Paul Graham’s latest essay is one of the best I’ve ever read. Given my own experiences over the last 5 months, I’m not sure he says anything I disagree with.

“The lesson here is that open source can create a slick consumer-friendly product. Firefox is definitely more than just a blip. It has some staying power.” — Kevin Werbach, legal studies professor, Wharton.

“Previous open-source products had a high geek factor: You had to be a geek to run them. Firefox is the first time consumers really chose an open source product.” —Dan Hunter, legal studies professor, Wharton.

Bingo.

The business schools at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon have announced that anyone who “hacked” into the system to view their admissions decision early on is automatically rejected, regardless of what that decision was. Here’s the story. I’ll note up front that I say “hacked” because hacking tends to connote a more dramatic and premeditated crime than what was actually committed here. That’s not what I want to talk about, but I do think it’s important that any discussion not be colored by dramatized perceptions of the real crime, so hopefully the quotes will serve as a reminder.

A number of columnists have chimed in to applaud the message to students that online hacking is tantamount to a physical break-in. But these plaudits seem to hinge on the assumption that the students who “hacked” represent some small, depraved subset of a much larger group who consciously decided against it on the basis of morality. While this may stroke our own sense of faith in people, I’d like to propose a different and more sobering interpretation—that the number of students who “hacked” was constrained only by how quickly the instructions were able to spread before they were pulled and the hole was plugged (a 9-hour window beginning at midnight).

I respect the columnists’ views, but I question their authority to write on this particular topic: they did not grow up on the Internet and apply in the most competitive landscape this country has ever witnessed. I did, just two years ago, and it’s not something you can begin to understand unless or until you’re part of it. I don’t question that the students’ actions were unethical, but that is not the same as saying that the students acted because they are unethical. I’m convinced that products of the Internet generation have an unusually neurotic, borderline obsessive personality which makes it difficult to try to characterize or rationalize their erratic behavior according to common standards. And I think what we’re seeing here is how this personality thrives in an admissions climate that breeds anxiety.

What do I mean by “borderline obsessive”? I mean that during my own run through the admissions gauntlet, I personally observed students at my high school logging in to their “admission status” pages 5 or 6 times a day—even if the school announced that decisions wouldn’t be available for another week. That’s the difference between waiting for a decision via snail mail and waiting for a decision online: both engender anxiety, but in the latter case, you are seemingly able to get within arm’s length of your future. Even though the online page says “come back on day X”, students still checked the page frequently. This is what I mean when I say it’s impossible to evaluate my generation’s behavior according to old standards or even according to common sense; I really believe the Internet hardwires developing brains with a click-happy sense of urgency that will not defer to reality. We are addicted to information and seek it even when we know it’s not available.

Based on my personal experience with the process, then, I want to propose that had word of these “hacking” instructions spread to the entire pool of applicants before they were removed, most applicants would have followed them. We shouldn’t forget that the decisions could only be “hacked” for a 9 hour window, from midnight to 9AM, and in that short period of time, 150 students managed to hear about it and participate. Of course this is only speculation, but I want to use it as a foundation to begin a constructive conversation about what’s going on here and what we can do to fix it. If you’re so adamantly opposed to this basis for argument then it may not be worth reading further, although if that’s the case, I urge you to ask yourself why the students I observed would login to an admissions page 5 or 6 times a day knowing full well that the school announced in advance the date decisions would be made available.

The fact that most applicants would “hack” if they’d known they could does not make it right. But it does force us to come to one of two conclusions: either the bulk of the people applying to business school are morally bankrupt, or some shared impetus compelled them to deviate. I think it’s the latter, and I think the impetus is the unparalleled, competitive-to-the-point-of-sickening nature of modern college admissions.

Much has been written about how damaging the climate is. I’m personally more interested in the intersection of this climate with the “Internet personality” I described earlier. Even though I believe this personality to be unprecedented, columnists are struggling to frame the behavior it engenders in terms of other criminal temptations we can better understand. It’s like taking money from a vault just because the door’s open, they say. But I don’t believe that all these students would have taken that money. They may want the money, but they do not need the money the way they need to know their admissions decision, the way they need to check and recheck their status page like it’s some kind of nervous tick or insatiable addiction.

I don’t condone what these students did, but I do think we’re doing them a tremendous disservice if we just dismiss them as immoral deviants without considering the bigger picture. The dean of Harvard Business School is correct that the “hacking” constitutes a “serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalisation,” but when I observe students obsessively checking their status page through legitimate means, it’s still irrational—but it’s not unethical. What does that mean?

To me, it means that there’s more to this story than the questionable ethics of 150 students. I don’t want to wait for the day when the entire pool exploits a hole and colleges are faced with the prospect of rejecting everyone to finally take the bird’s eye view. Are students just inherently unethical, or does their addiction spur unethical behavior? I want to understand now why today’s admissions climate makes students crave the decision, what’s unique about my generation that so affords this craving, and how we can make progress toward curing both.

I’m especially like to hear from students who may have observed the type of behavior I describe and may be better able to articulate it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the Internet is doing to the brain based on my experiences, but I’m still having trouble expressing it in writing.