Alienation and Engagement

Presented at HOPE Number Six (2006), July 22, 2006, 6 p.m. (60 minutes).

The hacker sense of social responsibility is undermined by our alienation from the mainstream. From bad school experiences in childhood to the content property grab of today, we infer the world to be hostile and corrupt. Unwilling to become sociopaths, yet unable to find avenues for social change, we are tempted to withdraw from civil society and limit ourselves to technical contributions. A discussion of three non-technical areas where hackers can make positive contributions and where we might find principled people: journalism, economics, and law. The next civic establishment has to come from somewhere and this should be our historical era. So we might as well participate - or maybe just take over.

(This talk was rescheduled from Friday evening.)


Presenters:

  • Jason Kroll
    Jason Kroll spoke at The Fifth HOPE about the incentive structures used to influence people and the incentives faced by institutions in their struggle to control technology through legal means. Here he is speaking about the sense of alienation that stems from the undisguised corruption behind the IP property grab and how it conflicts with our sense of social responsibility. Both presentations were inspired by research into the economics of science (BA in economics from the University of Washington at Seattle) and the computational complexity of economic problems (MS in computer science at Tufts).

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