The Concept of bringing order to something predominately chaotic is bizarre and pointless. The strength of the internet is the fact it governs itself, each site has its own set of rules, guidelines, laws. In essence this is the cyber-politics the lecture brought up.
The thing with the internet is theorists like to bring real world analogies to it. This is entirely senseless because the internet is a completely different thing from the real world. It's a world with no bounds, a world that constantly exists and changes by the minute.
Politics don't really exist in cyberspace, while I can very well say sites can have feuds against each other, you don't exactly see elections for the next webmaster, vote banhammer 09. Most websites are run as bitter dictatorships because hell, it's their site. They made it, those other jerks are lucky to be there!
I feel like rolling with this so it's time for my take on cyber politics:
I know this seems like some rainbow coloured command structure but bear with me. Most internet communities act like a secret society (hence why I couldn't help myself and added the 'new world order' logo up the top of it all), while you have the administrators and the general staff right up the top they aren't the only people in 'charge'. Regulars tend to be the main force when it comes to politics on the internet, a real world analogy would be that they're similar to a union. In general without regular members a website would die, the same as an industry would die if the union told everyone to pull out and stop work. Another analogy would be that they're similar to the noble class. They get their power because they're renown, they're liked by those in charge(for the most part).
Hacking is something I find very interesting. While I personally have never really hacked anything I've known quite a few people who could be called a hacker. As stated in the lecture, the term has a god awful foot note attached to it that makes it seem like a hacker is somebody who will murder you through your computer and will stop at nothing to make this happen. While hacking is mostly illegitimate by definition, there is always a line between that which is right/wrong and what is legal/illegal. Legality is a man made creation and is far from the idea of a strictly speaking good/evil. If we define hacking as a bad/evil thing, for example. What would it be if it was hacking for a greater good? This is in itself the major failing of any sort of legal system, it's black and white. True justice doesn't dwell in the light nor the darkness, it's in the shade.
I'm leaving cyberpunk for my next blog post on the lecture as I've got far too much to go on about regarding it because it's one of my favourite genres.
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