Your comment had just resurfaced in my brain and I saw this new headline and came here and was pleasantly surprised to find exactly what I was looking for.
The original tribal shaman(plural) who used sleight of hand or small chemical reactions cultivated society and truly invented ritual and religion, creating a separation of power. Fear of the unknown and fear of power is precisely what our culture is based on.
It underpins our entire society and government. Ritualistic religion goes hand in hand with our culture, even if some of us are not part of it directly.
We can't escape it, and hacker culture will always be counterculture until some great cataclysmic event occurs in our society. Those in power fear the hacker, and the hacker (as we have tragically seen) fears those in power.
I've run into this, to great frustration in nearly every aspect of life. There's little room for evidence in the face of countless religions.
For a singular example, my clients and colleagues are more likely to practice their own arcane rituals that they've gleaned from legends of SEO or UX sooth-sayers than to let me implement systems like split testing or - gods forbid - an actual user study. The truth is more difficult and less comfortable than their personal mythos. In the case that they do employ a "science" it's misapplied not unlike the pseudoscientific Witch test from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, making changes based on a single study with a tiny set of users and without even testing the proposed changes.
Sociologically, I would agree that religion is powerful stuff. I don't think it is the basis for all culture, if by culture you mean the sum total of experience one is capable of experiencing with minimal effort.
However, just like one can experience religion without knowing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, one can experience technology without understanding even the most basic layer below the UX level. In both cases, the uncurious have a world-view unfettered by the constrictions of cause and effect; so technology can seem like magic, and those outside the officially sanctioned boundaries are both wise and "unsanctioned", and thus witches.
I've long come to the conclusion that religion is a bootstrapping mechanism: it was something we needed in the past in order to jump over a threshold, and for the last thousand years or two, it's been obsolete and holding us back instead.
This is what I am trying to say, but a good point to the parent commenter. To clarify I would say that I was referring to how we got to where we are today. The current power structure of our society. As I said even without direct participation in religion there is a power structure evident in society vis a vis a teacher and a pupil, a slave and a master, a husband and a wife, to name a few controversial examples.
Not all of these are bad inherently, but some things about the world are changing. A hacker wields mystical power of mythical proportions that literally(don't we hate that word) scares the bejeesus out of the Power Elite. They respond with prejudice and who can blame them. Those in power will never willingly give it up.
Ethical or white hat hacking is just a foreign concept. They only see potential abuses, and threats to their power.
> As I said even without direct participation in religion there is a power structure evident in society vis a vis a teacher and a pupil, a slave and a master, a husband and a wife, to name a few controversial examples.
Don't forget white man and black man, cisgendered and trans, hetero and homosexual, sexual and asexual. I'm guessing you stand on the side of the powerful in at least one of these.
'Demystifying ourselves' meaning presenting our processes in a comprehensible manner so as to educate the audience?
I don't think that'll work, because there are an awful lot of them who have active disinterest in that learning process, and plenty whose positions of power are dependent on that. Look at Kansas, where it's not just WBC who're trying to forcibly simplify reality with mob tactics. Look at DOJ -- do you think they want to be reined in by having the bright light of informed scrutiny shone on their methods?
It's already pitchfork o'clock, and has been for a very long time (see 'Copernicus'). Until that changes, it's not safe for any of us outside the broom closet.
Unfortunately we can't make the modern technology-driven world simpler for people like Carmen Ortiz. The advice at the end by the author is that we (the tech community) should demystify ourselves. But, there's nothing to demystify, the complexity is there and the only way to understand it is to actually put the time in and learn it. It's not too much to ask that those prosecuting computer crimes are deeply educated in the technical details.
> Take the legend of a chosen redhead. Even as a child he cast a spell so powerful it blanketed the entire world ....
Can anyone tell me what this is referring to? None of the web searches I tried give me anything that seems to be helpful (most of them give me this article as the first hit, and the only hit that is relevant).
The original tribal shaman(plural) who used sleight of hand or small chemical reactions cultivated society and truly invented ritual and religion, creating a separation of power. Fear of the unknown and fear of power is precisely what our culture is based on.
It underpins our entire society and government. Ritualistic religion goes hand in hand with our culture, even if some of us are not part of it directly.
We can't escape it, and hacker culture will always be counterculture until some great cataclysmic event occurs in our society. Those in power fear the hacker, and the hacker (as we have tragically seen) fears those in power.