 By Alan Hall, originally published in the June 2011 Socionomist |
Keeping Watch: A recent web advertisement illustrates that society’s vision of the Internet is morphing from playground to minefield.
In Chapter 14 of The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior, Robert Prechter noted the tendency for positive social mood to impel the desire to build and for negative mood to impel the desire to destroy. Lately, the hacker group Lulz Security (Lulz means “laughter at someone else’s expense”) has garnered headlines for successful attacks on prominent properties such as the CIA’s website. According to the BBC, LulzSec “opened a telephone request line so its fans can suggest potential targets.”6 At first, LulzSec and others like it (for example the hacker group “Anonymous”) mostly seemed like kids out to have some fun. But with their devastating attacks on Sony, and the recent release of confidential Arizona Department of Public Safety documents, LulzSec has emerged as the latest WikiLeaks wannabe. These escapades conjure up novelist Graham Greene’s short story “The Destructors,” in which a group of boys vandalize and ultimately destroy a 200-year-old house while the owner is away. The boys find a treasure in the home: a mattress stuffed with cash. So great is their impulse to destroy that, rather than pocket the money, they torch it. The hackers’ current disruptive impulses foreshadow far more destructive cyber attacks should mood continue to wax negative. As we said in the March 2010 issue of The Socionomist, “Socionomists expect cyber attacks to become both more prevalent and increasingly vicious during bear markets.”■
CITATION
6LulzSec opens hack request line (2011, June15). BBC, Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13777129 on June 20, 2011.
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Most economists, historians and sociologists
presume that events determine society’s mood. But socionomics hypothesizes
the opposite: that social mood regulates the character of social events. The
events of history—such as investment booms and busts, political events,
macroeconomic trends and even peace and war—are the products of a naturally
occurring pattern of social-mood fluctuation. Such events, therefore, are not
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in that financial decisions are motivated by the herding impulse while economic
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