What About Tomorrow's Hackers?

by akerch

As if society's current relationship with technology weren't complicated enough, I'd like to challenge the reader for a moment to consider what programmers, hackers, and computer users in general might look like in the future.  I suspect a big shift is coming, not necessarily for better or worse, I hope, but a big shift nonetheless.

After boredom and despair led me to quit my corporate tech job, I decided to change fields and get into education. At first, I worked fixing Chromebooks and generally supporting the technology needs of a small elementary school.  Now I work at a high school and am one of two teachers in the school of 1500 students to have experience with programming.  I say this not to brag, but to emphasize the state of alienation that computer science education seems to be facing in schools.  Of course, computers themselves are by no means alienated, especially these days post-remote learning where the standard has shifted to a one-to-one relationship between students and Chromebooks.  The thing is, though, while student computer use is high and computer proficiency (maybe I should say Google Chrome proficiency) is high, too, I suspect the general student outlook on technology and computer use is becoming ever less messy.

Again, I'm hesitant to classify this as explicitly good or bad: a smoother, more stable, uniform experience with technology is by and large probably a good thing for most students.  The ubiquity of ChromeOS does make students' expectations for what they can do on a computer consistent, and ChromeOS's inherent limitations, along with school districts' obsession with walled gardens, make it difficult for an inexperienced user to brick their device or download a virus.  And for most students, who just need to write documents, make slide shows, and log into Kahoot!, ChromeOS does all they need to do.

I'm willing to concede all that: standardized, limited computer behavior does generally keep things calmer on a school network, in much the same way that forcing all cars to have turn signals increases safety on roads.  What concerns me is that I feel like the other side to this is a general "pulling away" from what a computer actually is and can do.  The elementary school kids I worked with were incredibly adept at using ChromeOS, and while they generally could not type to save their lives, they were very good at navigating the computer's interface as well as the Internet at large.  The high schoolers are better with their keyboards, and are refreshingly good at getting around district Internet policies, but are still very much stuck within the confines of ChromeOS, since they can't really access the computer itself, and the only way they can get information in or out of the device is through HTTP.

I've noticed, as a result of all this, that students and adults alike are beginning to think that ChromeOS and cloud-based technology is all there is.  Furthermore, perhaps more concerningly, they're O.K. with it.  Using a command-line interface at school for anything at all often raises eyebrows and gets me accused (albeit casually) of "hacking."  Trying to get a dozen old laptops running Linux to be O.K.'ed by the district as tools for AP Computer Science was an uphill battle, with the district citing security concerns and a lack of infrastructure for Linux (???) in place.  (I of course held my tongue and did not ask them what they thought ChromeOS was.)  Most teachers I speak with about AP Computer Science say they've only ever used web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDEs) to teach it, which doesn't surprise me but still makes me want to throw up.

As we get older, and the population begins to shift toward being dominated by those who grew up only using ChromeOS, I fear the definition of a "computer" will become, for regular users, simply a machine used to access the Internet.  Maybe we're already there - hell, I'm writing this on Google Docs.  Hackers, and the urge to get around restrictive policies, won't go away.  I'm confident about that.  But if Google et al's paradigm shift is successful, and the people of tomorrow only think of computers as a means to an Internet connection, that means all less-than-sanctioned behavior will still go through and be monitored by the likes of Google.  I'm worried that that won't even occur to the hackers of the future, since they'd never seen a computer as anything other than an Internet connection.

For example: after finals last week, I let students quietly use their computers after they were done testing, and I noticed a handful of them were playing Pokémon on emulators they'd downloaded to their computers.  This was fantastic, and I am always happy to see students using computers for fun even when policies say they shouldn't.  I didn't have the heart to tell them, though, that "downloading a file to a Chromebook" just meant downloading it to their Google Drive, and that any Google Suite administrator who wanted could easily see that activity and restrict their account activity, take away their Chromebook, or, even worse, delete their saved progress in the game.  We're so deep in the Google/Microsoft/Apple streamlined OS surveillance state, we're not even aware of it anymore.

Whatever.  Maybe I'm wasting energy on this line of thinking.  People's relationships with computers always change and will continue to change.  I've never used a Lisp machine or programmed with punch cards and I turned out O.K.  Today's young people will probably be O.K., too - as I said, I firmly believe the desire to hack, to get messy, and to circumvent will always be around; it just might look different for each generation.  Everybody should learn to hack by getting what they want out of the technological circumstances they're in.  Just as I learned about hacking by setting up and using proxy servers to play games in middle school, so will students of today by using Google Docs to chat with their friends when their phones have been confiscated.  I only want to make sure that we don't lose too much in the process.  If the folks at ChromeOS had their way, I fear they'd want everybody to believe that computers really are just for the Internet, anybody using a Command-Line Interface (CLI) really is a hacker, and that there's no sense in writing software locally when it can be done on somebody else's server.

So, at the end of the day, here's my request: if you see a young person messing around on a Chromebook, encourage them to keep doing what they're doing, and also give them the old laptop from the 2000s you have that's been collecting dust for a decade.  Maybe give them a screwdriver, too.  Invite them to take it apart, or to fire up the Windows XP (or whatever) that's on it and royally mess up the system, or to write a local script that does their homework for them or kicks their sibling's Chromebook off their home network.  Anything.  It's our responsibility just to plant the seed of hacking and of the Wild West world of computers outside the corporate walled gardens.

The rest, I'm sure, will take care of itself.