It is problematic when a user does not understand the technical functionality of the system they are presented with because both the system and the user become easier to manipulate. As mentioned in the piece Hacking as the Performance of Technology: Reading the “Hacker Manifesto” by Douglas Thomas when people lack an understanding of technology they tend to fear it. Technology then becomes this foreign object that is difficult to define, understand and is ultimately feared by the user. This fear then causes users to entrust technology to a more authoritative body whom the user feel is more capable in dealing with, deciphering, or fixing when problems or issues arise. Hackers realize this fear or apprehensive nature users have with technology and then uses it to their advantage. They know that if they go through side doors to get to the heart of a user’s system there is little chance that the ignorant user will notice.

The fear of breaking technological functions also enables hacker tactics like social engineering to work. Because the user does not know how technology functions at the core, unknowingly they let slip seemingly innocuous yet crucial information. Douglas Thomas is correct when he says, “The process of social engineering is solely about exploiting the mistrust or uncertainty that many people have about technology” (62). If average users knew what went on behind the curtain of technological systems they would be better equipped to prevent hackers from gaining access to their systems. They would not provide important data to illegitimate authoritative figures. Knowledge about how systems work would definitely provide the user with some power in fending off attacks.

An interesting point that Thomas brings up is that hackers not only go to extensive lengths to understand a technological system but they also research and gather information about users. Hackers learn the interests, occupations, and other personal details about users in order to discover their passwords (70). This is because interestingly, users give intimate associations to their passwords. Thomas explains when hackers needed to make educated guesses for brute force attacks they, “…exploit the cultural and social dimensions that are reflected in the kinds of choices people make in relationship to technology…” (70). Although users know little about a system, they attach pieces of their lives and themselves onto the system, perhaps as an unconscious way to make the foreign familiar. So in essence, the system and thus the hacker learns more about the user than the user does of system.

Society tends to look down on hacking because people do not understand the hacker’s need to make information boundary free. People have come to accept the fact that they only can know so much about a technological system and so have become very comfortable with providing a great deal of control to authoritative bodies. When hackers demonstrate that knowledge about technological functionality can be acquired, people become threatened by this unfamiliar concept because they do not want to take responsibility of technological control the way the hacker does. If we new how these systems work then society would not see hackers has such a problem because simply put, we would essentially know what they know. Perhaps, instead of seeing hackers as criminals, one can see it as a wake up call that we, the average users, should attempt to understand the technological systems we use on a daily basis.