Sociology Plans and Status in Hacker Web Project

ABSTRACT

The Hacker Web Project addresses fundamental social science questions. We present our plan of research and preliminary conceptualization under two broad rubrics: using social media analytics to understand the culture of hacking, and theorization of illegal markets and covert networks. The Hacker Web is comprised of a unique set of venues where “global” and “local” meet, generating the self-organizing principles that will be studied with social media analytics. We will partition differences in style and semantics into several relevant components (individual-level variation, community-specific, national-linguistic, and global). Among our hypotheses: There are common features across national cultures in hacker activity, and the degree of cross-cultural commonality has increased over time. With respect to markets, the very limited attention to illegal markets in economic sociology is an important failure because of the theoretical insights that might be gained from the study of these markets. We explore hacker web activities as exemplifying what economists call a two-sided platform market. We also put forward the concept of common-pool resource platforms functioning as local public goods. We hypothesize that (in varying combinations) reputation and brokerage behavior of forum administrators (market operators) in hacker networks affect the size and resilience of forums.