rather than its construction. Hacking of the APC sort isn't incompatible with this, and is perhaps even complementary. But I don't expect that there will ever be a day in which we all build our own hardware and software, any more than we build our own cars and bridges. We can nonetheless think about how we choose and use the technology that engineers make available to us: do we blindly pick up the latest product and join the latest web site, or do we think through what we want from our devices and how to best achieve it?
