Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Folks out there in the crowd are clobbering the high-tech giants and everyone else they want to clobber.

Yet another essay appears about how open-source software projects appear faster than systems produced by high-tech giants full of experts. Computing power is so inexpensive that there are many, many, many folks out there with the power needed to do big things in software. Someone out there hears an idea being worked at one of the tech giants, implements the idea this weekend, and releases the system on Monday.

Part of this concept goes to “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki. That book copied and was copied by many others. And the concept of the crowd goes back dozens of centuries.

Today, we have the crowd sitting around in front of computers with software that allows folks to write software. “It’s just software” is what I used to have on my business card. If you can think of it, you can write it in software and have it. It is a little more difficult than that, but that trite saying works.

And then we have the “hacktivists.” We don’t know what to call these folks and we certainly don’t know what to do with them. Hacktivists are living in their grandparents basements and piddling around on their computers. They have the technical resources and the physical and mental energy to do what they imagine.

Hacktivists messed up the Russian invasion of Ukraine by hacking into the rail system of Belarus and fouling the Russian logistics needed to conduct a successful invasion. These were not hackers employed by any world government. These were just folks sitting around who were angry and did something. Were they mercenaries? Were they contractors? We don’t know what they were.

A hacktivist broke into Uber in late September “just for fun.” Of course it was a teenager living in the family basement who did it.

Hacktivists took down the web sites of several US states in early October. These folks were “pro-Russian.”

The hacktivists are part of the crowd. The open-source software programmers are part of the crowd. The computing crowd has tens or hundreds of millions of members.

If you are part of a large organization (government, successful company, et al), watch out for the crowd.