Week 12 - Ideals

 Ideals

Passion

    Honestly, saying that "passion" should be an ideal to follow when choosing what you do is almost akin to saying that the sky is blue. It is utterly unnecessary as it applies to literally everything. No matter where you go, the phrase "you must be passionate about what you choose to follow" gets hammered into you, and it never really helps. If someone has the possibility and willpower to follow their passion, they will. If they don't, they will not. It just feels like bragging by people who have managed to land a good life with a profession that fits their passions. 

Freedom

    Definitely the most defining factor of the hacker culture, and one that is becoming more prevalent overall and is definitely a reason for more people getting into IT. Government censorship and regulations are becoming more and more restrictive, and even common people are getting hit by geographically locked content and starting to use VPNs to bypass that as well as gain more privacy. I would say this is the main reason people become interested in something like IT, especially cyber security. Most likely from personal experience and wanting to fight back against such oppression. 

Work Ethic

    This is something that we can see companies actually moving towards as well. A lot of the working process, especially in IT-focused companies, is becoming more freeform. There's a lot more comfortable and casual environments (such as Discord's workplace [1]) with an emphasis on hiring truly skilled people regardless of their background (also seen for example with Tesla). By making the entire working process more casual (whether by people themselves or company), creativity is increased significantly, which then further allows people to innovate and come up with new, exciting solutions to problems - rather than being forced into a strict, mundane routine where creativity decays. 

Money Ethic

    Honestly, I feel like outside of the hacker culture, this just does not hold up. People are intrinsically motivated towards getting money or some kind of value out of their actions. Even people who do charity and give away money etc [e.g. MrBeast] do it at least in some part for fame/influence and 'good guy points'. No one ever does anything for free, no matter what they say. Nothing anyone does is ever truly 'for the community'. True altruism simply.. does not exist in its purest form.

Network Ethic

    I fail to see how this is all so different from the freedom section, apart from maybe having 'social norms' (which, by some, could also be seen as "censorship"?). The entire idea of having social norms feels a bit off to a culture that is meant to resist any type of social norms and focus solely on the content, not who it is coming from. Seems a bit odd to me, and perhaps even a little bit of an elitist double standard.

Caring

    Again, this point seems to be so heavily related to another point, namely the entire money ethic topic. Though, there is some intrinsic value to the driving argument. A lot of people, both nowadays and in the past (This will likely never stop being an issue) focus so much on achieving a nigh-impossible goal and then going even further, that they fail to see.. anything else around it. They forget even why they are following that goal. Their entire life gets devoured by it and in the end, they achieve nothing. Even if they end up being the wealthiest and most powerful man in the world, they end up.. not having lived. They spent their entire lives reaching that point and have nothing to show for it in terms of actual content in their life. 

Creativity

    Aaaaaaaaand again related to a previous point, namely work ethic. Though a bit more loosely than the other ones. The trend towards a more creative society has been going hand in hand with work ethic, although the latter has been lagging behind quite significantly. No longer can you just get by on having read a manual and following its instructions word by word - it simply doesn't work. The landscape today is a very volatile and ever-changing one, and the truly creative and innovative minds are those who will prosper. Creativity must be encouraged, and that trend will only ever increase. It is probably the single most important tenet in this entire list.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX9MOVIMYkg

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