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                The Digital Outlaws: Hackers as Imagined Communities              *  
            
            - 
              Henning Ziegler 
              (bio)  
              John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University of Berlin, Germany 
             
                   
                  Introduction: "We love your Computer" 
             
              The goal now 
                is not whatever all the analysts first set out to do; the goal 
                becomes the creation of the system itself. Any ethics or morals 
                or second thoughts, any questions or muddles or exceptions, all 
                dissolve into a junky Nike-mind: Just do it. If I just sit here 
                and code, you think, I can make something run. When the humans 
                come back to talk changes, I can just run the program. Show them: 
                Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs. Whatever 
                you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words 
                and what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational 
                system. Talk all you want, but this thing here: it works. 
                --E. Ullman, Close to the Machine 
              Culture is 
                an infinite game. 
                -J. P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games 
               
            The month was 
              May, the year was 2000, and the loss was one of the largest amounts 
              of money ever caused by a worm in computer history. On Monday morning 
              in early May, if you had a Windows system running at work, there 
              was probably a message with the unsuspecting subject "I love 
              you" in your Outlook mailbox. The message text read "kindly 
              check the attached love letter coming from me." High as a kite, 
              you would have opened the mail (unless you were really sure that 
              nobody would send you a message with that subject, in which case 
              you probably would have opened the love letter anyway). But what 
              would have followed your click on the love letter would have made 
              you rapidly come back down to earth: the attached file love-letter-for-you.txt.vbs 
              was not a love letter at all, but an internet worm (worms are these 
              little programs that can self-replicate and spread through the internet 
              very rapidly, usually via Microsoft Outlook programs). The "I 
              love you"-virus, as it came to be known, sent itself to each 
              address in your Windows system address book and dropped an .htm-file 
              and an mIRC (a internet chat application) script on your computer 
              as alternative ways for self-replication. So in that week of May, 
              the worm spread rapidly to millions of Windows users, damaging their 
              systems by changing file types to .vbs-endings and copying itself 
              each time they would try to execute one of these 'infected' files. 
              By a love letter that had turned into a menace to your personal 
              (if digital) belongings, these users suddenly got acquainted with 
              the dark, the vulnerable, and the uncanny side of the 'Web:' Computer 
              help lines were busy and people were just plainly scared. Yes, you 
              had been told by computer security experts never to give out your 
              private address online since 'stalkers' might hunt you in real life 
              (ironically, of course, 'spyware' finds out your private information 
              for other companies). But a love letter turning into an evil worm 
              on the spot-that had been unheard of. 
            Of course, this 
              story is highly simplified. In fact, it only shows one assessment 
              of the strike of the "I love you"-virus-that of the media 
              and the anti-virus company 'analysts.' Ian Hopper, journalist with 
              CNN, chose to aptly title his feature about the worm "Destructive 
              I Love You computer virus strikes world wide." Hopper (2000) 
              describes how the "self?propagating and destructive" virus 
              "wrought hundreds of millions of dollars in software damage 
              and lost commerce." He quotes computer security expert Peter 
              Tibbett of ICSA.net, who estimated that "the price tag (of 
              the virus attack) would exceed $1 billion by Monday morning" 
              of the week after the worm had first been discovered. Interestingly, 
              hackers, the people whose programming skills allegedly gives birth 
              such viruses, have largely relativized such menacing accounts of 
              the "I love you"-attack. Frans Faase, a hacker from the 
              Netherlands, has analyzed the virus source code in detail, and he 
              has made his findings available on the internet. Faase concludes 
              his code analysis by saying that "the virus does not contain 
              all kinds of dirty tricks that the Anti?virus software people claim 
              it to have" (Faase, 2000). And he goes on to say that the "virus 
              was never intended to be anything more than a practical joke. It 
              is also not the most evil virus one can think of. It does some harm, 
              but there are some simple modifications which would make it much 
              more harmful." 
            The "I 
              love you"-incident of May 2000, in my mind, highlights a great 
              number of issues in thinking about digital culture. The virus, it 
              seems, has been constructed as a dangerous object by the media and 
              the companies, whereas virus programming seems to be fun in the 
              eyes of the hackers. With hacking becoming fun, political and cultural 
              theory of the sort which emphasizes the important role that 'counter-hegemonic' 
              groups play in social change seems to run into difficulties when 
              it projects its libratory hopes onto hacker culture. On the one 
              hand, there seems to be a pathological projection of an 'abject' 
              (Julia Kristeva) of the electronic age onto hackers by the media 
              and the general public, and on the other hand hacker culture isn't 
              political per se, but a multi-layered phenomenon that consists of 
              multiple 'imagined communities' (Benedict Anderson) that lie within 
              the power structures of a hegemonic framework. This article, then, 
              will attempt to read hacker cultures in terms of hegemony, and it 
              will show that the supposed "increasing democratization" 
              (Landow, 1992, p. 277) for society through the internet lies entirely 
              within the logic of hegemony as it has been developed by Ernesto 
              Laclau in Laclau & Mouffe (1983). Hacker groups with practices 
              as diverse as the Legion of Doom, the Billboard Liberation Front, 
              or the Electrohippie Collective constitute many intertwined, antagonistic 
              movements that are spoken for and spoken about. In the following 
              pages, I will attempt to describe these communities and the images 
              that are projected onto them and that they project onto others. 
              With this said, it should be clear that I regard any definition 
              of hackers (such as being antagonistic to crackers, etc) as quite 
              pointless: it is the purpose of this article to describe the semiotic 
              fight of the term, not to state a scholarly definition. Without 
              the help from influential hacker figures, this endeavor, of course, 
              would have been impossible. But with the many comments that I got, 
              I hope that this paper will shake some of the established ways of 
              thinking about hackers and digital culture a little, and maybe even 
              lead on to a more grounded discussion about the political in the 
              data sphere. I think that, as will turn out, even if hackers are 
              not the 'new hope' for that Marxist revolutionary subject which 
              we've been looking for so long, there are other people that are 
              sneaking through the contested terrain between hacking and political 
              action-hacktivists-and that what they are doing might constitute, 
              to my mind, a play of resistance.  
               
               
              Hollywood's Construction of Hackers on the Big Screen 
             
              Hacking will 
                begin killing people soon (...). Hackers in Amtrak computers, 
                or air traffic control computers, will kill somebody someday. 
                Maybe a lot of people. 
                --B. Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown 
               
            Hackers appeared 
              as a mass cultural phenomenon in the United States around 1990. 
              The so-called hacker crackdown inscribed itself into the American 
              psyche at that time, a large-scale FBI hunt of computer criminals 
              who were accused of having crashed the AT&T telephone system. 
              The way in which hackers surfaced in U.S. culture, however, had 
              little to do with the positivistic way in which the term was first 
              employed by the model train hobbyist at MIT's Tech Model Railroad 
              Club (TMRC) in the early 60s. In fact, looking at Hollywood movies 
              as indicators for mass cultural perception of reality, I would argue 
              that technology in the late 1980s was portrayed on the screen as 
              a finally uncontrollable, dark menace-the gooey chrome of Terminator 
              2, which leaves the individual vulnerable and disempowered. Hackers, 
              though, were ambiguously constructed: They were the strange technology 
              wizards who, as 'good Americans,' fight for civil liberty, but they 
              were also people with questionable motives, not hesitating to sell 
              their technical expertise to the 'bad guys.' In addition, the political 
              was generally reduced to activism-in the simplified logic of Hollywood, 
              the state apparatus becomes a shady force that randomly blocks you 
              from 'restricted areas.' In movies such as Tron (1982), War Games 
              (1983), and finally in the 1990 release of Renny Harlin's Die Hard 
              2, all these issues figure prominently. But since Die Hard 2 coincided 
              with the hacker crackdown, let's look at how that movie took to 
              the screen Bruce Sterling's prediction that "hacking will kill 
              people soon."  
             In 
              Die Hard 2, the tough, everyday guy John McClane (Bruce Willis) 
              is waiting to pick up his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) at an airport 
              near Washington D.C. On the same evening, however, the plane of 
              Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero), a South American politician who is 
              being brought to a drug-related trial to the U.S., is scheduled 
              to arrive. A group of hackers, hired by Esperanza, take control 
              of the airport technology to land his plane, demanding a B747 to 
              escape to 'the tropics' together with the politician. The motive 
              of the dark technology is introduced in the movie by an old lady, 
              who, pointing to her (then brand-new) cell phone, asks McClane's 
              wife on an airplane, "Isn't technology wonderful?" The 
              remaining two hours of Die Hard 2 can be read as a boldly negative 
              answer to this question. In fact, the movie opens up a dichotomy 
              between mere mechanical tools and electronic technology. This dichotomy 
              becomes apparent as, in the first scenes, McClane's car is towed 
              and he starts an argument with a New York police officer (who neither 
              cares about McClane's Los Angeles Police badge nor about the date 
              being Christmas Eve). The towing scene works as a counter-statement 
              against the rest of the movie: the human operator still has the 
              power over her tow truck-McClane's anger is directed against her, 
              not against the machine itself. Telephones, on the other hand, are 
              a dangerous and unpredictable technology in the movie. The notoriously 
              scarce pay phones are almost a running gag, and cell phones can 
              even threaten your life: as McClane sneaks up to the hackers who 
              have barricaded themselves in a small church, his cell phone rings, 
              giving him away to the crossfire of his enemies. Not surprisingly, 
              there's not a lot of 'good' technology in the movie. In a classic 
              scene, McClane is able to press the ejection switch of a hot seat 
              just in time to escape from an exploding plane. But generally, technology 
              in Die Hard 2 is constructed as the murky in-between the men at 
              the switches in the airport control tower and the pilots in the 
              cockpit. Even the hackers have to experience that it can turn into 
              a menace when, after they ingeniously hacked a whole airport control 
              system, their B747 finally explodes-through the manual labor of 
              John McClane. 
             
            Another notion 
              that is deeply connected to hacking is 'trespassing,' a concept 
              which Die Hard 2 employs in several ways. Individuals are trying 
              to gain access to forbidden spaces, and an authority blocks this 
              access for no apparent reason: the usually crowded public space 
              (the airport arrival halls, bars, cafés) is set against the 
              randomly sealed-up space that is owned by someone else. Throughout 
              the movie, the notion of trespassing is connected to the uncanny 
              when McClane actually manages to cross over into the forbidden. 
              He then finds himself within dark surroundings, as in the gunfight 
              between the screeching belts of the luggage transport system in 
              the 'bowels' of the airport. The hackers, of course, are already 
              on this other side; close to the machine, they use it as a camouflage 
              for their activity. McClane is randomly blocked away from this space, 
              and this contingency of access denial is personified in the figure 
              of airport police chief Lorenzo (Dennis Franz). Lorenzo is a fat 
              annoying figure that sits in McClane's way wherever he goes, attentive 
              only when his own personal position within the system is endangered 
              by his own boss--bureaucracy personified. Arguably, in connecting 
              this bureaucratic character with McClane's crossing over into the 
              forbidden, Die Hard 2 establishes a hacker mindset in the viewer: 
              the movie can be read in terms of the continuing attempts to get 
              access by McClane, and, of course, by the hackers to get access 
              to the tower, which positions them close to McClane. 
            Not surprisingly, 
              then, the movie's imagery of hackers is highly ambiguous. On the 
              one hand, since we're dealing with a Hollywood movie, to some extent, 
              hackers simply are the bad guys. The Colonel (William Sadler), the 
              leader of the group of hackers, is a blonde, Teutonic man with an 
              evil stare, and the "victory for our way of life" which 
              he proclaims right before their B747 explodes, seems to be a victory 
              for smoking dope in the back of a plane, and for partying in the 
              tropics on money that you've been paid by a drug mafia figure. The 
              political motivation of the hackers in bringing Esperanza safely 
              to the tropics is summed-up in the statement "I've seen enough 
              snow in my lifetime." But then again, hackers have good traits 
              in Die Hard 2. 'Social engineering,' for example, is a strategy 
              that both McClane and the hackers use: Captain Grant (John Amos), 
              the leader of a military platoon that apparently comes to safe the 
              situation, turns out to be a member of the hacker group in the end. 
              And John McClane, pretending to be a local policeman, 'socially 
              engineers' his way to a fingerprint of a dead hacker. The movie 
              makes clear that a hacker is not "some punk stealing luggage" 
              (Lorenzo) but someone who can influence technology on a very deep 
              level when the hackers not only shut down the lights of the runways, 
              but also reset the ground for a plane at minus 200 feet-they turn 
              into terrorists who can deeply influence a whole world structure 
              that relies heavily on technology. "It's like the tower isn't 
              there," the 'good guys' have to realize, before they send in 
              a 'good' hacker of their own: an African-American tower technician 
              elegantly hacks a beeper tower to sending radio signals to the pilots. 
              So when McClane's wife Holly tells him at the very end, "They 
              told me there were terrorists at the airport," McClane somewhat 
              sympathetically ends the movie on the note: "They are that 
              too."  
            But let's not 
              forget about the limits of Die Hard 2. The movie might portray hackers 
              ambiguously and it might bring to mind a relatively complex picture 
              of the Hollywood projections of uncanny technology, but the whole 
              source for the terror and the fighting, the political problems of 
              the United States with South American drug cartels, entirely falls 
              into the background as the action continues to develop. Generally, 
              the movie is more about personal activism, freedom, empowerment 
              to get access, and fun, than about political problem solving. The 
              politician Esperanza is not brought to a fair trial but simply killed-a 
              fact that might point to the limits that anyone who has political 
              ambitions to inscribe into hacker culture might have to face with. 
              But let's leave the contradictory Hollywood mindset of the late 
              1980s aside and see whether the 'technological uncanny' that has 
              figured prominently in Die Hard 2 will get us anywhere when employed 
              to the really existing internet and its digital outlaws. 
            
            Theorizing 
              the Uncanny Data Space 
             
              The perfect 
                bogeyman for Modern Times is the Cyberpunk! He is so smart he 
                makes you feel even more stupid than you usually do. He knows 
                this complex country in which you're perpetually lost. He understands 
                the value of things you can't conceptualize long enough to cash 
                in on. He is the one?eyed man in the Country of the Blind. 
                -J. P. Barlow, Crime and Puzzlement Manifesto 
               
            There's an important 
              difference between saying that something is constructed and saying 
              that the image of technology in Hollywood movies is merely an dark 
              fantasy. And there is also a difference between relativizing hacker 
              culture as a complex, empty signifier and saying that hackers as 
              a menace (crackers) simply don't exist. There are very real reasons 
              for the public angst. Think of the horror that stood at the very 
              beginning of the internet. In 1957, the Soviet Union succeeded in 
              launching a satellite into the orbit, and the Soviets won the 'space 
              race' against the United States. America fell into the so-called 
              'Sputnik shock' and, once it was on its feet again, founded the 
              Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) as a part of the Department 
              of Defense. The computer history Fire in the Valley clearly assesses 
              that the purpose of the network of computers that the ARPA researchers 
              put up back then had been from the start "to build a defense-research 
              communication channel robust enough to survive a nuclear attack" 
              (Freiberger & Swaine, 2000, p. 209). And this 'horror of the 
              beginning' has technologically continued throughout the history 
              of the internet.  
             
            The free flow 
              of information on a global computer network is essentially hard 
              to control, thereby adding to the dark twist of the Web. Corporations 
              take great pains to secure their 'unfree' data, and some of them 
              are selling security to private individuals in the form of encryption 
              software or firewall programs. So, with vulnerability being a central 
              issue in the thinking about an uncanny logic of the data sphere, 
              the nature of information turns into a contested, attacked, secured, 
              and fought about concept. Two projects, I think, fit particularly 
              well to illustrate this point. The first one is Cryptome (http://www.cryptome.org), 
              a website that specializes in making restricted information available 
              to the public. On the project's internet page, the purpose of Cryptome 
              reads: "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are 
              prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom 
              of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual?use technologies, national 
              security, intelligence, and blast protection--open, secret and classified 
              documents--but not limited to those." Browsing through the 
              website, one can find, for example, recent documents from the Al 
              Qaeda trials, access to which has actually been bought up by Cryptome. 
              The site's aim for providing access to restricted information for 
              individuals presupposes, of course, the two notions that there is 
              'secret' information and that the individuals' vulnerability is 
              not to have access to that. Furthermore, Cryptome constructs a state 
              apparatus that is vulnerable in that there finally is a way to get 
              access to its secrets (by the cunning of crackers, mostly). These 
              two-layered vulnerabilities surfaced again in an e-mail conversation 
              that I had with John Young, the maintainer of Cryptome. Young wrote 
              that Cryptome is "political in that we aim to offer information 
              access different from what is dispensed by authoritarians-all of 
              whom are censors and avid suppressors of political action" 
              (personal communication, May 1, 2002).  
            In the context 
              of digital art, a project of the San José-based collective 
              C5 is interesting when looking at the contested nature of information 
              on the Web and at the vulnerabilities that the free flow of information 
              causes. For Lisa Jevbratt's 1:1 (http://www.c5corp.com/ 
                projects/1to1), for example, C5 software robots traveled in 
              data sphere, systematically evaluating the content of IP addresses 
              (an IP address is the number that a 'Web' address stands for, and 
              it consists of four numbers from 0 to 255). During the first run 
              of the bots in 1999, what appeared on the 1:1 maps of data space 
              were mostly governmental or military pages that often required passwords-the 
              map gave you an uncanny feeling about the 'real' nature of its content 
              instead of the friendly and colorful image within your everyday 
              Yahoo! frame. In another project called Softsub (http://www.c5corp.com/projects/softsub), 
              C5 'data-mines' your computer at home and feeds seemingly banal 
              information about your directory structure and desktop layout into 
              a program that calculates your machine's closeness to other desktop 
              configurations. Softsub, therefore, hints at the "lack of awareness 
              (of the average computer user) about how extensively personal information 
              that has been collected is used on the Net and to whom this information 
              is shared" that John Young finds (personal communication, May 
              1, 2002). 
            With cell phones 
              increasingly turning into a fashion product (Nokia, for example, 
              makes more money off the selling of plastic covers than off technology), 
              'vulnerability,' of course, also reaches into cell space. In the 
              Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling cautions that "eavesdropping 
              on other people's cordless and cellular phone calls is the fastest 
              growing area in phreaking (phone hacking) today" (Sterling, 
              1994, pt. 2).. It seems comparatively easy to fake your identity 
              on a cell phone, a hack that enables you to hide your location from 
              'authorities' (drug dealers like this) and to get free calls. In 
              fact, any attentive reader of issue 73 of the Datenschleuder, a 
              magazine of the Berlin-based Chaos Computer Club (CCC), will learn 
              how to lead denial of service attacks (DoS) against Nokia cell phones.** 
              Interestingly, the uncanny of cell- or telephone space has a historical 
              dimension: In the 1870s, the early days of telephony, phones were 
              regarded as spooky gadgets-mysteriously speaking machines that hardly 
              anybody would dare talk to (see Sterling, 1994, pt. 1). Only much 
              later, telephones came to be regarded as a medium with a real person 
              on the other side. So the uncanniness stayed on with each time that 
              the technology took another step forward: telegraph boys, maybe 
              being the first hackers, had fun wiring up the wrong people with 
              each other until, in 1878, Bell fired them all and legions of professional 
              female operators stepped in.  
            This suggests 
              that hackers themselves, of course, can be 'bad guys' as well, and 
              contribute to vulnerability on the Web. The National Institute of 
              Standards and Technology, in a famous document entitled "Threat 
              Assessment of Malicious Code and Human Threats," describes 
              hackers in the following way: "Today, computer systems are 
              under attack from a multitude of sources. These range from malicious 
              code, such as viruses and worms, to human threats, such as hackers 
              and phone "phreaks." The document goes on by saying that 
              malicious "code (...) attacks a system in one of two ways, 
              either internally or externally. (...) Human threats are perpetrated 
              by individuals or groups of individuals that attempt to penetrate 
              systems through computer networks, public switched telephone networks 
              or other sources" (Bassham & Polk, 1994). What, to the 
              technologically illiterate, seems to be a Die Hard 2-construction 
              of a menace to society, maybe becomes more understandable when you 
              imagine someone regularly searching through your trash. Someone 
              reads every torn bill or letter that you threw away. You'll realize 
              that this person could find out quite a lot about you, only until 
              now you never thought that someone might actually search something 
              as 'abject' as your trash can. Well, some hackers would do that, 
              and it's called 'trashing.' If you're a little frightened now about 
              your trashing practice, you can imagine the uncanny that computer 
              network administrators feel when they notice a cracker in their 
              system... 
             
            Bruce Sterling, 
              summing-up what I've said above, writes that the "extent of 
              this vulnerability (of data space) is deep, dark, broad, almost 
              mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about 
              any computer on a network" (Sterling, 1994, pt. 1). In my mind, 
              this vulnerability can be grasped with Julia Kristeva's notion of 
              'the abject' which she develops in her book Powers of Horror. Using 
              her famous example of the skin on the surface of milk which causes 
              sickness, Kristeva writes that there "looms, within abjection, 
              one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a 
              threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, 
              ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable" 
              (Kristeva, 1987, p. 1). If we see crackers as the abject of the 
              electronic age, they constitute that "massive and sudden emergence 
              of uncanniness" (p. 2) and a "real threat (that) beckons 
              to us and ends up engulfing us" (p. 4) that Kristeva talks 
              about. One key passage explicitly connects the criminal to abjection: 
              "it is not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, 
              but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect 
              borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite 
              (...). Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of 
              the law" (p. 4). The construction of hackers by the media and 
              society, it seems, fits well into this framework. But Kristeva also 
              hints at the playful aspect of hacking that Frans Faase, the hacker 
              who commented the "I love you"-source code, has already 
              described: the abject "acknowledges the impossibility of Religion, 
              Morality, and Law-their power play, their necessary and absurd seeming. 
              Like perversion, it takes advantage of them, gets round them, and 
              makes sport of them" (p. 16). The counterstatement against 
              hackers as the playful abject of data space is the aseptical software 
              figure of Dr. Solomon, the white medical person who periodically 
              cleans your hard disk, thereby ritually and redemptively swiping 
              it clean of any abject data. Finally, accounts of cracker arrests 
              can be grasped within the notion of the abject as well. Leftist, 
              whose parents were "traumatized" when he was arrested 
              during the hacker crackdown, and Terminus, who was arrested as well 
              to "the stark terror of his wife and children," become 
              the abject in the family-the "threating otherness" (Kristeva) 
              that finally turned out to be within (Sterling, 1994, pt. 2).  
            
            How Hackers 
              see Themselves 
             
              The 'hacker 
                culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures 
                that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared experiences, 
                shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, 
                villains, folk epics, in?jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because hackers 
                as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves 
                partly by rejection of 'normal' values and working habits, it 
                has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional 
                culture less than 40 years old. 
                -The Hacker Jargon File, Version 4.3.1 
               
            Hackers, in 
              the way in which they imagine themselves and their friends (and 
              enemies), are a complex phenomenon that entails all the difficulties 
              of analysis that hold true for any other subculture. My way through 
              this maze will be that I'll describe some of the quite problematic 
              self-definitions that prominent U.S. hackers hold about themselves 
              and trace those definitions back to mythical constructions such 
              as the digital outlaw. 
             
            Hackers in the 
              United States are, of course, much more critical about themselves 
              than the stereotypical, if somewhat complex images of Die Hard 2 
              suggest. An issue that they are very critical about is internet 
              access (without which, of course, they wouldn't be able to hack 
              at all). American hackers, it seems, share a common concern about 
              the 'freedom of information' and about possible restrictions on 
              the openness of the data sphere and they also share certain premonitions 
              about the Foucauldian workings of power within that sphere. Eric 
              S. Raymond, a famous Linux programmer and author of the influential 
              book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, holds that the data sphere is 
              "open in that it's easy for lots of people to reach and difficult 
              to control" (personal communication, April 29, 2002). Raymond 
              goes on to say that, in the data sphere, he sees "the possibility 
              to help individuals become better able to acquire knowledge and 
              disseminate their thoughts to others" which should give them 
              "more leverage relative to governments and corporations." 
              And John Young of Cryptome says that "there are sustained attempts 
              to restrict (the internet) becoming and remaining fully open and 
              to instead use it for intellectual, political, social and economic 
              control" (personal communication, April 28, 2002). So although 
              both hackers imagine the Web as an essentially open space, the limits 
              of that space are clear in that governments and corporations are 
              constructed as blocking the free 'dissemination of thought,' and 
              that the Web is used for controlling purposes by an imagined state 
              apparatus. 
              
            The critical 
              view that already surfaces in such hacker statements about control 
              and informational freedom finds an expression in the antagonistic 
              construction of 'the cracker,' the enemy of hacker culture who illegally 
              breaks into computer systems. The Mentor, in his Hacker Manifesto, 
              plays with this construction when he confesses: "Yes, I am 
              a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging 
              people by what they say and think, not what they look like" 
              (The Mentor, 1986). Eric Raymond discussed the construction of the 
              hacker/cracker distinction at length in an e-mail conversation with 
              me. He holds that there "is a large, open culture of hackers 
              (...)-technologists who invented the Internet and keep it running 
              (...). We're no threat to anybody. There is a much smaller culture 
              of crackers, very secretive and in parts actively criminal." 
              Raymond traces this antagonism back to the split between the early 
              Personal Computer hobbyists and the campus subculture of minicomputer?based 
              hacker groups-interestingly, many expressions of hacker jargon such 
              as 'trojan' were coined in the 1960s college environments. Nevertheless, 
              what can be seen in this construction of the cracker, in my mind, 
              is that hackers as a subculture have their very own antagonisms. 
              They see themselves as 'the good technologists' with certain codes 
              and laws, while a group that they construct as 'crackers' (or 'script 
              kiddies') disturbs their system and does not 'respect borders, positions, 
              rules,' drawing attention to the emptiness and 'fragility' (Kristeva) 
              of their own self-construction-hackers, so to say, have their very 
              own abject.  
            It is within 
              this terrain that the notion of 'ethical hacking,' which has become 
              a real buzzword again, has emerged in the 1980s: ethical hacking, 
              read as an attempt to unite the binarism of hacker vs. cracker, 
              is an attempt to dismiss the abject of hacker culture by positing 
              an inherent ethics of hacking practice. The concept itself goes 
              back to Stephen Levy's book Hackers-true hackers, Levy writes, have 
              a "philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization" 
              (...). They "were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists 
              ... and the ones who most clearly saw why the computer was a truly 
              revolutionary tool" (Levy, 1984, p. X). Free access to technology, 
              the freedom of information, mistrust against authority, and the 
              view that computers can change life for the better are the basic 
              columns of Levy's ethics. Not surprisingly, these values have been 
              rediscovered by books such as Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar 
              and Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic. Raymond's overall argument 
              in Cathedral is nicely summed-up by Linus Torvald's (the programmer 
              of the kernel for the 'free' Linux operating system) law: "Given 
              enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (Raymond, 1999, p. 41). 
              As a believer in the free market, Raymond develops a strategy for 
              marketing Linux applications under the brand of 'open source' software, 
              an overall aim that is shared by Pekka Himanen in Hacker Ethic. 
              Himanen holds that "computer hackers can be understood as an 
              excellent example of a more general work ethic-which we can give 
              the name the hacker ethic-gaining ground in our network society" 
              (Himanen, 2001, p. 7). This ethic, unlike the Weberian work ethic, 
              holds that meaning "cannot be found in work or leisure but 
              has to arise out of the nature of activity itself" (p. 151). 
              Both Himanen and Raymond suggest an ethics of play which, at the 
              same time, makes the individual work. Again, what we have here is 
              the construction of laws and structure that 'real hacking' was meant 
              to run orthogonal to.  
            The above discussion 
              suggests some problems with Bruce Sterling's assessment that "there 
              is an element in American culture that has always strongly (...) 
              rebelled against all large (...) companies" and that a "certain 
              anarchical tinge deep in the American soul delights in causing confusion 
              and pain to all bureaucracies, including technological ones." 
              (Sterling, 1994, pt. 2). In fact, throughout the U.S. hacker culture, 
              an image of the electronic frontier is still prevalent that could 
              be viewed as the positive imaginary of the unconscious of hacker 
              culture that gets blown up as the hackers continue to face the 'threatening 
              otherness' (Kristeva) within their own tribe. In 1990, John Perry 
              Barlow, together with Mitchell Kapor, founded the aptly named Electronic 
              Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org), 
              an organization to promote the right of free speech in cyberspace. 
              Barlow, in his famous Crime and Puzzlement Manifesto, works a lot 
              with imagery of the frontier and the century West: "Cyberspace 
              (...) has a lot to do with the 19th century West. It is vast, unmapped, 
              culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally tense (...), hard to 
              get around in and up for grabs" (Barlow, 1990). Bruce Sterling, 
              in The Hacker Crackdown, uses similar expressions when talking about 
              the nature of the data sphere. Sterling asserts that hackers are 
              "soaked through with heroic anti-bureaucratic sentiment" 
              and that they "long for recognition as a praiseworthy cultural 
              archetype, the postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and 
              mountain man" (Sterling, 1994, pt. 2). Furthermore, he talks 
              about data space as the indefinite place 'out there,' and his analysis 
              culminates in the view that "a Personal Computer can be a great 
              equalizer for the techno-cowboy-much like that more traditional 
              American "Great Equalizer", the Personal Sixgun" 
              (Sterling, 1994, pt. 3). So I think one can generally assert, with 
              Sean Cubitt, that the anonymity of the U.S. data space "has 
              given rise to (...) the most uncompromisingly individualist of cultural 
              icons: the outlaw, the phreak, the cowboy, the frontier." As 
              Cubitt goes on to say, the "very Americanization of matrix 
              vocabulary indicates less its domination by North Americans than 
              the power of the North American mythography of westward expansion 
              and rugged individualism in the new context" (Cubitt, 1998, 
              p. 87).  
            Since the frontier 
              is a contested terrain, however, multiple antagonisms around the 
              hacker ethic are played out between fragmented hacker cultures underneath 
              the blown-up imagery of the 'vast open spaces.' The principle of 
              the freedom of information is contested as the programming of Linux 
              is basically free, but then again the most often visited sites about 
              Linux applications and information about the free software scene, 
              slashdot.org and Freshmeat, are owned and run by a company-VA Linux 
              systems. The principle of judging people on what they know is equally 
              contested by the tribal logic of hacker culture: This logic fosters 
              elite thinking and boasting, since "the way to win a solid 
              reputation in the underground is by telling other hackers things 
              that could only have been learned by exceptional cunning and stealth" 
              (Sterling, 1994, pt. 2). Handles that contain the words 'master' 
              or 'genius' are frequently used, and European hackers (who often 
              despise of such handles) are constructed as "hash-smoking anarchist 
              hackers who had rubbed shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international 
              Communist espionage" (Sterling). That computers can change 
              life for the better is highly relativized by issues of access and 
              the practice of carding which is (at least to crackers) one of the 
              best ways for an arguably simplistic betterment: In order to get 
              more money for new computers, you spy on someone's credit card transactions 
              to later use the card yourself. Finally, and not surprisingly, hackers 
              also have constructed their very own technological and social uncanny: 
              the figure of Microsoft head Bill Gates. A hacker site (http://www.enemy.org) 
              constructs Gates, as Slavoj iek aptly writes, as the 
              "Master who is simultaneously our common peer, our fellow-creature, 
              our imaginary double and-for this very reason-phantasmatically endowed 
              with another dimension of the Evil Genius." (iek, 
              1999, p. 349). So, given all those antagonisms, hacker culture generally 
              looks highly fragmented and doesn't seem to serve too easily as 
              a subculture onto which one can project hopes of a revolution (as 
              Negri & Hardt have tried to do recently with their update of 
              the term 'virtuality'). If anything can serve as a subject of resistance 
              at all, that might work best with a recent phenomenon that runs 
              so orthogonal to digital culture that even the hackers don't think 
              of as 'real' hacking. 
            
            What Hackers 
              don't call Hacking: Hacktivism 
             
              We are not 
                against government, but we are for government that is representative 
                of the needs of the people, that works to provide these needs 
                and services for them, and that is not influenced as part of its 
                everyday operation to meet the needs of one minority group within 
                society-large corporations. 
                -The Electrohippies Manifesto 
               
              
  As a practice of resistance, 'hacktivism' is a phenomenon that can 
              be situated close to activism, but hacktivism also employs certain 
              hacker strategies in its heavy use of technology (for example, DoS 
              attacks ). Prominent activities of groups such as the Zapatistas, 
              the Billboard Liberation Front, Cult of the Dead Cow, or Rark, 
              included the group X?Ploit's hacking of Mexico's finance ministry 
              Website, replacing it with the face of Zapata, in sympathy with 
              the Zapatista rebellion in the Chiapas region of Mexico; the New 
              York Times website being replaced with a call for the release of 
              jailed hacker Kevin Mitnick; political activists changing Indian 
              government websites to include photos calling attention to the government?sponsored 
              human rights violations in Kashmir; and Nike.com being 'hijacked'-the 
              site visitors were redirected to an Australian labor rights site. 
              As becomes apparent from this list, a practice seems to be going 
              on that, especially as it is being contested by the 'real' hackers, 
              deserves closer attention as possible site for resistance. 
            Hacktivism has 
              its historical precursors in the beginnings of cultural jamming. 
              Critic Mark Dery describes this notion as the use of a "guerrilla 
              semiotics-analytical techniques not unlike those employed by scholars 
              to decipher the signs and symbols that constitute a culture's secret 
              language" (Dery, 1993). Dery goes on to say that the culture 
              jammers' question is: "Who will have access to (...) information, 
              and on what terms? (...) In short, will the electronic frontier 
              be wormholed with 'temporary autonomous zones' (...) or will it 
              be subdivided and overdeveloped by what cultural critic Andrew Ross 
              calls  "the military-industrial-media complex" The people 
              first to prominently make use of this 'guerrilla semiotics' were 
              probably Jack Napier and Irving Glikk (both names are pseudonyms) 
              of the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) in San Francisco. In 1977, 
              they started to 'improve' existing billboard messages, starting 
              out from the insight that the internet is "a commodity which 
              is being carved up by commercial interests more each day" (personal 
              communication, May 1, 2002). In their Manifesto, the BLF people 
              ironically write that "the Ad holds the most esteemed position 
              in our cosmology" and that, therefore, "to Advertise is 
              to Exist. To Exist is to Advertise" (Napier, 1999). Perhaps 
              a recent action of the BLF can illustrate this: In 1998, the group 
              changed Apple's "Think Different" claim into "Think 
              Disillusioned" on a famous billboard ad starring the Dalai 
              Lama, and it altered the company's rainbow-colored apple logo into 
              a skull. So I think it can be argued that the BLF is quite conscious 
              of the complex Foucauldian workings of power in society: jamming 
              billboards, their Manifesto explains, is like messing with "the 
              messenger RNA of capitalism." And it's fun, too. 
              
            The Electrohippies 
              (http://www.fraw.org.uk/ehippies) 
              are a collective that has taken such jamming practices into the 
              data sphere. Their latest action is a 'virtual sit-in' called "Netstrike" 
              against the Israelian government that is technically accomplished 
              by using DoS-attacks-anyone with a modem and a computer can access 
              a site which repeatedly sends requests to the Israelian government's 
              website until it finally crashes (http://www.geocities.com/netstrike4palestine). 
              The ehippies' conception of the data sphere is complex in that it 
              includes all connected electronic media "that enable the dissemination 
              of information and intellectual property: telephones, fax machines, 
              information technology, radio, and the Internet."(Electrohippies, 
              2002) Interestingly, the collective's 'guerilla semiotics' starts 
              out with its very name-their resignification of the term 'hippie' 
              creates a dynamic meaning that serves well in the partly mocking 
              and partly serious attempts to semiotically jam the data sphere. 
              Coming from an activist background rather than a computer hobbyist 
              scene, the Electrohippies have an important concern that the 'real' 
              hackers and crackers leave out: the connection between the real 
              world and the data sphere. According to their website, the "corporate 
              forces that are damaging the world (...) are the same corporate 
              forces that are creating this new information society because it 
              assists their purposes. Therefore, tackling the inequalities created 
              by the new networked society before they become established is as 
              important as tackling real world problems today."  
            The 'hacktivismo' 
              movement (http://www.hacktivismo.com) 
              continues what might be called a notion of 'electronic civil disobedience' 
              (ECD). The group states in their manifesto that everyone shall have 
              the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas 
              of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing 
              or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his 
              choice" (Hacktivismo, 2001). Electronic civil disobedience 
              has become a famous concept through the actions of the Zapatista 
              movement: The Zapatista rebellion in the Chiapas region in Mexico 
              largely depended on the use of hacker techniques and technology. 
              With the traditional methods of public discourse being blocked or 
              exhausted, the Zapatistas came up with the Floodnet tool, DoS software 
              that can be downloaded from their website (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html). 
              The Zapatistas and the concept of ECD also draw attention to the 
              interplay between economical and political structures that depend 
              heavily on the global internet: "Blocking information conduits 
              is analogous to blocking physical locations; however, electronic 
              blockage can cause financial stress that physical blockage cannot, 
              and it can be used beyond the local level" (Hacktivist, 2001). 
              What has become clear from the statements of the hacktivist groups, 
              in my mind, is their concern about the connection between real political 
              action and activism on the internet. Hacktivists don't serve as 
              easily as hackers as the latest 'counter-hegemonic' group, since 
              their practice is at times equally self-mocking as it mocks its 
              target-the . So the self-conscious technological play of hacktivists 
              suggests the way in which 'hacking' could actually constitute a 
              radical cultural practice and a jams the terrain between the virtual 
              and the real. 
            
            Conclusion: 
              Hacking as Playful Resistance 
             
              We cannot 
                relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence, 
                therefore, has an inescapably fluid character. This is not to 
                say that we live in a fluid context, but that our lives themselves 
                are fluid. [
] Only that which can change can continue: this 
                is the principle by which infinite players live. 
                -J. P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games 
               
            I have shown 
              throughout this article that hackers cannot serve as the new 'counter-hegemonic' 
              subject that Hardt & Negri (2000), among others, project onto 
              digital culture's outlaws. The way in which Hollywood movies such 
              as Die Hard 2 in the early 1990s constructed hackers as an uncanny 
              menace might have lead the way into to such romanticizing fantasies 
              that finally employ myths (such as the openness of digital space) 
              that the cultural critics of the Left set out to dismantle. In fact, 
              hacker culture is much more fragmented and antagonistic than these 
              critics hold, so that it lends itself, in my mind, much more readily 
              to Ernesto Laclau's theory of hegemony than to hopes for a revolution. 
              Hackers' pejorative statements about 'crackers' or 'script kiddies' 
              point to the existence of hacker culture's own abject, and, in Laclau's 
              terms, to the "limits of all objectivity" (Laclau & 
              Mouffe, 1985, p. 122)-to define the 'fullness' of hacker culture 
              is impossible. In the semiotic struggle about the culture, however, 
              the self-conscious technological mockery of hacktivists such as 
              the Electrohippies constitutes a cultural practice that more radically 
              jams the virtual and the political. Hacktivism, one might say, constitutes 
              a necessary, playful reaction by digital activists to Foucauldian 
              power structures, once the universality of hegemony has been accepted. 
            The importance 
              of play at the crossroad between the political and the data sphere 
              has already been hinted at by Sean Cubitt when he states that the 
              playful "mode of reading, its potentials and limitations, is 
              central to reading in both the Internet and multimedia" (Cubitt, 
              1998, p. 15). Can one, then, make sense of hacktivism as playful 
              resistance? It's a little more complex, I think. James Carse has 
              developed an interesting language in talking about play that might 
              help to see hacking as a playful culture that can serve as a field 
              that is, in a sense, not as rooted in power as Capitalism, in that 
              it tweaks the power structures and causes unforeseen outcome. Carse 
              differentiates between finite and infinite games-the latter continue 
              without results whereas the former have a winner and a loser (zero-sum 
              games). Hacktivists are the finite gamers in this language: instead 
              of killing their opponent, their game continues, and it changes 
              its rules as it does that. The Toywar of the hacktivist/artist collective 
              etoy is a good example here: etoy won a virtual domain name war 
              against lawyers of eToys.com because of their strategy of changing 
              rules as the games continues, preserving the openness of the play 
              (http://www.toywar.com). Etoy 
              (or the Electrohippies, or the Zapatistas, or BLF) can easily be 
              called 'just steamy young males' without real political aims, so 
              it's vital to understand how Carse could think of play as being 
              "political without politics" to see where my main argument, 
              perhaps, is finally going (p. 47). Finite play, for Carse, is like 
              theater: the participants walk home after the show and become liberal 
              subjects again. But add hegemony/antagonism to the picture and you 
              get the infinite game of cultural resistance: it is one consequence 
              of the insight into the universality of antagonisms that constitute 
              hegemony. Similar to the conflict in a drama, the antagonisms at 
              the heart of society are irresoluble. Hacktivists have taken this 
              lesson to heart and, so it seems, they are trying their best to 
              playfully expose the logic of Capital that increasingly rules the 
              digital world in order to evoke that (always already nostalgic) 
              dream of the early Tech Model Railroad Club hackers at MIT: to control 
              things yourself. 
            
             
                 
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            *This article 
              has benefited from criticisms by members of the Nettime and Rohrpost 
              mailing lists, most notably Harald Hillgärtner, and from criticism 
              from my teachers Margaret Morse and Winfried Fluck. I am particularly 
              grateful for comments from the legendary GNU/Linux programmers Richard 
              Stallman and Eric Raymond, Jack Napier of the Billboard Liberation 
              Front, John Young of Cryptome, and from the legendary hacker John 
              "Cap'n Crunch" Draper. 
               
              ** A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is the flooding of an internet 
              server by sending multiple page requests to it, so that the server 
              cannot process the requests anymore and simply 'denies service.' 
              Such attacks are usually done with the help of specific computer 
              programs, such as Floodnet. 
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