The Cuckoo’s Egg

The conclusion that Cliff Stoll ends his account in The Cuckoo’s Egg with was different then I had anticipated. Throughout the book, the author goes in to great detail describing his extended encounters with a German hacker trying to steal government secrets. However, the moral of his story was not about the importance of using strong passwords or the need to develop better encryption algorithms. No, he concludes by stating why these attacks were so repulsive. He concludes with the observation that this transcendental computer network was more then hardware—it was the front for a community of users. A community built on trust and cooperation that was being violated by this hacker.

These ideas of community reminded me of a lecture given by Robert Putnam at BYU a few years back. Robert Putnam is famous for his controversial book Bowling Alone which details his study on the decline of Social Capital, and his forum lecture touched on the same subject. In his book and during his lecture he contended that the United States has undergone a unique breakdown in civic, social, and political life. Additionally, he felt that this breakdown has caused negative ripples in our cultural pond.

Now, if Cliff Stoll could feel that a fringe network of University and Governmental computers was sufficiently developed to constitute a community worth protecting, then he and anyone that agrees with him would have to consider the social networks of today to be even more fully developed. Then, is Robert Putnam wrong? Has he only witnessed a shift, not a decline, in Social capital? Or is he still right because these social replacements are insufficient to take the place of more traditional forms? Can the clans of World of WarCraft sufficiently replace bowling leagues?