Hacking in the Village
"Where am I?"
"In the Village."
"What do you want?"
"Information."
"Whose side are you on?"
"That would be telling. We want... information... information... information."
"Well you won't get it."
"By hook or by crook, we will!"
Remember the '60s TV show The Prisoner? Created by and starring Patrick
McGoohan, this surrealist series was basically a platform for McGoohan to explore
his own fears of modem surve-illance/spy technology, behavioral engineering, and
society's increasing ability to control people through pacifying pleasures.
He was convinced that all this might soon mean the obliteration of the individual
(expressed in the defiant opening shout: "I am not a number, I am a free man!").
McGoohan's #6 character became a symbol of the lone individual's right to remain
an individual rather than a numbered cog in the chugging machinery of the State.
McGoohan, a Luddite to be sure, despised even the TV technology that brought his
libertarian tale to the masses. He saw no escape from the mushrooming technoarmed
State short of out-and-out violent revolution (it was, after all, the '60s!). As
prescient as The Prisoner series proved to be in some regards, McGoohan failed to
see how individuals armed with the same tech as their warders could fight back.
The #6 character himself comes close to revealing this in a number of episodes, as
he uses his will, his ingenuity, and his own spy skills to reroute #2's attempts to
rob him of his individuality.
One doesn't have to stretch too far to see the connection between The Prisoner and
the subject at hand: hacking. With all the social engineering, spy skills, and street
tech knowledge that #6 possessed, he lacked one important thing: access to the
higher tech that enslaved him and the other hapless village residents. Today's
techno-warriors are much better equipped to hack the powers that be for whatever
personal, social or political gains.
In the last two-part episode of the series, #6 finally reveals why he quit his
intelligence job: "Too many people know too much." Again, this expresses McGoohan's fear that the
powers that be were holding the goods on him and everyone else who was bucking
the status quo at that time. He probably didn't mean "people" as much as he
meant "governments." It is this fact, that "too many
[governments/megacorps/special interest groups] know too much" that has
provided an important motivation to many contemporary hackers and has fueled
the rampant techno-romantic myths of the hacker as a freedom of information
warrior.
Let's look at a number of the mythic images of the hacker that have arisen in the
past decade and explore the reality that they both reflect and distort:
