But secondly, I'd say there's the much wider question of why we're doing *any* of this. In a social context, what's good and bad? Questions like whether digital rights management for music is a good or a bad thing, and why do we get upset when we're denied use of said music to deal with as we want. Or whether we should legislate against spam. Or even whether we should put effort into creating that kind of visibility I was talking about, or opening the hacker ethos to more people.

For that I can only recommend Floridi of Oxford University. His work in the Philosophy of Information, and especially his papers on CyberEthics.

Floridi points out how we use ethics in the real world to create society. Society's so big, and how it emerges from our collective individual actions is so complex, there are no real cause-and-effect rules for what to do. If we knew exactly what our actions would cause, we wouldn't use politics to argue about the method so much. Furthermore, our actions are quite local. It's rare that we do something and it has a world-changing consequence. Very very rare.

So what we do is we try to live the right life. We make moral decisions and take moral actions and we try to be good people. The idea being that if we all act like good and just people, we'll get a good and just society. It's a fair heuristic. It works okay.

What Floridi points out is that cyberspace is still relatively simple. The actions of a single individual can disproportionately effect the composition or evolution of the society that exists online. What's more, the composition of the environment quite directly affects the kinds of actions people can perform: the existence of the email protocol allows a new form of interpersonal communication.

This combination - of being powerful and having clear consequences - puts us in a similar situation to what's happening in the real world with the environment. When humans became powerful enough to affect the environment on a global scale, a new kind of ethics emerged, one that gave value to things which might inadvertently be damaged: the atmosphere, rainforests, rocks. We give these things intrinsic value. Actually it happens even on a small scale. Geologists have a code too, where the rocks have an intrinsic worth: you don't bore holes into them in obvious places, you don't leave paint splashed around.

In the context of cyberspace, Floridi calls this cyberethics.

Information objects themselves, he says, have moral worth. The more able we are to manipulate and use an object, that is, the more handles it has, the more valuable it is, the more worthy it is. If you improve the information, you're doing a good deed. That's wiki gardening, the concept of idly improving a website just as you wander by. If you leave the object open to be used in as many ways as possible, to be more manipulable, you're doing a good deed. Well, that's the free software movement.

Floridi underpins with a simple, graspable concept, what we who have lived with the internet feel instinctively is good and bad.

So from this perspective, concepts like adaptable design, and designing for hackability and unintended consequences aren't just design rules of thumb, they're aspects of how to be a good person and create a just society.

From Floridi's environmental cyberethics, wiki gardening and free software are the cyberspace equivalents of respecting rainforests and biodiversity.