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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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