Paranoid Penguin - Book Review: <emphasis>Islands in the Clickstream</emphasis>

Why do we hack? Of all the things a person can spend time on, why obsess over the myriad details involved in getting a C program to compile cleanly, a network application to communicate properly or a Web application to withstand SQL-injection attacks? Why do these things matter?

Richard Thieme, hacker sage, journalist, business and government consultant, humanist and former Episcopalian priest, has some ideas why, and he provides 336 pages worth of credible responses to this and many other important questions in his unique book Islands in the Clickstream (Syngress Publishing, 2004).

This is the sort of book you may not realize you want or need until you know it exists. That's true of a lot of things, many of them trivial (shrimp-flavored crackers and brass collar-stays come to mind), but there's nothing trivial about Islands in the Clickstream. Based on Thieme's on-line column of the same name, Islands in the Clickstream is about “the impact of computer technology on organizations, society, and one's own self.”

If you think that sounds like a big topic, you're right. This book is composed of columns spanning the better part of a decade, and Richard still has a long way to go before exhausting his chosen subject.

Actually, though, that's a little like saying “that chap Stephen Hawking is on a roll; I hope he doesn't get bored.” Because the picture Richard Thieme is trying to paint is that of the human condition itself, which nowadays happens to be inextricably entwined with technology. Each new “Islands in the Clickstream” essay he writes adds clarity here or expands onto fresh canvas there, but the painting never can be completed, even if it were possible for one person to paint the whole thing.

Rather than simply being arranged chronologically, the essays in Islands in the Clickstream are distributed across the following chapters:

This is as good a way to organize Thieme's essays as any. Following Richard's suggestion, however, I've been reading them more or less at random. Although certainly there are common themes and even common observations between essays, there's no narrative per se demanding sequential reading, even within a given chapter, let alone between chapters. A single essay, whether five pages in length or one and one-half, is a completely self-contained Richard Thieme reading experience.

In this respect, and I hope Richard doesn't clobber me for saying so, Islands in the Clickstream is ideal bathroom reading.

So that's what the book is about and how it's organized. But what does it contain?

As readers of my Paranoid Penguin column might predict, some of my favorite bits are in Chapter 4, Hacking and the Passion for Knowledge. Here's a wonderfully representative snippet from the essay “Knowledge, Obsession, Daring” (December 26, 1998):

Personally, I find it extremely refreshing to read such a concise and insightful redux of the hacker ethos. I get a very good feeling knowing that this sort of insight is being preached not only to the choir, so to speak, but to audiences that include business people, law enforcement officers and representatives of the federal government. Now, more than ever, the world needs hackers to continue exploring and creating, and it furthermore needs to know that that's what hackers do.

Thieme's insight goes far beyond understanding hacker culture, however. He also understands our day jobs, and better still, how they relate to larger societal issues. Consider this passage from “Lest We Forget” (November 23, 2001):

I find it remarkable that Thieme sees not only subtle truths and non-instinctive fine points (and if you think his point about “inside” vs. “outside” is totally obvious, think about how rare it still is for people to take internal security very seriously), he finds common threads between these truths and fine points, and then relates them to larger truths. It's a little like having a friend who not only finds your lost car keys, but also accurately describes correlations between short-term memory loss and work-related stress, and ends up suggesting ways in which the national rates of heart disease and career dissatisfaction might both be lowered.

I don't mean to sound facetious (though, I am having a little fun here). My point is that although Richard Thieme is fascinated by hackers, network security, espionage, UFO encounters, intellectual property and many other geeky topics, what he's really trying to figure out is how all that relates to the larger human truths about who we are, why we do what we do and how our perceived and constructed realities relate to “real” reality.

As I stated earlier, a book about the hacker ethos, reality constructs and humankind's place in the universe may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of computer books worth purchasing. But on the other hand, that very well may be because it's never occurred to you that there was such a book. Islands in the Clickstream is one, probably the only one, and it may provide some crucial things you haven't been looking for but should have been.