The Secret Art of Power - Part I
April 03, 2006
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 4/4/2006
An Epistolary Dialogue Between Roberto Calvo Macias and Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".
Here is a quote I found somewhere, I don't even recall where:
"Only art history still knows that the famed geniuses of the Renaissance did not just create paintings and buildings, but calculated fortresses and constructed war machines. If the phantasm of all Information Warfare, to reduce war to software and its forms of death to operating system crashes, were to come true, lonesome hackers would take the place of the historic artist-engineers."
This is a problematic statement because it ignores the emergent property of genius. The "famed geniuses of the Renaissance" did not interact with their calf hide and sharpened quills the same way an hacker interacts with the network or even with his computer. Hackers are, by definition, dependent on computing collectives. Galileo worked in the solitude of his rooms during his long inquisition-imposed house arrest. An hacker without vast and sprawling communications and computing (information) networks is dead, paralysed, a non-entity. Paradoxically, the hacker is by far the most social artist ever to have existed. The romantic view of the hacker (lonely, tortured genius, a-la Van Gogh) is the result of ignorance and fear. Genius today is a distributed, collective phenomenon and the medium of the hacker is the distributed, collective network. The internet is a mass phenomenon, a MOB phenomenon, in the derogatory sense that Jose Ortega y Gassett used - but it is also a chance to focus the actions of millions of individuals into a coherent, powerful, laser beam of awareness and activism.
Source: http://globalpolitician.com/
An Epistolary Dialogue Between Roberto Calvo Macias and Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".
Here is a quote I found somewhere, I don't even recall where:
"Only art history still knows that the famed geniuses of the Renaissance did not just create paintings and buildings, but calculated fortresses and constructed war machines. If the phantasm of all Information Warfare, to reduce war to software and its forms of death to operating system crashes, were to come true, lonesome hackers would take the place of the historic artist-engineers."
This is a problematic statement because it ignores the emergent property of genius. The "famed geniuses of the Renaissance" did not interact with their calf hide and sharpened quills the same way an hacker interacts with the network or even with his computer. Hackers are, by definition, dependent on computing collectives. Galileo worked in the solitude of his rooms during his long inquisition-imposed house arrest. An hacker without vast and sprawling communications and computing (information) networks is dead, paralysed, a non-entity. Paradoxically, the hacker is by far the most social artist ever to have existed. The romantic view of the hacker (lonely, tortured genius, a-la Van Gogh) is the result of ignorance and fear. Genius today is a distributed, collective phenomenon and the medium of the hacker is the distributed, collective network. The internet is a mass phenomenon, a MOB phenomenon, in the derogatory sense that Jose Ortega y Gassett used - but it is also a chance to focus the actions of millions of individuals into a coherent, powerful, laser beam of awareness and activism.
Source: http://globalpolitician.com/