Hmmm, how much good that could be done is lost in the moment we succumb to the temptation to be perverse?
The online malcontents had me in their rifle sights this past week. Early in the week, I discovered that both my website and my novel online companion site had been hacked. Shortly thereafter, a malicious malware bug snuck shut me out of all my programs on my computer.
It’s not the first time my sites have been targeted by that nefarious community known as “hackers”. But the past episodes were minor tampering instances.
This time around, when I entered the URLs, a blank screen appeared with the words “hacked by hacker” in the upper left corner. It is kind of like discovering that your house has been broken into with the added outrage that the vandals put new locks on the door before leaving.
Fortunately, my very talented and generous tech savvy friends were able to liberate my websites from captivity over the course of a few days. The Best Buy Geek Squad cast the demons out of my computer (thank God for back-up drives) for a $200 fee.
Needless to say, I harbour considerable resentment towards the perpetrators of these online joy rides. At one level, I can chalk it up to the price of living in a Microsoft world. We give up some measure of control over our lives when we harness ourselves so willingly to technology.
But I have difficulty wrapping my head around the motivations of these techno terrorists. There is nothing of any monetary value to be found in the bowels of my websites or the unexplored caverns of my personal computer. I’m in tune enough with the risks not to keep anything of value in those places.
Hacking into corporate or government websites I can understand, although not excuse, for the valuable information that is housed there. There will always be people who chose to make their living off the proceeds of crime. For those people, technology is simply another frontier to be exploited.
But the only incentive these keyboard cowboys have to mess with my humble online identity, or cripple my computer, is amusing themselves with the temporary havoc they can create. Simply because I can seems to be their sole motivation.
Such a shame that these obviously technically gifted individuals have nothing better to do with their time. It is such a dreadful waste of talent and skill that could be put to far better use.
It is, unfortunately, a prime example of “the imp of the perverse” metaphor – the tendency to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation for the sole reason that it is possible for wrong to be done. I’ll let Edgar Allan Poe have the last word on the subject since he definitively diagnosed the condition in his story of the same name.
We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. … It must, it shall be undertaken today, and yet we put it off until tomorrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. … [Then] The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies—disappears—we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late! ~ Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse
Tags: Edgar Allan Poe · hackers · imp of the perverse · malware · metaphor · Michael Robert DyetNo Comments