Digital outlaws

“Hacker and hacktivists” has been mentioned several times in Johan Söderberg’s article. Before I read this academic paper, I often mixed ” hacker” and “hacktivists”.  According to Söderberg’s explanation, hacker referred to a behavior of breaking into other’s computers. Hacktivists, a relatively new term, is usually referred as a form of protest through hacking behavior. Those hackers who have politically or socially motivated purpose can be defined as hacktivists. In a nutshell, hacktivists are hackers, but not all hackers are hacktivists.

I used to associate all hacking behaviors with criminal things until I found some organizations hired hackers to probe their own company system to make recommendations to improve security. So hacking just like a two-edged sword, you can utilize it to for a malicious purpose or just consider it as a technology to do legal thing. But it is hard to take hacktivist into either legal or illegal category， since the purpose of hacktivist is the political, not profit.

John talked about ‘‘tragedy of the commons” by Garrett Hardin (2013). Hardin imagined an open pasture where everyone could bring their animals to it and eventually overuse the commons.  The term has gradually evolved to many meanings of varying subjects,.  Many researchers use this term as a metaphor to discuss environmental issues. But I think the idea of “tragedy of the commons” can also be applied to the network world. Like overgrazing in an open pasture or overfishing in a public sea, the digital place is also continually over exploited recently. Just like John takes public kitchen as an example, “everyone remains whole, despite being shared” (p. 200).  The virtual world can be seen as a shared kitchen, many people bring their own goods to this public place or take seasoner from there regardless it does not only belong to yourself.

This theory maybe can explain some reasons why pricy is so prevalent in many countries.  Before 2015, a majority music websites or apps didn’t charge users until relative laws of protecting copyright published. To most people, they were used to listening to music for free. I guess they thought” If everybody in this country is getting music via file sharing, so why I need to purchase them? ” If we consider the whole internet as a pasture, as long as one of their friends get his or her music for free (other farmers bring animals), they would not like to pay for it, since it seems unfair to them.

Ostrom has a more positive view of this situation, he believes that people can find ways of regulating themselves and agreeing on their common rule. From my perspective, to solve piracy issues, we should not only depend on self-regulation, since as human being we have our human weakness. What we need is strict laws and statute.