It's funny. Last night I was just thinking about hacking and then the news totally busts a nut that humans are evolving at an incredibly fast rate compared to the past. Not only that, but many scientists had assumed evolution was slowing down. How's that for a turn-around? Also, suck that creationists.
Back to hacking. I don't mean to sound like one of those aging hackers that they tritely write into crime dramas on TV but the scene has changed sooo much. I was there when the internet went retail. My father has always been in the computer industry so we had internet before you could find it on every block. The whole "AOL users suck" thing? That's because AOL originally didn't carry the internet. They just made their own network which sucked. Back when the internet first went non-military and non-academic (and text formatting was the most impressive thing out there) it was all just looked at as coding. I think that's why there's a generation out there who look at everything on the internet as nothing but code to an extent. Not that I can program in every language, but when the net went multimedia it was never a photo I was looking at. Never a song I was listening to. It was a file.
Now people just pirate and it's the norm because the industries for film and music suck so bad at respecting rights. And to be fair, they were violated by the net. But then people had a choice: to side with too much freedom or to side with legality. And while laws can change, freedom is a binary situation. On of off. And as much as Bush doesn't want to admit it, as much as the MPAA and RIAA hate it, America was based on the idea of leaning towards too much freedom. Innocent until proven guilty, all that? That's to err on the side of too much freedom. So now piracy is seen as an act of defiance by pirates and theft by companies.
That's not how it used to be. It used to be that once something went digital it was a file and files weren't afforded the same protection as material copies. Digital was just code and that's like trying to copyright a 1 and a 0.
What does this have to do with our newfound evolutionary speed? Everything. People have been talking about how fast technology changes. The rate of technological generations is nuts. Antique furniture has to be 100 years old. An antique car is 20 years old. A computer antique can be as recent as 5 years, usually closer to 10. So I find it incredibly heartening to find out that the human genome isn't beyond humanity (I also find it heartnening that Bruce Sterling's column on this topic reads like watching a wall of TV screens). Things are faster now. Humans thrive on change. The only reason we've survived is because our main advantage is our brains. Our brains have led to our world moving and changing faster. And? And it's led to our genome following suit. It's not just our minds that that are racing now. It's our brains as well.
That's not to romanticize the issue too much. Evolution is a harsh mistress, to rip off a classic The Tick quote. Evolution is not interested in developing a better human, a smarter or faster human. It's interested in a reproducing human. It's quite feasible to imagine a situation occurring (sooner, now, than later) where evolution comes around and kicks us in the ass. A situation in which we evolve to a point where we aren't able to produce enough skills or people to exercise the skills necessary to sustain us. But you know what? If there is a god then it (not he or she) has such a delicious sense of irony that god must be a hipster. Irony because not only is our physical development possible too damn fast to support us, but so is our social and technological evolution.
As I said, it's not just our minds that are evolving. It's also our brains. And I never said evolution is in our favour.
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