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Comments on: Exploits, Ethics, and the ‘Little Old Lady’ Problem http://clinamen.jamesjbrownjr.net/2011/07/01/exploits-ethics-and-the-little-old-lady-problem/ thuswise to swerve Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:11:29 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.25 By: Matt King http://clinamen.jamesjbrownjr.net/2011/07/01/exploits-ethics-and-the-little-old-lady-problem/comment-page-1/#comment-651 Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:05:06 +0000 http://clinamen.jamesjbrownjr.net/?p=444#comment-651 I enjoyed your post, Jim. I know that procedurality and object-oriented rhetorics are lurking in the background here, but I wanted to bring them to the foreground for a moment. (I know that you know all this, but just to put it on the table…) For Ian Bogost, all objects – including little old ladies and credit card accounts – have withdrawn logics, procedures that embody certain capacities for expression. In your examples, the hip bone works according to the logic of breakage in its encounter with the pavement; the credit card account reveals its information in its encounter with the procedures of the hacker. The little old lady and the credit card account have other capacities for expression; their withdrawn logics aren’t exhausted through their relations with the pavement or the hacker (or any other relation, for that matter).

I don’t remember to what extent Bogost discusses ethics (my sense is that he doesn’t, but this might just be my oversight), but we can imagine a sort of procedural ethics here. Do we have a sense of obligation to objects to help them express their withdrawn logics? We can frame this question in a number of ways. If we think of ethics as an obligation to others, this suggests to some extent that we want to let the logic of the other express itself without imposing our own logic upon it. But there’s a difference between not imposing your own logic and helping to bring out the logic of the other, and this goes well beyond human relations as well.

At some point here, we’re getting into questions of invention. I’m thinking here of things like Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From and thoughts toward networked invention, the notion that innovation and invention benefits from having more objects on the table, exposed to one another, putting more logics at play. But how do we balance invention and ethics? To put it a different way, how do we balance our obligation to help objects express themselves and our obligation to minimize suffering?

It’s one thing to say that hackers are acting unethically by exposing personal information or ethically by highlighting the weaknesses of security systems and helping us make them stronger, but it’s something else entirely to ask if hackers have an obligation to the system and the code itself.

For some people, this line of questioning might be fruitless or absurd: why would we feel a sense of obligation to the bone rather than the little old lady, or to the code rather than the people with sensitive information encrypted in the system? Regardless of how we feel about these questions, we can follow the same line of thinking with much more traditional concerns, such as student writing. If our students have their own withdrawn logics, their own capacities for expression, is our job to help them express themselves according to the norms and logics of rational discourse, or should we think of ourselves as hackers, helping students engage and express capacities that don’t necessarily fit within established discursive parameters?

I’m starting to feel like these thoughts have wandered substantially from your post, but hopefully in a productive way. Thanks for sharing your RSA experience.

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