Firstly Necrocam is a movie that might have you consider cremation after thinking about how a body decomposes faster when you up the heat in coffin. However after moving past this, the film brings up many different facets of the hacker world. We see hardware hackers, software hackers, gamers, as well as web designers. Beyond just showing that there is an array of hacking that one can partake in, the film also brings up important issues in the hacker world. I found the idea of privacy to b paramount, and perhaps it is because it is a topic that we have recently discussed in class.
We have focused on surveillance and disclosure. Discussing this in terms of what you put on your Facebook, to the right people have to be taped on the streets. But do we, the living, have the right to tape and watch the dead? One of the slogans if you will, of hackerdom is that knowledge wants to be free. In the film we see Xeno asking his father about coffins and the rate of a bodies discomposure once buried, if looked at from a scientific perspective a live feed of a decomposing body can be seen as a means to acquire such knowledge, knowledge that Xeno claimed was not something he was able to find on the internet when questioned by his father. For a hacker it might not be a matter of rights in terms of the personal right, but it can be seen as something that should be public.
Although it’s a plausible argument, it does not make the idea of chronicling the stages of death any more palatable. This might be my personal opinion, but I feel it is almost a mater of culture. Death is a very culture sensitive issue to begin with, people morn differently, just feel differently about the dead. Obviously it would be too far of a jump to believe that necrocam’s are exclusive to hacker culture, but one has to wonder why this comes up along side hackers (aside from the fact that it makes it more plausible as they are technically savvy).
I wonder if the body just seems unimportant to hackers, that it is the mind, and what has been created that holds the significance of a person. Perhaps to watch the body decompose is nothing, its just the hardware, and if the mind and the software can continue on then it really does not seem so obscene. If one takes the story line in the film, it was Xeno’s idea of have people vote on changing the temperature, and while his body decomposed faster when people upped it, never the less his idea lived on in the form of the website that was created.