Page 201 - Cyberculture and New Media

192 De-Colonizing Cyberspace
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This quotation clearly illustrates how competent programmers are
able to gain power through their expert knowledge, but this is also what the
narrator reacts strongly against. Human emotions seem to have no place and
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she asks Brian if he has morals, a question he prefers to ignore. She has
seen computers as neutral tools, but she discovers that “there is something in
the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the
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world in its own image”. She notices that the very language people use to
describe the machine – by calling the microprocessor a ‘brain’ or saying that
the machine has ‘memory’ – shows that computers are given human
attributes, but, as she continues, “[i]t is a projection of a very slim part of
ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we
took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human
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existence”. She realizes that what she has thought of as “sexy bouts of
software writing” has an enormous and not always positive impact on real
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world social life. In her realizations she shows a rebellious wish to
destabilize the techno-meritocratic world view, and she stresses the benefits
of the rhizomatic innovative and unconventional thinking of a good
programmer when she argues: “‘I mean, you don’t want them to stop being
cats,’ I kept on bravely. ‘You don’t want obedient dogs. You want all that
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weird strangeness that makes a good programmer’“.
The second culture defined by Castells is that of the hackers, a
culture just as techno-oriented as the techno-meritocratic one, but at the same
time often more imaginative and innovative. The hackers often bridge the gap
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between the techno-meritocratic culture and the entrepreneurs. A keyword
in this type of culture is ‘freedom’: “Freedom to create, freedom to
appropriate ... and freedom to redistribute this knowledge” in any way
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possible. Castells points out that any software development made by a
hacker usually is posted on the Internet as a ‘gift’ for other developers to
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work on. This is exactly what happens in Melissa Scott’s The Jazz. In a
society controlled by large corporations, the main character Tin Lizzy, works
as a “back-tech provider” for Testify, a lose-knit virtual community that hosts
and spreads “jazz” – unauthorized computer programs developed outside the
studios of the large corporations. In order to avoid the striations of this
extremely regulated society, and to be able to work, she has become used to
creating smooth space. Being a “back-tech,” Tin Lizzy checks and adjusts
code submitted by programmers before their work is to be released on
Testify, and this is where she meets Keyz, a sixteen-year-old programmer
who has stumbled upon a help program, a ‘spellchecker’ for code. Keyz has
used this program when writing his own “jazz” and the result is remarkable
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and attracts enormous attention. The problem is that this ‘spellchecker’
program belongs to America’s largest computer corporation, known for their
relentless pursuit of anyone using what they consider their property.
Copyright lawsuits can be expensive and Testify’s policy is to avoid any