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/// INTRODUCTIONS
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The concept of hacktivism, while eloquently described for decades in contextual re-imaginings of synthetic, science fiction-enhanced futures by authors such as William Gibson, Jeff Noon, and China Melville, has recently become startlingly salient in today’s global-political sphere. Hacktivists have finally jumped from the world of fiction to our current reality, and they have done so in a unique way—by demolishing previous regional and nationalist boundaries and creating a global, conscious network of net-based activists impossible to pin down and difficult to track.
What I am specificaly concerned with for the purposes of this essay is how place-making as been uniquely re-imagined through contemporary net-based activism. This activism is known as ‘Hacktivism’ by admirers and researchers, while opponents prefer the term ‘Cyberterrorism’. Today’s hacktivist initiatives, in a sense, have caused deeper levels of damage to existing systems of power than the isolated, sporadic jabs of Gibson and Melville’s fictional master hackers. In essence, my thesis centers on the theory that the worst nightmares of hacktivism’s opponents and the greatest dreams of hacktivism’s initial representation have actually been realized. TODAY’S HACKTIVISM IS A LITERAL EMBODIMENT OF THE VIRTUAL CYBER CITY—A HYPER-REALIZED COMMUNITY OF ACTIVISTS AND HACKERS UNITING TOWARDS COMMON GOALS AND UNDENIABLY PROVOKING CHANGE.
To adequately explicate this thesis, I will draw from a variety of academic and non-academic sources from both the governmental and non-governmental political sphere, as well as the original visionaries who first imagined what hacktivism would look like—science fiction writers themselves. I will draw heavily from two novels that have specifically exemplified hacktivism through ‘master/hacker’ protagonists—William Gibson’s Neuromancer and China Melville’s Perdido Street Station.
In this essay’s totality, I aim to prove that cyber hacktivism has transformed itself from something fictional into something exhilaratingly and terrifyingly concrete, creating an unstoppable, placeless community/city of activists and hackers from all spectrums of political life prepared to act en masse. While a hacktivist initiative entirely unified on the global scale has not yet occurred, I predict it is only a matter of time before it does.
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/// OUTLINE
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The format of this essay shall exist in three parts, as follows:
One\ The Fiction of hacktivism \
/// hypothetical, visionary imaginings, science fiction dystopias and hyper-realized cyberspace protagonists.
Two\ The Present of hacktivism \
/// initiatives and communities existing today, successes and failures, contemporary political analyses of hacktivism.
Three\ The Future of Hacktivism \
/// possibilities, potentialities and existentialities.
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/// FIRST, WHAT IS HACKTIVISM?
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In 1994, guerilla artist Rushkoff inspired an entire generation of counter-culture hackers and artists when he said that “one two-dollar can of spray can reverse a hundred-thousand-dollar media campaign.”[i] Hacktivism can be defined as the emergence of community-based political actions on the internet, often orchestrated by computer hacking and code. It is also an umbrella term which includes a wide range of activist web-based initiatives, including ‘culture-jamming’ (reversing the images of corporate advertising into something critical) performance-based satirical interventions, and civil disobedience on an electronic medium. A few well-known hacktivist groups are (arguably) the Yes Men, the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, the Zapatistas and Adbusters. Hacktivism in itself originated in the mid 1990’s out of basic hacks and hacking projects. While original hackers rejected politics and overriding ideological impetuses, hacktivists embraced these underlying factors in their work.
Paul A. Taylor, a notable counter-culture scholar who has done a great deal of research on hacktivism and how it has affected community, writes that hacktivism is more successful as a whole than hacking because it is “the refocusing upon the political nature of the end to which technological means should be put: a normative element has been put back into objectified computer code.”[ii] He adds that while early hacking culture saw hackers acting as mere “embodiments of the Frankfurt School’s notion of instrumental reason,” consequently falling victim to their own “apparently inherent inability to see beyond the technical artifacts presented to them by the dominant social system,”[iii] hacktivism immediately realized exactly who the players were and was able to manipulate them instead of being manipulated BY them. Instead of allowing corporate media and communications to use them in their own image as something ‘cool’ to be re-created and commodified (one only needs to view the cult-classic film Hackers with Angelina Jolie to see an example of this), hacktivists turn corporate communications on its head and use it to their own political ends. When I think of the manipulation of existing systems of power to the point that the original power is misaligned to the point of being unrecognizable, I think immediately of the methods used by the Weaver in China Melville’s Perdido Street Station.
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/// THE FICTION OF HACKTIVISM
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THE WEAVER IN CHINA MELVILLE’S PERDIDO STREET STATION.
Jordan and Taylor assert that “hacktivists operate almost entirely within a fabric of cyberspace, struggling over what is technologically possible in virtual life, and reaching out of cyberspace to utilize those powers to mould offline life.”[iv] The Weaver certainly works within this framework, although with the visualization of a ‘web’ instead of a ‘fabric’ of virtual vs. real life. The Weaver is described in Melville’s novel as a gigantic spider who works within both the virtual, dream-influenced web-world and the real, concrete world of the city’s residents.
Much like a hacker, the Weaver is able to visualize another world in accordance with the real world, and acts based on what he/she sees in that virtual world—entirely free of abjuration and law-based considerations which constrain those living entirely in the real world. The Weaver comes and goes as it pleases, and is unstoppable due to its fluid, de-regionalized nature. “From out of the shadows cast by some unseen shapes, shadows that seemed stretched-out and taut,”[v] the Weaver shows itself to others only when it chooses to. It is ruled entirely by a set of ideologies which cannot be easily comprehended or predicted by others—at least, others who happen to exist outside the Weaver’s own community (of other Weavers, as hinted at several times throughout the novel).
Other characters describe what happens when the Weaver decides to appear in front of them—“there was no sudden manifestation, no creeping flesh or vast stalking figure…. All that happened was that the Weaver’s voice sounded in Rudgutter’s ear.”[vi] The Weaver’s actions and speech are often entirely incomprehensible to the other characters in the novel—as if the Weaver truly does inhabit another world with different rules, ideas and speech. To others, the Weaver “was utterly alien…there could be no bargaining and no games…it had been tried.”[vii] Based on these descriptions of the Weaver, he/she can even be seen as what our fledgling hacktivists may look like in the future—a virtual morphing of the surreal and the real into one combined mass of higher-level thought processes for the greater good, or ‘greater beauty of the Web.’ Similarly to William Gibson’s hacker characters, today’s hacktivists may, in the future, become inevitably and continuously tied into the Web they navigate just as the Weaver is.
CHASE IN WILLIAM GIBSON’S NEUROMANCER.
William Mitchell in his famous Me++ lauds the representation of hacking characters like Gibson’s Chase in Neuromancer. He writes that Gibson’s “fictional heroes inhabit a world in which neural extension is taken to the limit by dispensing with all the intermediate junk and just jacking brains directly into the global network…so if my sensorium is no longer localized by the inexorable laws of visual occlusion and acoustic decay…it reaches to wherever there are sensors with network connections.”[viii] Chase certainly is an example of someone whose sensorium is half placed in the virtual world and half placed without. He exists in the ‘flesh’ as well as in a virtual sense, seamlessly intertwining his discussions with the virtual Wintermute entity and flesh-based colleagues and friends like hired-bodyguard assassin Molly. In fact, Case’s sensorium appears to have evolved to the point where he is never as ease in the real world as he is in the virtual world where he ‘jacks into the ice.’ While his body may still be human, he represents a true transcendence of form—a mental flight to a different world than that which humans have traditionally existed within—a world of computer speech and actions.
While Case himself is somewhat ambivalent about ultimate ideological and political aims—he laughs at the efforts of the Zionist settlers to re-create an artificial Zion of their own and live by rasta/revolutionary prescriptions based in Black Islam movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, he is aware of the existing power structures. He is also aware of virtual methods which can be used to manipulate those structures. “Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power…the zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers…viewed as organisms.”[ix] Case knows the game to be played. “You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were always others waiting to step up the ladder…access the vast banks of corporate memory…Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses would be both more and less than people.”[x] Knowing the nature of the beast is the first step towards conquering and transcending that beast’s methods and aims, and Case is an expert at knowing that nature. If he had true political aims, he would be a true force to be reckoned with, and one that corporations would be fatally afraid of. In Case’s world there are political revolutionary hacktivists, and they do appear to be successful at wreaking havoc in the systems they oppose.
One group Case deals with is the Panther Moderns. They specialize in the above-mentioned havoc-wreaking, aiding Case, Molly and Wintermute in their ambitions to bring down the massive Sense/Net corporation. They do activities such as “using some kind of chickenwire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man’s scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan…choosing to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private joke.”[xi] Hackers outside the Panther Modern membership only have “a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns plan” and the group is just one of many “coded precepts of sub-cults that are replicated at odd intervals” in the urbanized world of Neuromancer.[xii]
The “nihilistic technofetishism” of the Panther Moderns is eerily echoed in many hacktivist groups’ mantras today, as exemplified in the manifestos of the Cult of the Dead Cow, Hacktivismo and other pseudo-nihilistic, free-speech supporting, politically-minded hacktivist countercultures existing on our version of Chase’s web-circuitry. Whether these counterculture groups were influenced by novels such as Neuromancer or that relationship occurred the other way around is debatable; regardless of their origins, its is evident that there are examples of Chase’s fictional description of hacktivist cultures in today’s society.
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/// THE PRESENT OF HACKTIVISM, WITH CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES
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What present examples of hacktivism are available and how has it affected global geopolitical analysis as we see it today? A striking example of the potency of hacktivism can be found by comparing its possibilities to the already-existing possibilities of nuclear and weapons-based terrorism. September 11th was a devastating day for the majority of the Western world. It made us rethink assumptions of safety and security we had depended on for decades and forced political scientists around the world to re-analyze power structures in a new post-Cold War light. Scholars like Thomas Bartnett (in his visionary book The Pentagon’s New Map) showed us how to cope with these new geopolitical definitions of power and conflict.
However, just a week after September 11th, a computer virus called ‘Nimda’ struck over 85,000 servers across the world. This single virus produced more Internet congestion, outages and economic damages than the entirety of infrastructure losses which resulted from the World Trade Center attacks.[xiii] As Taylor writes, “hacktivism engages with power-based metasystems directly, and with those systems’ close ties to the politics of globalization, marking the beginning of a new chapter in radical technological politics.”[xiv] In other words, hacktivism is just coming into its own, and it is startingly effective at manipulating and warping existing systems (government, societal norms, technological advances, corporate influence) which together have fostered its existence in the first place (by funding the initial steps in the creation of the World Wide Web).
KOSOVO ON ONE SIDE OF THE GLOBE, ETOYS ON ANOTHER.
This new form of hacktivism or ‘cyberterrorism’ is also startling in its de-regionalized tendencies. Denning believes that the conflict in Kosovo provided the first impetus for internet-fostered cyberterrorism. She says that “the Kosovo conflict is characterized as the First War on the Internet because government and non-governmental actors alike used the Net to disseminate information, spread propaganda, demonize opponents, and solicit support for their positions…hackers used it to voice their objections to both Yugoslav and NATO aggression as well, disrupting service on government computers and taking over websites.”[xv] Denning argues that Internet-based involvement in the Kosovo conflict on both sides essentially turned cyberspace into an “ethereal war zone where battles for hearts and minds are being waged through the use of electronic images, discussion groups, and hack attacks.”[xvi] This concept has further been exemplified by various hacktivist responses to Israel’s most recent occupation of Palestinian territories, an example of which I am not going to delve into in this essay but which further proves the idea that the Web is becoming more of a ‘battle zone’ than it once was.
These ‘wars’ may be virtual, but their consequences are often entirely real. In the 1999 E-Toy hacking campaign, for example, hacktivists sent a unified rebuttal to a corporate company (E Toys) attempting to sue them and remove their website’s domain name because it was too similar to their own. A combination of hacktivist and public relations stunts were used to force the company to give in to E-Toy demands. Why did a massive corporation give in to the demands of a group of anonymous, communist-influenced hackers? Due to the attacks, E Toys faced an amazing 70 percent decline in its NASDAQ stock value, wreaking havoc on the company’s finances, and causing its heads to find that relenting in their litigation against E-Toys was the most profitable action possible.[xvii]
THE ELECTROHIPPIES.
Jordan and Taylor write about a hacktivist group called the ‘Electrohippies’, who initiated a successful and damaging online protest against the WTO’s 2001 meeting in Doha. The collective decided to develop an automated means of sending protest emails because many could not physically be in Doha to protest ‘against the war on terrorism and globalization’.[xviii] In this way, they were able to target a highly decentralized body without a set physical location. Furthermore, in attacking that body, they were able to target the underlying ideology which frames the WTO’s work—neo-liberalism itself.
To implement their mass-action hack, the Electrohippies wrote a program that “identified the targeted WTO head computer and sent repeated requests to it…participants would click on a link to begin the attacking program”[xix] from proxy servers. It is also interesting that the Electrohippies, due to their underlying political agendas, decided they did not want to actually bombard or ‘drown’ WTO computers with information—even though they certainly had the technological and hacking expertise to do so. Instead, they said that “what we’re all about is bringing community accountability to the Internet…governments and corporations are setting up stalls on the Net in the expectation that the space is immune from the normal pressure present in society…but it isn’t…we have to treat cyberspace as if it were another part of society.”[xx] HERE is where hacktivism delineates from simple malicious hacks directed at a randomized patch of cyber victims, and where it proves that as a movement, it will reverberate throughout society in a way that mere malicious hacks could not.
THE ZAPATISTAS.
“Social netwar is more effective the more democratic the setting,” Ronfeldt and Arquilla add.[xxi] In their research of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas from 1994 to1998, the authors find that the Zapatista’s NGO-based, Net-perpetuated activism was formative in impelling the Mexican government to call a halt to its military operations against the Zapatistas on more than three occasions. While the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) is a local, regionalized movement made up of rural insurgents and villagers living in Chiapas who oppose the policies of the national Mexican government, it also represents “the world’s first post-communist, ‘post-modern’ insurgency”[xxii] at the same time—a representation which is entirely PLACELESS and not defined along national lines, attracting supporters from across the globe.
Chiapas Zapatistas are especially remarkable specifically because they are so rural. Laptops and computers are scarce, and many Chiapas villagers have never learned how to read written text. They have never really had “their own laptop computers, Internet connections, fax machines and cellular telephones.”[xxiii] However, they do have the friendship and support of groups and individuals that own these devices across the world, and through that support the ELZN movement has successfully become a global one. Without de-regionalized, global support, the authors say hands-down that Chiapas defiance of the national government would “probably have deteriorated into a conventional insurgency where the small, poorly equipped EZLN members would not have done well.”[xxiv]
The network of supporters of ELZN initiatives is certainly a loose one and under other circumstances many of the groups actually are in opposition to the ideas of others. However, they are all “in basic agreement that they are not interested in seeking individual political power…but rather, to foster a form of democracy in which civil society actors could counterbalance state and market actors and could play central roles in making public policy decisions that affect society as a whole.”[xxv] It is this fact which scares national governments enough to provide research grants and create top-secret task forces specifically to address hacktivism’s future possibilities.
HOW HAVE THESE EXAMPLES CHANGED PLACE-MAKING?
In his musings on today’s political hackers, Mitchell says that “with the electronic de-localization of my interactions…(I) am not integrated into a single, closed, stable community…rather…scattered, spatially indefinite, and transitory social and economic structures are now engaged.”[xxvi] Electronic hacktivist culture facilitates successfully the emergence of global, de-regionalized groups of like-minded radicals of all ages. Maffesoli first envisioned this idea in 1996, talking about the possible emergence of ‘empathetic neo-tribes’ based on ideological links rather than geographical locations,[xxvii] and today that idea is happening more and more, in different activist and hacktivist communities all over the Web.
Hardt and Negri put it perfectly when they suggest that the “traditional Marxist revolutionary mole and the subterranean tunnels from which he periodically emerges to revolt may need to be replaced in hacktivism’s case by an image of an undulating snake.”[xxviii] As Mitchell writes, “I am both the surveying subject at the center of my electronic web and the object of a multi-modal electronic surveillance…all those constructions of the gaze that the post-Foucauldians have altered to us—are extended and reconstructed electronically…re-releasing Big Brother—he is everywhere and all of us.”[xxix] Hacktivism truly does give us all the opportunity to be placeless Big Brothers—brothers who, instead of being spied ON, are actually conducting their own spying on governments, international governing bodies and corporations. The potentiality of this concept is awe-inspiring—what can we all accomplish with this kind of power? What political and ideological ends can be met?
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/// THE FUTURE OF HACKTIVISM
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FIRST, CAUTION.
The US Department of Defense has decided that hacktivists and cyberterrorists “have not posed much of a real threat comparatively to date”—but does feel that “this could easily change if they aquire better tools, techniques, and methods of organization, and if cyberdefenses do not keep pace.”[xxx] I feel confident in predicting that the Department of Defense is less blasé about hacktivism than it may appear—there are undoubtedly several secret task-forces researching and following hacktivist movements globally as we speak. As Mitchell adds, “while the ‘death of distance’ that prophets of telecommunication have promised does not, as it turns out, entirely destroy the power of place, it does mean that zones of networked interdependence are now growing in a rapid, unbounded fashion.”[xxxi] We have yet to find whether that unbounded growth should lead us to caution and fear or to hope and exhilaration. I personally prefer the latter.
Taylor, Bard and Renquist worry about another potential problem with hacktivism—what may become of hacktivism if it does not have a strong leader in the future. Taylor says that the consumatarian protest movement against globalization and corporate control will suffer from its “chronic lack of coherent leaders—because potential talents are constantly absorbed into the Netocracy—and will have little ideological sophistication.”[xxxii] It is a possibility that without the presence of a strong leader-identity, “social discontent will become blind.”[xxxiii] However, perhaps we are just too blind ourselves to envision what a global movement could look like without the presence of a strong leader because all we have to contextualize—to remember—is the existence of movements happening BECAUSE of strong leaders. What if those movements happen first because of the underlying ideologies at play, not because a strong leader happens to claw his way up to the podium to subvert and voice those shared ideologies?
NEXT, HOPE.
Despite the above doom and gloom, Jordan and Taylor suggest that “although the jury is still out on the ultimate chances of success, hacktivism at least offers some hope that a critical, proactive dimension can be restored to the predominantly passive nature of our usual reception of media.”[xxxiv] Mitchell agrees, adding that he believes we will increasingly see “disparate strangers, in vast numbers, get along peacefully and productively.”[xxxv] Indeed, by operating within immaterial space and by avoiding the limitations of nationalist prejudices, hacktivists in the future may be able to recognize the true underlying nature of the power they are seeking to oppose—by staying unified behind a certain ideology instead of allowing themselves to be divided along class, regional, national and other superficial societal lines.
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/// CONCLUSIONS
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As William J Mitchell writes triumphantly in Me++, “…today, as a privileged postmodern urbanite, I can take advantage of the vast accumulation of mechanical devices to precisely apply machine power wherever and whenever I may need it…I can tend a distant garden electronically.”[xxxvi] What are the possibilities of keying into our own potential gardens of political change through peaceful, unified hacktivist initiatives? Will the potentiality of hacktivism to promote positive change be overrun by its potentiality for negative consequences—for violent attacks? Will the original political integrity and idealism of the fledgling global ‘hacktivist city’ emerging today survive in the hyper-connected, social-media obsessed atmosphere of our increasingly corporate-influenced and ad-run World Wide Web?
Only time give us the answers to these questions, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the amount of time we have to reflect and analyze the possibilities latent in hacktivism’s true emergence as a global political force is less plentiful than we may hope. Based on the combined analysis and exemplification of original fictional portrayals of hacktivists (as seen in Chase and the Weaver), current hacktivist initiatives today, and possibilities in the future, I find that hacktivism truly has redefined what ‘activism’, ‘place’ and ‘community’ really mean today. Hacktivists, in my opinion, truly have created their own ‘cities’ on the Web, cities where all activists who share a similar ideology are welcome, regardless of their socioeconomic or regional situations. We are certainly on a threshold of something new, where the future merges with the past merges with the virtual merges with the urban in all its facets—and I, for one, am exhilarated by the possibilities.
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/// WORKS CITED
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Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. “Emergence and Influence of the Zapatista Social Netwar.” Networks and Netwars. Ed. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. (Washington: Rand Corporation, 2001), 171-201.
Bard, Alexander and Soderqvist, Jan. Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism. Chicago: FT Press, 2002.
Denning, Dorothy E. “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy.” Networks and Netwars. Ed. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. (Washington: Rand Corporation, 2001), 239-288.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
Melville, China. Perdido Street Station. New York: Del Rey Publishing, 2000.
Mitchell, William J. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
Jordan, Tim and Taylor, Paul. Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? New York: Routledge Publishing, 2004.
Taylor, Paul A. “From Hackers to Hacktivists: Speed Bumps on the Global Superhighway?” New Media & Society 7:5 (625-646).
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/// ENDNOTES
[i] Tim Jordan and Paul A. Taylor, Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? (Chicago: Routledge Publishing, 2004), 6.
[ii] Paul A. Taylor, “From Hackers to Hacktivists: Speed Bumps on the Global Superhighway?” (New Media and Society 7:5), 646.
[iii] Taylor 630.
[iv] Jordan and Taylor 131.
[v] China Melville, Perdido Street Station (New York: Del Rey Publishing, 2000), 286.
[vi] Melville 341.
[vii] Melville 287.
[viii] William J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 31.
[ix] William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 197.
[x] Gibson 196.
[xi] Gibson 59.
[xii] Gibson 56.
[xiii] Mitchell 178.
[xiv] Taylor 637.
[xv] Dorothy E. Denning, “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy.” Networks and Netwars, editors John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (Washington: Rand Corporation, 2002) 241.
[xvi] Denning 240.
[xvii] Taylor writes more about the E-Toy/E Toys hack on p. 635 of his article.
[xviii] Jordan and Taylor 78.
[xix] Jordan and Taylor 77.
[xx] Jordan and Taylor 79.
[xxi] John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Emergence and Influence of the Zapatista Social Netwar.” Networks and Netwars, editors John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (Washington: Rand Corporation, 2001) 174.
[xxii] Arquilla and Ronfeldt 174.
[xxiii] Arquilla and Ronfeldt 178.
[xxiv] Arquilla and Ronfeldt 171.
[xxv] Arquilla and Ronfeldt 175.
[xxvi] Mitchell 20.
[xxvii] Taylor 638.
[xxviii] Taylor 629.
[xxix] Mitchell 26.
[xxx] Denning 239.
[xxxi] Mitchell 210.
[xxxii] Taylor 627.
[xxxiii] Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist, Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism (Chicago: FT Press, 2002) 432..
[xxxiv] Jordan and Taylor 623.
[xxxv] Mitchell 210.
[xxxvi] Mitchell 21.
3 years ago