Slashdot Mirror
Anthropologist Spends Three Years Living With Hackers
concealment writes "Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years studying the community that builds the Debian GNU/Linux open source operating system and hackers in the Bay Area. More recently, she's been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief. When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group's monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco's Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out."
TL;DR - she's writing a book and wants us all to know, and Wired is cooperating. It's a fluff piece. Apparently we should buy it when it comes out.
As the sibling posts also say, you wrote a really bad summary. I think you just wanted to be cynical, or troll.
Aside from the fact that she'll apparently release the book copyleft, there's also the fact that it's a scholarly work - a good way to lose money.
A better summary would be something like "Anthropologist studies nerds, finds that they have an interesting culture and a clear interest in civil liberties issues."
But of course that isn't relevant to Slashdot. There are no nerds here, and no one cares about civil liberties here, right? We just discuss computer parts endlessly, right? I hope some smarter moderators show up soon.
And that's what humans who make their profession studying other humans do. (And what I've just done with all anthropologists, sociologists, etc. Groovy) Sadly, though, stereotypes often reign true...but they will always be stereotypes and people who are hackers in Alabama, for instance, will probably laugh at the new wave of box office hacker stereotypes to emerge from this study.
p.s. plugging my tag "labrats", seems appropriate here...
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.