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2. Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism?
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
27 2 TERROR AND PLAY, OR WHAT WAS HACKTIVISM? Only a fool rejects the need to see beyond the screen. —Don DeLillo, Libra It is to be strongly established, from the beginning, that the myth is a communication system, is message. —Roland Barthes, Mythologies as we witness numerous government and corporate initiatives around the globe to restrain the free use of networked computers, knowledge and discussion about these and parallel measures are increasingly withdrawn from public discourse. Social power is already so diffuse that Adam Smith’s market metaphor of the invisible hand has become pure nostalgia . Authoritative power is dispersed as global organizations transition from corporations to networks, and citizens of information society are governed less by concentrated coercion and more by ideological power, as manifest in the symbolic practices and norms of cyberspace.1 But at the same time, media policy is increasingly determined exclusively by profit-oriented actors, transforming the legal and political frame of cyberspace.2 These developments may soon have put an end to critical media practice and conceptual Net art; resisting this closure, tactical art “signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible.”3 Once cyberterrorism is redefined to include any use of technology to disrupt, 28 TERROR AND PLAY sidestep, destabilize, or subvert any officially condoned user interface with technology, the tropes of computer culture as the triumph of bricolage will have been criminalized. Pop culture no longer celebrates hacking as the generally innocuous but occasionally very profitable pursuit of the computer hobbyist. As television has stopped romanticizing the obsessions of talented nerds, the press no longer touts the bootstrapping spirit of digital capitalism. Instead, TV and print journalists have been selling the specter of hacktivism as an irreducible systemic threat of digital media.4 To comprehend the precarious balance of secrecy and access in information policy, it is necessary to combine psychological, theoretical, and technical insight, as Shannon has already emphasized. This chapter takes issue with three of the most unfortunate misunderstandings in the standoff between old and new media.5 First, hackers tend to be portrayed as immature scofflaws , and the remedy usually sought is greater disciplining power for the authorities, with the inevitable backlash. Second, once the protection of privacy and free speech is hollowed out by surreptitious data mining and invasions of data privacy, activism becomes all too easily equated with cyberterrorism, turning into enemies of the state anyone who dares question some of the more insidious consequences of a pervasive commodification of the network infrastructure. Third, the assertion that greater secrecy ultimately yields greater security is wrong, and the cult of secrecy leads to a global resurgence of irrational rumorology online. When conspiracy theory takes the place of critical Net culture, public debate over code and law is impoverished. if in the past few years one wanted to follow nuclear tests in India , antigovernment protests in Arab countries, the fate of indigenous Mexicans in Chiapas, protests against the World Trade Organization, the handling of prisoners in Guantanamo, or demonstrations against the Republican National Convention, one was underserved by TV and print journalism and probably turned to the Internet. Human rights advocates, energy policy activists, sympathizers of the Zapatistas, antiglobalization protesters, and other groups likewise sought to attract attention to their causes by disrupting or defacing Web sites associated with Indian nuclear research, the Mexican government, the World Trade [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:43 GMT) TERROR AND PLAY 29 Organization, or conservative think tanks. Internet users alerted to the concept of Echelon, an electronic communication scanner filtering all satellite, microwave, cellular, and fiber-optic traffic, had to wonder why and how capitalism had morphed into a fully integrated surveillance apparatus that could treat the world like a company town. To pull the veil of secrecy and ignorance aside, activists coined the notion of Jam Echelon Day, trying to disrupt the surveillance and alert the public to its presence in one stroke. Chinese computer hackers launched attacks on U.S. Web sites in protest against NATO’s bombing of a Chinese embassy in the Kosovo war. Sweatshop critics, techno-libertarians unhappy with certain politicians, and people harboring curiosity or vested interests in commercial, military, or trivial secrets stretch the limits of the legal in cyberspace every day. A concerted denial-of-service attack on American e-commerce Web sites in February...