More 1337 Than You

Editor's Note: Squid wrote this in June, but I didn't get around to editing it until recently... so let's just all pretend it's two months ago while reading this lol - Jada

It's Pride Month, and if you're active online, you may have witnessed the annual ritual of users across social media gathering to engage in the same dated, tired debate over who is "really" queer. The popular sport of choice seems to be creating lengthy threads dissecting which identities are considered “valid” and which are dismissed as “problematic”, “illegitimate”, “exclusionary”, or otherwise unwelcome. What begins as a discussion between strangers separated by screens quickly turns into a debate over the lived experiences of real people attempting to exist within a shared community. What began as binary ones and zeros became a discussion between usernames and profile pictures about whose existence deserves to be acknowledged.

I can only describe the entire spectacle as a digital expression of purity culture. Participants often demand strict adherence to a particular set of beliefs or standards about who qualifies as queer, who belongs within the community, and who deserves support. Clear "in-group" and "out-group" boundaries are drawn, and considerable energy is devoted to determining who should be excluded on the basis of their identities failing to fit within a new, equally narrow definition of acceptability.

Of course, this phenomenon is hardly unique to queer spaces. Variations of it can be found in religious institutions, political movements, fandom communities, and countless other social environments. The tech world is no exception. There, the same impulse often manifests as a heated competition in posturing, to determine who is the most knowledgeable, the most skilled, or the most deserving of the title of "elite" hacker, engineer, or technology expert.

What Does Purity Culture Look Like in Tech?

As someone who has spent years teaching friends, family members, and broader public audiences about technology, I've learned that one question is more valuable than almost any other: "What do you mean when you say X?"

I welcome that question because if I cannot answer it in a way that an average person can understand, then I consider that a shortcoming in my own understanding. Expertise is not demonstrated by how many technical terms you can string together. It's demonstrated by your ability to make complex ideas accessible to people who are encountering them for the first time.

Too often, knowledge in technology is treated as a status symbol rather than a public resource. Information gets hidden behind jargon, buried in obscure forums, or locked away in communities that expect newcomers to "do their own research" before they're allowed to participate. The result is a culture where understanding becomes a marker of social status rather than something to be shared freely.

The irony is that technology only becomes truly useful when ordinary people can understand and use it. A security recommendation that cannot be explained to your neighbor, your parents, or the person standing behind you in line at the grocery store is unlikely to improve security on any meaningful scale. Information that cannot be understood, found, or accessed by the people who need it most might as well be lost.

If our goal is to build a safer, more informed, and more technologically literate society, then knowledge cannot remain the exclusive property of self-appointed experts. Information should be translated, simplified, archived, and shared as widely as possible. The purpose of expertise is not to separate ourselves from others. The purpose of expertise is to help bring more people in.

The Information Security and broader tech scene are filled with a common sight, more “tech bros” than you can count talking to themselves online or to anyone who will listen, regarding the best way to set yourself apart from normies who don’t know about security. Invest in crypto, leave every popular social media platform in favor of a federated existence that is largely still out of the public’s awareness, make sure every computer and laptop you own runs Linux, and make sure you’re investing in the latest equipment. 

All of this “helpful advice” more often than not appears to disregard accessibility to individuals with little to no background in tech. If someone with no prior knowledge or experience in computer security asks where or how to start improving their security practices, it’s likely that these so-called tech experts won’t know how to explain their advice in terms that can be understood enough to make the average person walking down the street care about their security. In this case, they may as well consider their “elite advice” to be lost in the ether, rather than making a difference. If you're using an obscure platform to share knowledge you believe is important for the general public, you're not meeting people where they are, you're expecting them to come find you. 

Speaking from experience as someone who entered the tech scene in my early twenties and sought out resources and advice from so-called “infosec superstars”, the goal of many of these individuals does not seem to be to assist or contribute to community understanding, it’s to explain to anyone who will listen how they are more skilled or “elite” based on the projects they’re working on or the knowledge they seemingly have, that others might not. Writing about this topic brings me back to a time when I was very new to exploring my interest in technology and a supposedly more skilled person in the hacker scene was trying to explain to me how a laser I had bought to play around with worked to pop a balloon. He could not figure out how to explain it to someone unfamiliar with the concepts he was explaining and ended up faltering and had to be reminded to use his words, while I lost interest in the explanation. Just as a reader might steadily lose interest in my lengthier writings.

There’s even a term for those still learning in the hacker community: Script Kiddie. 

Script kiddie is an informal and more often than not, derogatory, term in the cybersecurity community for a low-skilled or amateur hacker, who is often still in the learning stage. Some argue that we should refer to those trying to learn and improve as neophytes or “greenhorn” hackers, to set them apart from script kiddies who don’t seem to want to learn enough to improve or understand their toolkit. I argue that they’re at the same stage, the only difference is mindset, and information that we can’t assume they have equal access to. 

In the end, script kiddie is more frequently being used as a derogatory term to refer to those still getting their feet wet in the information security community than it is to denote someone who is unwilling to learn. Nothing but ego from already skilled individuals differentiates the script kiddie willing to learn but lacking in guidance from the greenhorn hacker. One can argue the latter is used to refer to those who have the privilege of knowing where to access the resources needed to improve, and their accessibility needs met. 

The greenhorn hacker may be a computer science freshman at MIT, while the script kiddie could be a lower-income kid who realized he could mod his games and cause a little mischief. The difference is that the latter here has no formal guidance on how to hone his curiosity. While many script kiddies will eventually find their way to knowledge on their own if they seek it out, we can’t assume that will always be the case, even if the desire to improve is there. Bringing us back to the key point of this article: ensuring that information is accessible to all, at a level that they can understand, and being able to explain why that information is beneficial, in terms that can be understood by the unacquainted, not a collection of buzzwords.

Learn to Be a Helper

Don’t give advice if you don’t know to point someone in the right direction, and if you think it’s crucial that they improve, don’t immediately point them at a resource and set them loose considering your job to be complete. You need to be meeting people where they’re at, and teaching, not preaching. Assuming that others are as able-bodied, have the same access to tools, can devote the same amount of time to learn, or have the means to seek you out to teach them, is a recipe for creating another system where those who most need access to information and assistance are unable to receive it. For some in the tech scene, this requires letting go of an ego that placed them above others in a corporate hierarchy, and for those who have been told they aren’t skilled enough to be teaching others, this will require developing the ego of an average, middle-aged, cis white man in tech. When we drop the “by your own bootstraps” mentality and adopt the “everyone deserves to benefit from this knowledge” mindset, society will benefit from learning how to protect their data and secure their technology. 

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