I just listened to the NPR Science Friday episode entitled Where Are The ‘Hackers’ Now? featuring the great Steven Levy.

Ira Flatow picks Levy’s always-impressive brain about his re-released Hackers book and how he sees the computer industry today being shaped by the individuals he profiled back in the 80′s (Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Woz, etc).

The piece is an entertaining listen in itself (especially his comments about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg), but what particularly caught my interest was a call-in question.

A lady named Judy asks Levy if he thinks the term “hackers” has negatively impacted the “flow of consumerism” on the web:

JUDY: Well, the question that I have is just do you think or does your guest believe that hackers have contributed to a sense of unease for those of us who aren’t when we’re navigating the Internet? You know, we’re always being warned about where to go, what information to parcel out, how easily information is captured. And do you think that that has maybe reduced the flow of, I don’t know, consumerism would be my first guess because I’m an avid consumer, you know, that hackers and those warnings would have slowed down some progress that might have been made?

“Hopefully!” I would have answered in my best AdBusters reading voice of righteous indignation about the rapid deification of cultural consumerism had I been in Levy’s shoes.

However, I don’t think Judy is equating the web itself with consumerism. Yet, it is fascinating to ponder how much the web has come to mean ecommerce rather than the spread of independent or quality information.

Levy tries to answer Judy by explaining what he meant by Hackers instead of the common parlance today that shapes so much of the Good Morning Today America morning shows that profile hackers as greasy malevolents bent on destroying our local bank’s encryption and shapes our educational policies.

It also illuminates the brilliance of Apple’s strategy of providing a suburbia of “safe” apps on its mobile devices that are free from these hack0rz out to steal our passwords.

There are more hackers out there than ever, of course. Most of them are doing incredibly beneficial things for the rest of the web (and humanity).

It’s a shame that the word has come to be a synonym of evil intent.

Blessed are the tinkerers and hackers indeed.

We need more of them in our schools (as parents, teachers, admins, staff and students).