Security News > 2024 > June > The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt
4 If culture is like an operating system, then to hack it is to exploit the design of that system to gain unauthorized control and manipulate it towards a specific end.
Sociologist James Davison Hunter, who popularized the phrase "Culture war," stresses that culture is used to justify violence to defend these identities.
We see the commingling of play and military control in Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, which was a huge influence on early tech culture.
25 As AI researchers and artists Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler explain in the catalog to their exhibition Calculating Empires, AI developers require "The entire history of human knowledge and culture The current lawsuits over generative systems like GPT and Stable Diffusion highlight how completely dependent AI systems are on extracting, enclosing, and commodifying the entire history of cognitive and creative labor."26.
Permitting internet companies to hack the systems in which culture is produced and circulates is a short-term trade-off that has proven to have devastating long-term consequences.
The rise of white Christian nationalism shows that the right still regards national identity and culture as crucial-as potent tools in the struggle to build political power, often through anti-democratic means.