The hacker high life — girls, notoriety, White Russians — can be hard to resist.

—Virginia Heffernan

If you watch Colbert, read the New York Times magazine, Alternet, or the Washington Post, you may have heard of an old acquaintance of mine, Virgil Griffith.  I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the Time magazine and saw an article by Virginia Heffernan about Virgil.  Now if you know anything about Virgil you’ll know he’s been involved in some pretty interesting stuff, not all of it without consequences either.  Now, in my mind, Virgil is your typical atypical guy; a little awkward sometimes, very conscious of his privacy, but still enjoys his media attention.  Basically, much the same as many of us, except he’s way smarter.

Unfortunately, the above summary of Virgil is not enough to write an article about, and this was something that people like Neal Stephenson or the editors of Wired figured out a long time ago.  You can’t describe what the truly interesting details of a system are for the benefit of the top 5% of your readers, such as readers with an actual background in the field.  No; you have to dumb it down for the masses; in the case of the NYTM it’s for the 50+ readership; for Wired it’s for what I like to call the ‘16-’.  Both of these audiences romanticise computer nerdery in the same fashion in which it’s depicted in the movie Hackers.  If you’re a Hacker (with a capital H) on the Inter-Net, you go to clubs and dance with all of your hip friends, before going around back and whistling into a payphone and suddenly the ATM nearby spits out wads of cash, and, on cue, the accompanying girls’ panties mysteriously drop to their ankles.

Nope, sorry Virginia.  There is no Santa.

The fact is, Virginia Heffernan recycles the same predictable crap that most mainstream journalists now do.  From the very beginning she puts complex systems in quotes, as if to say it’s some mysterious, inaccessible science that no one can understand save for people like Virgil (she even uses the word ‘mysterious’ to describe the Santa Fe institute):

Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied.

Imagine if Virgil was a marine biologist instead of a hacker.  Would Virginia Heffernan say this?

Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious University of Oregon, where “marine biology” is studied.

No, of course not.  Because that would be ridiculous and insane.