Contents

1.Introduction
2.Cultures
3.Networks
4.Revolutions
5.Conclusion

1. Introduction

As the interface between global capital and new electronic technologies refigure and reshape the face of culture, the importance of thinking through the possibilities and limits of the political takes on a new urgency. What constitutes both the subject and the object of the po­litical mutates and expands as the relationship between knowledge and power becomes a powerful force in producing new forms of wealth, increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, and radically influencing how people think, act, and behave. Culture as a form of political capital becomes a formidable force as the means of producing, circulating, and distributing information transform all sectors of the global economy and usher in a veritable revolution in the ways in which meaning is produced, identities are shaped, and historical change unfolds within and across national boundaries.

—Henry A. Giroux

Cultural studies as an academic project has always been concerned with describing ways to change the political status quo of society at large toward greater democracy. The concerns of early British cultural studies sprang from a crisis of orthodox Marxism; the result for cultural studies as an academic field was a turn toward the agency of the working class and of subcultures. The concerns of North American cultural studies sprang from a disbelief in the agency of a revolutionary class, and the result was a turn toward describing popular culture. Witnessing the United States’ culture wars in the name of ever spreading capitalism, however, writing about romance novels and Star Trek increasingly seemed to be too acquiescent an agenda to some theorists. They developed a nostalgia for the critical perspective of engaged scholarly work of the Birmingham school It might be for that reason that some of these thinkers have now swarmed to explain to us the cultures of the digital age. In the wake of their writing, a view of the Internet as hotbed for a digital revolutionary class has become en vogue—contrary to lifestyles, it is argued, digital culture seems to open up new places of hope (Haraway 1991, Benedikt 1992, Landow 1997, Turkle 1997). As Mark Poster writes,

The magic of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, and radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production (Poster 2001: 184).

Is there revolutionary cultural resistance, then, to be found in cyberspace? Or is technocapitalism finally taking over the world while we are living in—a Matrix?

It cannot be the task of a critical cultural studies to settle this question once and for all by returning to an empirical discussion of Internet culture. Cultural studies should instead inquire after the context of such questions, after the power games that take place in the struggles over closure. Recognizing that “students of new media must be modest in their claims and hypothetical in their voices” (Poster 2001: 19), it is perhaps more useful for us to think in terms of different questions about cultural resistance on the Internet: “are there new kinds of relations occurring within it which suggest new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals” (Poster 2001: 177)? If so, what do these look like? How do they differ from real world power struggles? Do groups who engage in cyber-struggles disappear from the radar of the monolithic real world law and order? Or is capitalism, especially in the United States, taking on a ‘fractal’ quality that is speeding up the digital divide with a hyper-capitalist work ethic that can now reach right into dissidents’ homes? What is tactical media activism and how is it being sized-up by the spectacle of cyberspace? Do hackers constitute a revolutionary subculture that is actively unmasking that spectacle? Is the digital public domain more public than a mall, as some privacy activists seem to think? And finally: do the activities of such activist groups constitute a new, democratic politics of the Internet?

In this essay, I will attempt to answer some of these questions. The first part will be a general introduction to the field of the politics of culture and technology in the United States. Starting from a critique of an instrumental view of technology, we will arrive at the notion that technology is a cultural construction. The result of our diagnosis of contemporary American technoculture will be that a process of closure it taking place on the Internet that we might term more generally the ‘malling of America’ (Kowinski 1985). The second part discusses the politics of some groups that are actively working against this closure. It will essentially argue that rather than taking up monolithic notions of hero-hacking or free software activism, we need to follow the more skeptical and pragmatic outlook of tactical or micro-media to arrive at a useful understanding of a practice that might counter this spectacle of the Internet. However, instead of proclaiming a new-found revolutionary subject, the third part of this essay will illustrate how tactical media might change the self-understanding of politically pessimistic critical practice itself: much of contemporary cultural theory seems to follow a cycle of singling out a revolutionary subject and watching it fail the test of real-life politics. Using the Internet as a thing to think with, our critical practice might depart from this cycle and begin to learn from Internet micro-struggles how to reformulate power and ‘resistance’ in order to arrive at a more meaningful notion of cultural studies itself.

A significant problem poses itself for us in the process of arriving at an informed guess about question of an Internet politics: Our generation hasn’t really witnessed any revolutions or greater societal changes. As George Lipsitz puts it, “It’s difficult to believe in something that you have never seen” (Lipsitz 2000: 83). To make matters worse, we have also (though rightfully) abandoned the belief in a “progressive self-consciousness in which theory and practice will finally be one” (Gramsci 2002: 67). With this outlook, writing about cultures of dissent on the Internet almost seems paradoxical: if we are living in a total system, where is the dissent supposed to come from? My tactics in the face of this problem can only be tentative, and they are twofold: one is the usage of the “we” form. In his book Dark Fiber, Geert Lovink writes that

The ‘we’ form in the age of the net is one of the few possibilities left to address groups and subnetworks and formulate common strategies […]. Using the problematic ‘we’ form is an indirect critique of the liberal-bourgeois form of debating in which opponents politely exchange arguments, just for the sake of it (Lovink 2002: 230).

The other tactic is my hope that by discussing what we can learn about activism in the United States from groups such as Critical Art Ensemble, Witness, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or Free Radio Berkeley who move about playfully and creatively in American net-scapes even though the process of the malling of the Net continues with an ever-increasing speed, we might open our academic practice to new forms of agency that might contribute to disturbing the closure of the Internet and of our lives. If this essay makes that closure seem just a little less inevitable, my efforts will have been worthwhile.

2. Cultures

   1. Net-scapes

Technology, the hardest of material artifacts, is thoroughly cultural from the outset: an expression and creation of the very outlooks and aspirations we pretend it merely demonstrates.

—James W. Carey

What is technology? What does technological advancement do to social justice? How can we direct the development of computer and Internet research in a humane manner? In our time, such questions often get buried underneath the discourses of hope, freedom, and newness that surround computer culture and ascribe phenomenal capabilities to even the slightest advancement in processor speed. Such questions, however, are also key questions for a politically engaged cultural studies as it has been practiced by critics such as Stuart Hall or Raymond Williams. Why does the discipline of cultural studies hardly begin to pose “the cultural question of the Internet” (Poster 2001: 4)? Why do we shy away from interpreting the cultural processes that lie at the heart of the accelerating distribution of the logic of capitalism in our time of networked computing? Perhaps we have internalized the mechanistic view of technology of the computer industry’s marketing departments and combined it with the cynical, radical semiotic outlook that seems to dominate many cultural studies departments today. In this section, we will see how the notion of ‘net-scapes’ might help us begin to perceive technology not as a seamless, determined structure of domination, but as an ever-changing cultural phenomenon.

Code Culture

As the information divide between rich and poor widens on a global scale, the silence of cultural studies regarding the cultures and politics of networked computing as a key factor behind that development becomes increasingly problematic. Why do we hold on to an instrumental view of technology that sees machines as tools instead of understanding technology as a deeply cultural phenomenon which would enable us to critique the divide? Why has film studies, for instance, largely established itself in the academic world and why haven’t many books been written on a “cultural studies of the Internet as a road into the critique of Internet discourse itself” (Sterne 1999: 260)? There are at least two reasons for this shortcoming. For one thing, the writing on culture and technology is firmly in the hands of the people who publish articles for popular computer magazines and manual books on software applications: journalists and computer experts who in turn depend on computer companies’ public relations departments for their information. On the other hand, academia shies away from networked computers that are still regarded as locus of unreliable information, even though computers and Internet services such as email increasingly also structure the domain of academic knowledge production. The reason for this problematic might be the mistaken notion of the computer as the perfect symbol manipulator. Like much of academia, cultural studies has completed its version of the linguistic turn, at the heart of which lies the contention that every phenomenon can be explained within the framework of literary theory. The theoretical reduction of the computer to a symbol manipulator might have been an outcome of the strange marriage between the literary theory notion of radical textuality and the mechanistic world model of code theory that is prevalent in media studies. As a result, we are accustomed to think of programmers as literary authors, and we can read and analyze computer code like poetry, without regard to its cultural context (Bolter 1991, Landow 1997). In fact, the academic success of film studies might originate in the field’s very ability to import such models of authorship from literary theory (as long as the cinematic apparatus is left out of film interpretation). Since much of literary theory is silent on politics, we should not be surprised that our current version of a cultural studies of the media

has little to say about the underlying political and economic forces that keep various social groups marginalized; nor does it know how to address the often subtle ways in which cultural practices both deploy power and are deployed in material relations of power (Giroux 2000: 69).

If we do not want our version of cultural studies to lack such characteristics, it is then perhaps time for us to turn away from the marriage of literary and code theory and to begin to understand technology as an essentially cultural phenomenon.

Boundaries and Links

An important attempt at qualifying a view of communication and technology that is silent on political and social questions has been undertaken by James Carey. In his book Communication as Culture, Carey separates two concepts of communication: the ‘transmission view’ and the ‘ritual view’ (Carey 1989). The transmission view is prevalent in media studies, and it is based on our physical experience of transportation. Just like the Christian missionaries thought that they were spreading the word of god to the heathens, we think that our communication consists of transporting a message with a fixed meaning to another person. In the theory of communication as transmission, communication becomes “a process whereby messages are transmitted and distributed in space for the control of distance and people” (Carey 1989: 15). Essentially, this view highlights the boundaries between social formations and their continuous cultural reiteration. The ritual view, on the other hand, emphasizes that communication is essentially a cultural balancing between two different sites: it is a negotiation of the relation of the social formations that take part in the communicative process. The ritual view is then “directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs” (Carey 1989: 18). Storytelling would be one way to think of such a representation of shared beliefs of a culture. Our strange marriage of literary and code theory, however, seems to be based on the transmission view of communication. It is this view in which “movement is space could be in itself a redemptive act” that is the ideological foundation for our ever-increasing computer hardware and software upgrade fever, and that is responsible for the aggressiveness with which ‘Western’ cultures sometimes try to get their message across to others (Carey 1989: 16).

How can we formulate a more open cultural notion of the Internet and communication that follows the ritual school? Steve Jones warns us that the speed in which the Internet is changing makes our attempts at grasping its characteristics in textual form or in panel discussions seem pathetic: the Net generally “does not meet what scholarship might require” (Jones 1999: 7). While it seems impossible then to detail out a ritual theory of the Internet and to stake out a specific path for cultural studies to follow, what we can learn from Carey’s emphasis on the negotiation of the relation of the formations that take part in the communicative process is to pay critical attention to the political implications of communication on the Internet. The ritual school of communication points us to an understanding of technology as an essentially cultural phenomenon: “To study communication is to examine the actual social process wherein significant forms are created, apprehended, and used” (Carey 1989: 30). From this wider perspective, studying the Internet involves not only the technology but also its users and its producers, the conditions in which it is produced and used, and the interconnections between its users, in short: the Internet and its context. From a similar perspective, Raymond Williams has used the term “cultural technology” instead of the classical Marxist notion of ‘superstructure’ to emphasize how culture and technology are intertwined in our everyday life in complex ways (Williams 1974: 4). The ritual school then highlights the links between social formations, not the boundaries. More generally, the Net as a research object perhaps crosses our traditional borders and limits of disciplines, schools, or academic interests: the ‘cultural question of the Internet’ is at the heart perhaps a question about the general usefulness of reductionist theories of boundaries that are continually setting up divisions between ourselves and others in the name of what has been called the logic of difference.

Complex Flows

There is a tentative metaphor which seems useful to connote in this essay the fluid and contextual character of the Internet as a cultural phenomenon: the notion of the ‘net-scape.’ Rather than being a fully working model of technology and society on which we can base our discussion about Internet activism in the United States, the metaphor should suggest that “the Internet is more like a social space than a thing, so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers” (Poster 2001: 176). In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai has coined the terms ‘technoscape’ and ‘mediascape’ (Appadurai 1996) to highlight the fluidity of the spheres of culture and technology: “The suffix -scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles” (Appadurai 1996: 33). With the concepts of technoscape and mediascape it becomes possible to describe complex structures of feeling that cannot be grasped by notions of the ‘global village’ or techno-imperialism. For instance, the ‘global village’ is a strange reductionism for the experience of the way in which larger social formations are implicated in local space-time: it ignores that the village does not project its structure onto the larger formation, a configuration that results in a loss of a sense of place whenever we speak about the global (Appadurai 1996: 29). In addition, the mantric repetition of the reductive binarism ‘domination/resistance’ in cultural studies is now replaced by a description of a “complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models” (Appadurai 1996: 32). However, our concept of the ‘net-scape’ perhaps comes closer to being a useful shorthand for the “increasingly complex relationships among money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both un- and highly skilled labor” that are in our time increasingly driven by the Internet than the notions of mediascape or technoscape (Appadurai 1996: 34). For this essay, we will adopt this concept then to lead us away from monolithic ideas about technology toward more fluid notions of dissenting cultures on the Internet.

2. Technocultures

Truckers and cyberpunks, rap musicians and concert pianists, even hippies and the Amish all employ technologies in such a way that their cultural activity is not intelligibly separate from the utilization of these technologies. The Amish have their wagons and farm equipment, the hippies their Volkswagen buses. The rap DJ has his or her turntable, which is employed differently from the turntable of a commercial radio DJ; the cyberpunk has a computer complete with modem, and this utilization differs from the accountant at his or her computer console.

—Stanley Aronowitz

America before electricity and America after are two different places.

—Bruno Latour

Our interpretation of net-scapes of Internet activism in the United States should start from the general recognition that American cultures are essentially cultures of technology. In the United States, advanced technology plays a crucial role in the formation of all social groups, perhaps contrary to Europe, where the activities of hackers for one have been associated with making-do and using cheap, low-tech equipment. As a technoculture, the United States are so deeply entangled in the webs of technology that the instrumental notion which regards our relation to machines as tools does not grasp technology adequately, namely as a “product of and producer of culture simultaneously” (Bell 2001: 2). From this viewpoint, net-scapes of Internet activism in the U.S. are both a product and a driving force of a larger societal process which we might call the ‘malling of America’ (Kowinski 1985).

Electronic Frontiers

There is a surprisingly wide range of social formations in the United States that have associated technology with a positive change of society at large toward greater freedom. Understanding their motivations perhaps enables us to understand the complex role of technology in American culture. The first part of this libratory coalition is the American government. In the early nineties, Al Gore has advanced the concept of the Internet as a national ‘information superhighway’. The information superhighway would strengthen America’s role as a leading nation in the business, educational, and military field, and under America’s lead, a better world for us all would eventually come about: “America, born in revolution, can lead the way in this new, peaceful world revolution,” Gore proclaimed in his 1994 speech at the University of California in Los Angeles (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 34). Essentially, the idea behind Gore’s superhighway concept was a transfer of control over the Internet from science and the government to corporations, a goal toward which the business world as the second part of the libratory coalition had been pressing ever since it discovered the World Wide Web (the total number of HTML pages accessible via the Internet) as a marketing instrument. In The Road Ahead, Microsoft leader Bill Gates describes such a corporate marketing fantasy of the Internet as “a new world of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which market information will be plentiful and transaction costs low. It will be a shopper’s heaven” (Gates 1996: 171). ‘Low-friction’ capitalists and the government thus saw themselves in agreement over the future of the Internet; an agreement which would eventually result in one of the most important victories for telecommunication corporations over the independent media since the privatization of the air waves in the early twentieth century: the takeover of the U.S. Internet backbone from the National Science Foundation by the three U.S. telecommunication companies Sprint, Ameritech, and Pacific Bell in 1995 (Winston 1998).

Non-governmental organizations, media theorists, artists, and other critical thinkers in America fill in the third part of the libratory coalition. Most famously perhaps, John Perry Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have been associated with the ‘cyberlibertarian’ viewpoint. Barlow is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization that promotes computer user freedoms (www.eff.org). In The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, a text that he had written in 1996 during a WTO meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and that widely circulates on the Internet (Barlow 1996), Barlow aligns himself with Gore and Gates against the old industrial leaders whom he labels “weary giants of flesh and steel” and for electronic networks which he calls “the new home of Mind.” Barlow and the EFF formulate a view of American technocultural net-scapes that is similar to the rhetoric of the ‘information superhighway’ and ‘friction-free’ capitalism: the Internet is the place where “lovers of freedom and self-determination” are creating “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” a world “where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” This ‘Barlovian view of cyberspace’ (Jordan 1999: 56) has been taken up by Mark Poster who voices a similar contention that “the Internet is ruled by no one and is open to expansion or addition at anyone’s whim as long as its communication protocols are followed” (Poster 2001: 27). In addition, a large part of earlier theoretical writing about works of fiction on the Internet, sometimes called ‘hyperfiction,’ follows the libertarian viewpoint (for a critique of these positions see Ziegler 2003). For instance, hypertext critic George Landow (Landow 1997: 25) speaks of a “democratization” through hypertext. And finally, artist Nicole Stenger proclaims that the Internet, “though born of war technology, opens up a space for collective restoration, and for peace” (Stenger 1991: 58). What to make of this coalition of what Jonathan Sterne has labeled the ‘millennial imagination’ (Sterne 1999)?

Machines in the Garden

Leo Marx has attempted to understand the crucial role of technology in American society in his book The Machine in the Garden in a way that views technology as “not only artifact but actor” (Carey 1989: 8). Marx qualifies two related aspects of the insistence on the libratory capacities of technology in American culture: one is the dichotomy between nature and culture that lies at the heart of U.S. society, and the other are the paradoxical attempts to reconcile that dichotomy. “There is a special affinity between the machine and the new Republic,” Marx writes (Marx 1964: 203). Ideas of democracy and the nation were not spread to a wider audience until the first printing presses had arrived in the colonies from Britain, a process that in turn had been made possible by naval technology improvements. The intimate relation of the early republic to technology is also expressed in the constitution—in fact, the document can be interpreted as an articulation of a mechanistic world view and politics in the English colonies. As Marx argues, “the dominant structural metaphor of the constitution is that of a self-regulating machine […]; it establishes a system of ‘checks and balances’ among three distinct, yet delicately synchronized, branches of government” (Marx 1964: 165). As a consequence, we could argue with James Carey that the United States is largely “the product of literacy, cheap paper, rapid and inexpensive transportation, and the mechanical reproduction of words” (Carey 1989: 2).

A dichotomy between nature and culture that Marx diagnoses as “the root conflict of our culture” (Marx 1964: 365) has then been ingrained in American society ever since the first colonizers and their machines set foot onto American soil. One famous imaginary resolution of the conflict is the Jeffersonian reconciliation of nature and culture through the purification of industrial technology through the contact with nature. Essentially, Jefferson’s idea was that “Once the machine is removed from the dark, crowded, grimy cities of Europe, […] it will blend harmoniously into the open countryside of his native land” (Marx 1964: 150). As an articulation of culture and nature, Jefferson’s attempt at a reconciliation of nature and technology can perhaps be interpreted as a reaction to a larger epistemological change in society: the cultural change from a cyclical, pre-modern notion of history and time toward the ideology of progress that dominant social formations were beginning to impose on other social groups during the industrialization of Britain in a cycle of naturalization: the more technology was purified by nature, the less the settlers resisted the beginning industrialization of America; the quicker industrialization in the colonies developed, the more “the notion of progress became palpable” throughout society (Marx 1964: 197). There is an irony at the heart of the Jeffersonian viewpoint that would result not in the purification of technology, but in antagonistic social formations that struggle over the development of technology. Jefferson’s idea “rests at bottom upon the idea that the factory system, when transformed to America, is redeemed by the contact with ‘nature’ and the rural way of life it is destined to supplant” (Marx 1964: 159). At this point, however, Leo Marx concedes that “The machine’s sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs […] to politics” (Marx 1964: 365). Nonetheless, his analysis offers us an understanding of how technology and culture in America are historically intertwined, with the result that we begin to understand the motivations behind the libratory coalition that we can now interpret as engaging in a version of the Jeffersonian practice of purifying industrial technology.

The Malling of America

If we are now able to see how culture and technology in the United States might be deeply intertwined, we are still lacking a political interpretation of the resulting net-scapes. For this purpose, it is helpful to return to the inception of the United States as a nation. There is an aspect of the philosophy of the republic in the American constitution that Leo Marx does not discuss. It differs in an important way from the Greek conceptualization of democracy that was held to work only on a very limited terrain: “The constitution proposed a republic on a scale never before imagined or thought possible: continental in its geography, virtually unlimited in its population” (Carey 1989: 5). As a result, we not only have a dichotomy between nature and culture ingrained into the American social formation, but also the starting point for what would later develop into the theory of United States imperialism. In this view, the U.S. is an imperial machine that has favored “spreading messages further in space and reducing the cost of transmission” over the equality of access as key approach to technology (Carey 1989: 155). A critical school of cultural studies has taken up that view in relation to the media. Raymond Williams, for instance, distinguishes the commercial character of television on three levels (Williams 1974): the production of the programs themselves, the advertising industry, and the overall promotion of consumer capitalism as a way of life. Media is the crucial force behind what has been called ‘cultural imperialism’ (Barber 1995): they are “at once locally generated, by domestic capitalist interests and authorities, and internationally organized, as a political project, by the dominant capitalist power” (Williams 1974: 35).

What is the difficulty of such a techno-imperialist view with regard to a politics of the Internet? Recognizing that the production and consumption of technocultural goods is a complex process with many nodal points and levels that we have called ‘net-scapes,’ a notion of culture meaning essentially “the expansion of the American communications system” (Williams 1974: 33) becomes limiting. Constructing the United States as a center of cultural imperialism might have worked in the age of the one-to-many medium of television, but today that notion becomes too convenient a term to describe the ever-changing flows of informational capital. As Appadurai cautions, “the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” (Appadurai 1996: 31). How can we then interpret American technocultures as not the center, but as an important site of capitalist power? It is Al Gore’s metaphor of the ‘information superhighway’ that takes on another meaning at this point. On the one hand, Gore’s images evokes the fast-paced communication of the many. But as much as the superhighway evokes fast communication, it also refers to a streamlined, near-total circle of production and consumption. As Nick Dyer-Witheford reminds us, the economic context of that image is one of Fordism in the post-World War II era. Around the auto industry and road building, a way of life was built at that time that “integrated assembly-line labor, mass consumption of manufactured goods, suburban housing, and privatized mobility in an industrial regime that sustained three decades of extraordinary prosperity” (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 33).

In the complex of industrial mass production, suburban housing, transportation, and consumption, the shopping mall takes on crucial importance. Similar to the Internet of Bill Gates, the mall is a site for the (still mostly female) labor of commodity consumption, a practice during which we are mostly isolated from unpleasant social groups and their agendas that could disturb our moods and the oblivious tranquility of our shopping (Schiller 1989: 101; on the creativity of mall shopping see Fiske 1999: 38). The real estate on which every mall is built is privately owned, and as a result, the mall accelerates the corporate fantasy that places can be entirely configured for low-friction capitalism: similar to the Net, producers and consumers increasingly develop the expectation “to be able to choose to create a symbolic boundary between personal life-world and poverty, crime, and cultural alienation” (Chaney 1994: 165). It is this expectation rather than a process of monolithic techno-imperialism that lies as the heart of what we can call ‘the malling of America’—the process of the naturalization of a low-friction public space. This process might serve as a tentative first description for the dominant cultural politics against which cultures of dissent on the Internet direct their practice.

3. Closures

The Internet is the Wild West. If you can imagine that you and your machine are you and your horse. And your ISP is your local town with your local sheriff. You know folks there. And you got your virus scanner on your side. Once you leave your local town, you're out on the cultural frontier. There's mail tribes, banditos, but more importantly, there's the railroad barons. In this case, router barons, and the router barons control everything.

—Ricardo Dominguez

Internet activisms take place against the backdrop of the malling of America. How can we begin to describe with more sophistication what is going on at the heart of that process? Any cultural studies approach to a qualified politics of U.S. technocultures will perhaps suffer from a lack of training in political and economic theory, and the limited scope of this paper adds to such difficulties. Nonetheless, the finality of Ernest Mandel’s classic term ‘late capitalism’ does not seem to us lead into the right direction (Mandel 1975). If we follow Nick Dyer-Witheford, the political backdrop we are looking for might provisionally be described as two heterogeneous globalizations: one is the globalization of informational capital, and the other are the net-scapes of a counter-globalization (Dyer-Witheford 1999). Both globalizations are engaged in a complex struggle about the naturalization of a low-friction public space that is the ‘malling of America.’ At the end of this first section, we will characterize this process as the spectacle in the condition of ‘fractal capitalism.’

Fractal Capitalism

How does cultural studies generally interpret contemporary technocultures? After the linguistic turn that we have briefly touched upon above, it has by now become familiar in the field to characterize our time as ruled by the concept of the sign. The sign is not only taken to refer to the real, but also to have an arbitrary relation to the object which it stands for. Jean Baudrillard has extended this notion to his concept of the hyper-real, in which nothing stands for any real object at all, since everything is a copy, or a simulacrum (Baudrillard 1994). It has by now also become familiar to speak of an increase, or even overload, of visual information that is connected to the rule of the sign and that is the very basis for our lives in the contemporary capitalist net-scapes: “In this swirl of imagery, seeing is much more than believing. It is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life,” writes Nicolas Mirzoeff (Mirzoeff 1999: 1). As we have discussed above, the computer becomes nothing more than a perfect symbol manipulator in such an environment of signs: the increasing ubiquity of net-scapes of symbol-manipulating technology works toward making the ‘radical semiotic’ ideology commonplace. What gets lost in the semiotic outlook are the socio-political aspects of technology. Instead of limiting ourselves to interpreting an indefinite interplay of signs, we should recognize that commodities “come with prices attached” (Murdock 1997: 100). We are living in an economy of signs that has been made possible by the “superabundance of cultural signification”—after all, money is the perfect sign (Apostolidis 2000: 158). From this perspective, radical semiotic interpretation can only be regarded as a symptom and not a road to critique of the malling of our lives. As Mark Poster writes, such a position is perhaps simply a “desperate playfulness in the face of extreme phenomena” (Poster 2001: 138).

How can we conceive the ‘extreme phenomena’ without receding to radical semiotics so that we are able to diagnose the condition of culture in the United States? The key theoretical tactic is to regard the phenomena not as extreme but as an indication of capitalism’s transfer of money to the cultural domain, a process that results in informational capital. Following Nick Dyer-Witheford, we might call this condition ‘fractal capitalism:’ “In the newly socialized space of capital, a fractal logic obtains, such that each apparently independent location replicates the fundamental antagonism that informs the entire structure—capital’s insistence that life-time be subordinated to profit” (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 82). Essentially, what the condition of fractal capitalism is all about is that capital has taken to the net-scapes: “the nervous system of daily life is no longer to be found in the simple workings and display of raw industrial power—the old means of production—but in the wired infrastructures that compute and transmit information” (Giroux 2000: 7). The interplay of signs is symptomatic of the condition in which “Information has now become capital” (Giroux 2000: 2). What we have tentatively labeled ‘the malling of America’ might now be restated in more detail: we are living in a “comprehensive, corporate, informational-cultural apparatus” that has no center but relatively powerful nodal points (Schiller 1989: 4). These nodes are actively altering their neighbors’ structure and copying micro-versions of the greater kernel onto them as they get triggered into activation by changes in their context. This framework makes it possible for us to understand how the logic of capital can become increasingly global without the dichotomy ‘center of domination/marginal resistance.’ In fact, the kernel of capital is copied at the very periphery so that, as the Critical Art Ensemble reminds us, the inner cities of Western metropolises look increasingly desolate (Davis 1990) as cities on the former marginal nodes take on some of their former strategic importance (Critical Art Ensemble 1995).

Why might our notion of fractal capitalism still sound frivolous to some cultural critics? The inevitable falsity of such an interpretation of our time should perhaps be regarded simply as a result of that very condition, when in fact the historical relation of technology as a driving force of capitalism has been well-documented. In his book Cybermarx, Nick Dyer-Witheford describes such links between technology and capital. For instance, it is commonplace for some theoreticians to write about computers and the Internet as if they were a first, non-industrial application of Bentham’s panopticon (Frohne, Levin and Weibel 2002), an apparatus of surveillance or control that Foucault discusses in detail in his Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979: 195-228). Dyer-Witheford, however, argues that “the original panoptic apparatus that Foucault discussed in a carceral setting was at first designed for use in a factory setting” (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 102). Essentially, the whole concept of networked computing received its first application in an industrial environment, namely “in the emergency management systems used by the Nixon administration to monitor its wage-price freeze and picket line violence in a truckers strike” (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 78). One of the origins of computer science, in fact, lies in cybernetics, which is today often taken to mean ‘cyberspace studies’ when it really translates to the ‘science of control at a distance’. As Brian Winston reminds us, the general idea of control over distance antedates the first personal computer for years: as early as 1940, an IBM Model 1 was used to remotely operate another computer (Winston 1998: 322). Since control over distance today is most often applied in industrial robotics, cultural studies is perhaps well advised to generally interpret contemporary technocultures in this light: fractal capitalism is essentially a virtual continuation of such earlier industrial practices of remote control. As Dyer-Witheford writes, capitalism might have chased wage-labor out of its factories to the sweatshops at its margins and to cyberspace, but “with the aid of new technologies, it globally maps the availability of female labor, ethno-markets, migrancy flows, human gene pools, and entire animal, plant, and insect species onto its coordinates of value” (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 10). Recognizing that Karl Marx has termed this integration of all structures of feeling into the logic of capital much earlier “the circuit of capital” (quoted in Dyer-Witheford 1999: 91), we should perhaps reformulate his notion from the electric sphere as the condition of fractal capitalism in our contemporary digital net-scapes.

Net-scapes without Politics

Internet activisms are cultural reactions against capitalism in the net-scapes. Why is it that theories of computers and ‘new media’ have generally erased an interpretation of the logic of this process from their agenda? From early German Medienwissenschaften that largely follow the myth of computers as war machines (Kittler 1999) to more recent North American publications (Bolter and Gruisin 2000, Manovich 2001), theorists see the computer essentially as nothing more than a machine that modifies and copies code. Perhaps Lev Manovich’s book The Language of New Media is symptomatic for this condition (Manovich 2001). Essentially, Manovich argues that ‘new media’ can be traced back to a historical convergence between photography and the computer: the programs were fed into the first computers in the form of punching cards, so the process of running a computer was similar to feeding film into a movie projector. Manovich goes on to develop the following principles of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. Indeed, the automatic assembly of a website on the Internet follows these principles: images, sounds, and text files are numerical representations, so they can be incorporated into a website in computer code. As a result, a website may consist of many code modules that can each be manipulated and reinserted without disturbing the structure of the whole. In Manovich’s interpretation, ‘new media’ becomes new because of the process of transcoding: the “translation of all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers” (Manovich 2001: 20; Bolter and Gruisin 2000 have called this concept ‘remediation’). The weakness in Manovich’s approach is symptomatic for media studies in general: it does not grasp adequately the complex relationship between culture and technology in American society. In Manovich’s interpretation, the concept of transcoding or ‘remediation’ ultimately reaches into the social sphere: cultural transcoding becomes the process through which “cultural categories and concepts are substituted […] by new ones that derive from the computer’s ontology, epistemology and pragmatics” (Manovich 2001: 47). But how is it that this process actually works? If it remains true to the mechanistic principles of ‘new media,’ it comes close to the hypodermic needle theory of early media studies.

The goal of many mechanistic or instrumental media theories then is to reiterate the marketing rhetoric of technology as pure phenomenon, untouched by social friction and struggles. As David Sholle writes, “what lies behind the present discourse on technology is not a strict determinism, but rather an erasure of the social construction of technology” (Sholle 2002: 5). Bruno Latour has made a useful attempt to criticize the naturalization of such an ethereal Internet culture (Latour 1993). On the one hand, the apparatus of science is actively separating and purifying our world into “two entirely distinct ontological zones” of rational and irrational phenomena, culture and nature, and “human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (Latour 1993: 11). In addition, we are continuously moving phenomena from one sphere to the other to make sense of their complex characteristics in the practice of translation that “creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture” (Latour 1993: 10). The notion of the Internet as a rational phenomenon can be interpreted as an outcome these two related processes of translation and purification by which we are trying to make sense of our pre-modern condition: although it is essentially a mongrel, the Net is actively purified into the clean sphere of the mathematical. As Geert Lovink writes,

despite the dotcom crash and growing monopolies, the net is still presented to an ever growing group of usually young (and usually male) developers as a ‘pure’ medium; an abstract mathematical environment, untouched by society, neutral of class, gender or race, capable of ‘routing around’ problems caused by the dirty world outside (Lovink 2002: 10).

The Internet Spectacle

What does the process of the closure or purification of the Internet look like in practice? One of the most frequently cited examples here is perhaps America Online (Lessig 1999, Tetzlaff 2000). America Online (AOL) is the single largest Internet provider in the world. As a part of the entertainment corporation AOL Time Warner, the company not only has “more than 35 million members of its flagship AOL service,” but it also owns the company Net-scape with 48 million registered users of the Net-scape.com service, Internet service provider CompuServe with 3 million members, the ICQ messaging service with over 120 million registered users, the AIM messaging client, and the sound player Winamp (AOL 2002). It is then no exaggeration for the company to proclaim on its website www.aol.com that “America Online has played a major role in creating the consumer online experience worldwide.” Essentially, the strategy of AOL is to capture the novice computer user who wants to access the Internet from his or her home computer. For this purpose, AOL gives away free software packages that consist of functionally reduced programs for typical Internet services such as email or the World Wide Web and advertises these packages on its website in a discourse of ease and simplicity: “You’ll be enjoying the benefits of America Online in no time!” Ironically, AOL calls the users’ dependency on simplified programs ‘netwise.’ A corresponding website (Internet Education Foundation 2003) that poses as a public benefit organization but is run by, among others, AOL, AT&T, VISA, Amazon, Microsoft, and the People for the American Way Foundation, promotes a climate of general mistrust and fear in which the openness of net-scapes “has become synonymous to child pornography and computer hackers” (Lovink 2002: 335). Afraid of such Net criminals, the user turns to AOL to lose basic control over his or her Internet freedoms. As Lawrence Lessig writes,

There is no public space where you could address all members of AOL. There is no town hall or town meeting where people can complain in public and have their complaints heard by others. There is no space large enough for citizens to create a riot. The owners of AOL, however, can speak to all (Lessig 1999: 68).

We might conceptualize AOL’s active closure of the American net-scapes as the spectacle of the Net. The notion of the spectacle that we will adopt for this essay is based on Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1994 [1967]). Although it is difficult to summarize the metaphors that Debord uses to characterize (or rather, to invoke an intuitive understanding of) the concept of the spectacle, we can perhaps say that the spectacle is essentially a shift in societal relations that is very similar to our notion of the fractal nature of capitalism: it is the result of the commodification of time. The spectacle appears at the point in which the linguistic turn of capitalism that turns information into a cultural commodity is complete, at the “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life” (Debord 1994 [1967]: 29). In the condition of the spectacle, the ideal commodity is as ethereal and ubiquitous as the products of America Online to the point at which “The real consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusion. The commodity is this illusion, which is in fact real, and the spectacle is its most general form” (Debord 1994 [1967]: 32). The spectacle sells to us images of our societal relations and posits those images as more desirable than the social relation itself. This is perhaps the crucial aspect of the concept of the spectacle: in order to perpetuate itself as a system, the spectacle installs into social formations an always already made choice for the spectacle as total commodity: “it is the spectacle as a whole which is advertised and desired” (Plant 1992: 24). Recognizing that our field of cultural studies is not different from non-academic social formations, the spectacle might also explain why we hardly begin to pose the cultural question of the Internet and why we often perceive technology as a seamless, determined structure.

Importantly, however, we should recognize that a contradiction lies at the heart of the spectacle: “the same technical infrastructure that is capable of abolishing labor must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity” (Debord 1994 [1967]: 31). One the one hand, the spectacle is an almost “total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system” (Debord 1994 [1967]: 13). Although the replacement of manual labor through the automation of production is proceeding in an ever-increasing speed with the help of networked computing, we must be made to believe that our labor essentially continues to have the fixed characteristics that it had in industrial society. It is at this juncture at which the cycle of feeding us part of the spectacle-as-commodity while still keeping the system intact where the spectacle loses credibility. We might view the practices of cultures of dissent on the Internet that we will discuss in the following section as micro-struggles that are attempting to disturb the spectacle by getting at some of the critical nodes of its increasingly contradictory network to install a perhaps more democratic or humane version of technology.

3. Networks

   1. Hackers

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.

—Jargon File 4.3.1

The Internet is the primary sphere in which activisms against the spectacle emerge. Following Geert Lovink, we can divide such activisms into three basic groups: activisms within an existing movement, between movements, or entirely as virtual protest (Lovink 2002: 266). While some of these movements are an extension of real-life organizations such as the websites of Greenpeace or Amnesty International, other movements take place primarily in the net-scapes themselves such as the practice of hacking. Since cultural studies has traditionally put an emphasis on ‘subcultures’ such as skinheads or mods (Hall and Jefferson 1993), it has now singled out hackers as the seemingly most important, coherent group of dissent on the Internet (Thomas 2002). But is hacking really a practice that is directed against the Internet spectacle? Can we conceive hacker culture as a homogeneous whole? And if not, how can we reformulate the practice of hacking in a meaningful way?

Wake up, Neo

The revolutionary capabilities that cultural studies ascribes to hacker culture are not easily qualified. The reason for this might be that hacker culture differs from other forms of activism on the Internet that we will discuss below in that

the substance, the content of hacker culture, is derived from mainstream culture’s embrace of and, simultaneously, confusion about technology. It is a culture in one way completely divorced from mainstream culture, yet in another way completely dependent upon it (Thomas 2002: 4).

Thus, any interpretation of hacker culture must largely be based on the fictional descriptions of hackers as an imagined community (Anderson 1991) in the mainstream media. A cultural commodity such as the movie trilogy The Matrix (The Wachowski Brothers 1999) might then point us to some of the crucial aspects in our diagnosis of hackers as a culture of dissent on the Internet (Irwin 2002). The first part of the trilogy is one of the more interesting depictions of hacker culture in mainstream media, and it revolves around several critical issues: the way in which the figure of the hacker is constructed as an amateur opposition to professional corporate authority and power, the notion of a simulated reality, and the capacity of hackers as a marginal social formation to free humanity from oppression. Thomas A. Anderson (Keanu Reeves), the main character of The Matrix, works as a program writer for the software company Metacortex, whereas he spends his spare time in the net-scapes under the hacker alias ‘Neo,’ secretly pursuing the search for a phenomenon that he does not know anything about: the Matrix. In the course of the movie, Anderson finds out that he is actually living in the Matrix, a neural interactive simulation that has been fabricated by a regime of intelligent machines that uses human bodies as mere batteries for their culture’s energy supply while the humans are actually hallucinating a normal life in the late twentieth century. The movie constructs Anderson’s hacker identity as more meaningful than his professional life, and it suggestively depicts how the power structures of informational capital attempt to reincorporate Neo into their logic. Anderson’s professional life is contrasted in at least two scenes in the movie to his hacker practice. In one key scene, Anderson is reprimanded by his boss for being too late for work:

You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you’re special, that somehow the rules don’t apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world, because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole. Thus, if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem.

In another key scene, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), a powerful computer program that roams the neural simulation in search for critical and harmful human minds, warns Anderson that only his one life as program writer for a respectable software company has a future. As a hacker, however, Anderson is “guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for.” In both scenes, Smith and Anderson’s boss insist on a strict separation of Anderson’s professional time and the amateur hacking practice of Neo: his harmful hacker life should be concluded for the benefit of greater efficiency in his programmer life, or perhaps more accurately, Neo should implement his ‘good’ hacking skills into his professional life while he should organize his free time like a work schedule. In The Matrix, the hacker aspect of Anderson ultimately triumphs when he proclaims “My name is Neo!” before crushing Agent Smith under an approaching subway train. It is not clear, however, how exactly a the practice of hacking would be more meaningful than Anderson’s office work: from the outside, he essentially spends his time typing away in front of a computer in both lives.

The Matrix relies on a critique of the programmed neural simulation in order to make a meaningful distinction between the two lives. To this end, hacker leader Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) speculates about the constructed character of reality in the movie. Morpheus is a charismatic hacker who travels the real existing, desolate earth together with a small crew aboard his hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar in the late twenty-second century. Like the other hackers, he trains Neo for combat against software agents such as Smith with a program that the hackers call ‘The Construct.’ Inside this program, Morpheus provokes Neo to enable him to overcome the principles of gravity and mass during combat in the Matrix: “What is real? How do you define real? You think that’s air you’re breathing now?” In fact, this discourse of the real in The Matrix explicitly refers to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations in at least two instances (Baudrillard 1994): Neo hides illegal software in a hollowed-out copy of the book, and when inside the Construct, Morpheus welcomes Neo to a neural simulation of the desolate real earth with the words: “Welcome to the desert of the real.” From the hackers’ perspective, the Matrix is essentially a prison to keep human beings under perfect control. As Morpheus says: “You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch: a prison for your mind.” The discourse on the real in The Matrix is then a negative comment on the naturalization of the spectacle in the age of networked computing: the movie powerfully evokes the “false consciousness of time” that the spectacle of cyberspace installs in the net-scapes (Debord 1994 [1967]: 114). Ultimately, however, such a philosophy of the real does not lead to a plausible conclusion. As Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), a hacker who eventually cooperates with the agents, recognizes: “The Matrix can be more real than this world.”

It is a third discourse in The Matrix, however, that is perhaps the most problematic in relation to a politics of hacking: the notion of hackers as a marginal social formation that can free humanity from oppression. This discourse has essentially two aspects. One aspect is the idea that the hacker group on board of the Nebuchadnezzar is an elite or avant-garde. As Morpheus says:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. And when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

This ideology of hackers as an avant-garde social formation that will eventually lead the masses to revolution and overthrow the existing regime of the machines follows a version of traditional Marxism that relies on a dominated class as a revolutionary subject. In such a framework, the iconic figure of Neo becomes the leader of the avant-garde, ‘the One’ who is able to bend the rules of the Matrix to his liking. The other aspect is the perfect world of ultimate freedom that lies beyond the current condition, “a world without rules or control, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible,” as Neo says. Essentially, The Matrix then fails to reconceptualize activisms and reiterates instead a monolithic notion of ‘resistance’ that is typical of earlier, failed Marxisms (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 38-61). If we remind ourselves that Debord characterizes the spectacle as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image,” we might diagnose the retreat to such monolithic notions as a symptom of the movie apparatus itself (Debord 1994 [1967]: 24). After all, The Matrix is a product of the AOL Time Warner corporation and thus part of the spectacle—like all critical cultural commodities, it purports the very idea it set out to critique. Nonetheless, if hacker culture “is a culture in one way completely divorced from mainstream culture, yet in another way completely dependent upon it” (Thomas 2002: 4), we might now begin to recognize some of the paradoxes of hacker culture that cannot be regarded as a coherent, monolithic subculture that is resisting the spectacle, but as a heterogeneous culture that might follow many contradictory ideologies.

Hacker Ethics

The limits of the hacker ideology that The Matrix purports are mirrored in real life hacker culture by equally contradictory ideologies. Even though these limits have been insightfully described by Andrew Ross in his essay “Hacking away at the Counterculture” (Ross 1991), many other books about hacker culture, especially the sensationalist reports about hero-hackers (Stoll 1990, Sterling 1992, Hafner and Markoff 1995), have not taken into account the heterogeneous nature of hackers as a social formation (Thomas 2002, Himanen 2001; see my critique in Ziegler 2002). If the difficulty in describing hacker culture as a more complex phenomenon lies in the fact that we can conceive hackers largely through mainstream media, it becomes all the more important for cultural critics to qualify the hacker self-assertion that the group has “important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values” and “unusually rich and conscious traditions” that make hackers a coherent group (Raymond 2003). A first step toward understanding hacker culture as a complex cultural phenomenon is then the recognition that the self-image of hackers and their depiction in the mainstream media does not differ from earlier ‘subcultures.’ Like other social formations, hacker culture is more about cultural rituals and power structures than it is about malicious computer programs.

Similar to the neural simulation of the Matrix, the world of hacker culture is essentially a place that is governed by mathematical laws with the computer at its core (Cubitt 2000). Ellen Ullman suggestively describes this place in her book Close to the Machine: as a programmer, her social environment gradually recedes in importance as the process of programming becomes more important and her wish to live in a “calm, mathematical place” more alluring (Ullman 1997: 21). Although Ullman’s program is really a software for a municipal social service and thus entwined in a complex social configuration, it has “the beauty of a crystal” in the abstract world of computer code (Ullman 1997: 21). Such a view of net-scapes as being essentially governed by mathematical laws results in an outlook of the hacker as a person that has a mysterious, deeper insight into this mathematical world. The definition of hackers that Douglas Thomas gives in his recent book Hacker Culture, follows this idea: Thomas sees hackers as “a group of computer enthusiasts who operate in a space and manner that can be rightly defined by a sense of boundless curiosity and a desire to know how things work” (Thomas 2002: 3). As Thomas goes on to write, “‘True hacks’ are the result of […] taking advantage of […] flaws, oversights, or errors in an original way” (Thomas 2002: 43). Such distinctions, however, largely serve the purpose of constructing hackers into an authentic, ‘subcultural’ group. In fact, they follow a certain notion of elite hacking that excludes youth computer freaks, pejoratively labeled ‘script kiddies’ by older hackers, from its self-image. An inappropriately romanticized, homogeneous version of hero-hackers is the result for cultural studies.

Finally, as we have seen in The Matrix, hacker culture does not stand in opposition to office work structures. On the contrary, the culture in part “celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy, and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance” (Ross 1991: 121). Pekka Himanen has made this work attitude fruitful for his business book The Hacker Ethic. Himanen proposes a new work ethic for our time that “cannot be found in work or leisure but has to arise out of the nature of activity itself” (Himanen 2001: 151). While Himanen’s concept is designed to supplant the monolithic character of manual labor with a more complex notion of informational work, his theory is really a version of the idea that mathematical principles are underlying our world in which ‘chaos theory’ has been taken up as a metaphor that seemingly best describes the interactions of social formations with its paradigm of emergence. We can then interpret Himanen’s concept of hacker work with Sean Cubitt as a version of the chaos theory of the social sphere (Cubitt 2000: 139). If we follow the notion of hacking that remains prevalent in books such as Thomas’s Hacker Culture, hacking becomes identical to office work as a practice that, as Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) writes, leaves “little or no leisure time for collecting information about specific political causes, building critical perspective, or designating contestational sites” (Critical Art Ensemble 1995: 19). As CAE goes on to caution, “Without such information, hacker politics will continue to be extraordinarily vague.”

Household Hacking

If it is not the mediatized culture of hero-hackers that works actively against the spectacle, perhaps we can reformulate the notion of hacking in a more meaningful way to help conceive such an activism. Another look at mainstream media hacker discourse might be useful in order to understand in what way our notion of hacking has to be altered. In American media, the practice of hacking has been associated with discourses of terrorism and criminality of the one hand, and with infection, disease, or contamination on the other (see Wald 2000 for a more general discussion). For instance, Ian Hopper’s article “Destructive I Love You computer virus strikes world wide” does not describe how to secure a home computer against a virus, but it engages in a rhetoric of war and disease: a “self-propagating and destructive” virus “wrought hundreds of millions of dollars in software damage and lost commerce” from innocent corporations (Hopper 2000). Andrew Ross has connected hacking to the wider notion of a general American fear of viruses in his article “Hacking away at the Counterculture” (Ross 1991). The website Ready.gov is a recent example of such a general fear that equates hacking with terrorism, war, and contamination in society at large. The website has been installed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and it should inform American citizens about possible preparations against ‘terrorist’ attacks. The website rhetoric essentially seems to install a climate of suspicion across all spheres of American society: “Terrorists are working to obtain biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological weapons, and the threat of an attack is very real” (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2003). The website advises Americans to be “prepared for the unexpected” and to be able to “make it on your own for at least three days, maybe longer.” Essentially, as Ross argues, the rhetoric of this website mirrors early AIDS hysteria in its discourse of microscopic particles that “hurt you if they get into your body, so think about creating a barrier between yourself and any contamination.” The bottom line of such propaganda in the American mainstream media seems to be that “it is important to be suspicious.”

What lies at the heart of such rhetoric? At the heart of such rhetoric seems to be the closure of net-scapes and the purification of the domain of the professional programmer and the security analyst, authorized people who do not play with computers but work with them. To the extent that cultural studies can free itself from regarding the practice of hacking as taking part in such a discourse of distinction and purification, hacker practice will be a fruitful notion: it might contribute to a non-reductionist way of seeing the links between micro-struggles in electronic networks. If we follow the myths about hero-hackers and malicious viruses, however, we are taking part in the closure. Recognizing that there is no hacker culture as a homogeneous whole, we might then follow Andrew Ross and extend the notion of hacking to include “all high-tech workers, no matter how inexpert, who can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured communications that dictates their positions in the social network of exchange and determines the pace of their work schedules” (Ross 1991: 124). In short, we should regard hacking as any ‘amateur’ activity that disturbs the rationale of the spectacle of cyberspace. To be sure, such amateur practice will necessarily be “deficient in relation to the proper balance demanded by professionalism” (Ross 1991: 118; on science and amateurism see Cubitt 2000: 130). But it is precisely this deficiency that comes with our reformulation of the notion of hacking that might open up spaces for dissent against the spectacle. As we will see in the last part of this essay, our rejection of a clear-cut politics of hacking and our turn to the notion of everyday or ‘household’ hacking does not mean that we are engaging in the practice of cultural studies to seek out a new group of resistance such as the mods or skins that always fails the test of real-life politics. Instead, we are using hacker culture as a thing to think through our own critical practice. From this perspective, it is the idea of everyday hacking that will have the most to offer.

2. Public Domains

The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.

—Utah Phillips

Hackers are not the only group that is regarded as a potential site of ‘resistance’ by cultural studies. There are less prominent Internet activisms within and between movements such as the free software movement and privacy activists that seem to work actively against the closure of the net-scapes (see DiBona, Ockman and Stone 1999 for an overview). Although such movements are engaged in important struggles, however, their practice is perhaps grounded in problematic ideologies of community, privacy, and the public sphere that a critical cultural studies should qualify: it is not clear how free software, email encryption programs, or electronic governance (or ‘e-democracy’) will lead to an increase of social justice without having any negative effects. At the bottom, many Internet activisms rely on the idea of an inevitable information revolution that has been developed in prosperous Western think tanks and policy institutes. This conception largely provides the rationale for a “restructuring, legitimization for social dislocation, and exhortation toward a radiant future” as much as it does inspire fictions of human commonwealth and freedom (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 37). Instead of such fictions of the free software movement and privacy activists, the ‘sarai’ might be a more useful notion: as an “enclosed space […] where travelers and caravans can find shelter, sustenance and companionship” (Lovink 2001), the notion of the sarai conceptualizes an open public domain in which hacking as a necessarily deficient, amateur practice might take place.

Programmed Publics

Internet privacy activists and the free software movement share an underlying project: the struggle for a digital public space. Whereas the first group has the reconstruction of a version of the Greek public space as a goal, the latter seeks to replace monolithic structures in software programming (Windows) by the concept of a bazaar-style program development (Linux). Both groups, however, essentially agree on a specific ideology of community, privacy, and the public sphere that expresses itself in an emphasis of a version of a ‘virtual commons.’ In the view of the Center for Digital Democracy, such a digital commons takes the digital form of the public space that we have in real life: “Just as we have set aside public space (e.g., parks, beaches, town squares) in the real-world landscape, so must we protect and promote a portion of the online world for noncommercial speech and public interest applications” (Center for Digital Democracy 2003). While this version of the digital commons might still include a central planning, more radical libertarian projects do away with this notion. The EFF, for instance, advances an extreme idea of an uncontrolled Internet on its website: “Imagine a world where technology can empower us all to share knowledge, ideas, thoughts, humor, music, words and art with friends, strangers and future generations. That world is here and now, made possible with the electronic network—the Internet.” As the EFF continues to proclaim, “governments and corporate interests worldwide are trying to prevent us from communicating freely through new technologies” (Electronic Frontier Foundation 2003). The Free State Project (FSP) follows the same radical concept (www.freestateproject.org). Since its inception in September 2001, the goal of FSP has been to convince 20,000 libertarians to move into a single state of the U.S. to take over the government of the state by voting for the same party. The ‘virtual commons’ of the FSP consists of a place for everyone who supports the “abolition of all income taxes, elimination of regulatory bureaucracies, repeal of most gun control laws, repeal of most drug prohibition laws, complete free trade, decentralization of government, and widescale privatization” (Freestateproject 2003). Essentially, the function that government takes on in all of these versions of a digital commons is nothing more than “the protection of citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and property.”

Although cultures of free software originate from a very different technocultural tradition, a similar version of public space underlies their ideology. Historically, free software culture can perhaps be traced back to the beginning of the home computer: before Bill Gates had programmed MS-DOS, computer programs were developed and traded along with their source code free of charge; the goal of the industry was to sell expensive mainframe computers and not the software to corporations or research facilities. When the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds developed Linux, a smaller version of the Unix operating system that ran on the earlier mainframes, a dichotomy between proprietary software and free software was installed: the software kernel was soon enhanced by free applications under the General Public License (GPL) that make Linux today the primary alternative to a Windows operating system. Although there is a radical version of the free software ideology and a version that is more open to marketing Linux/GNU programs, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI), both versions’ concepts of the positive characteristics of free software as opposed to proprietary software are similar. As programmer-activist Oxblood Ruffin writes:

In non-technical terms, a closed program would be like a menu item in a restaurant for which there was no recipe. An open program would be like a dish for which every ingredient, proportion, and method of preparation was published. Microsoft is an example of a closed, hi-tech restaurant; Linux is its stellar opposite, an open code cafeteria where all is laid bare (Oxblood Ruffin 2002).

Richard Stallman, the founder of the FSF, follows this logic: “When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of their own lives” (Stallman 2001: 179). From the perspective of the OSI, Eric Raymond writes that ‘open source’ software enhances “the possibility to help individuals become better able to acquire knowledge and disseminate their thoughts to others” (email to the author). The reductionist notion of public space of free software activists then follows the binary concept of much of the libertarian ideology of the digital commons. For them, using proprietary software instead of free software becomes identical to “living in an authoritarian society as opposed to a free one” (Oxblood Ruffin 2002).

Imagined Communities

What is the backdrop of such ideologies of freedom, privacy, and the community? And what are some of its deficiencies? On the one hand, these ideologies follow a perhaps specifically North American myth of communal action against a centralized government. If we follow science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, a “certain anarchical tinge deep in the American soul delights in causing confusion and pain to all bureaucracies, including technological ones” (Sterling 1992). Indeed, there is a complex history of civil disobedience in America, perhaps beginning with Henry David Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government that is often quoted on activist websites. Thoreau is highly critical of the American government whose effectiveness he compares to a “wooden gun to the people” (Thoreau 1992 [1849]: 226). Politics, in Thoreau’s view, is a game of power, and voting is similar to betting on one of the players. Thus, he concludes that “we should be men first, and subjects afterward” (Thoreau 1992 [1849]: 227). Such a libertarian stance, however, is limited in at least two aspects: On aspect is the central paradox of American libertarianism that is ingrained in this version of freedom: “the most widely held communal value is that of individualism,” as Henry Giroux writes (Giroux 2000: 3). The other aspect is the monolithic notion of power that it is grounded on. As James Boyle has argued (Boyle 1997), such a notion of power is centrally exercised by a sovereign over a geographically limited population that is perfectly obedient to that power. This notion does not take into account the more complex characteristics of power in the net-scapes, and it also overlooks that the public space that it seeks to construct has historically been controlled by those very power structures: it “was limited to those who possessed social attributes such as education, wealth and masculinity” (Chaney 1994: 114).

In addition, such ideologies of public space are rhetorical fictions of collective life. Recognizing that there is a “symbolic dimension of community that exceeds its social function or formalist nature” (Fernback 1999: 209), perhaps we should follow Benedict Anderson’s characterization of these rhetorical fictions as ‘imagined communities.’ According to Anderson, all communities are imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 1991: 6). However, even though the concept of the imagined community is increasingly used in cultural studies as a shorthand for the way in which a communal structure of feeling works, it does remain problematic. For once, the use of the term ‘imagined’ might suggest an opposition to a real community—even in the more radical notion that there are only imagined communities we sense a feeling of built-in nostalgia (Poster 2001: 122). More importantly, perhaps, these ideologies construct an essentially friction-free public space: they carry over a notion of peaceful citizenship into the net-scapes that is based on the idea that communication is essentially reasonable. As Vincent Mosco has cautioned (Mosco 2000), that notion does not differ from friction-free market ideology which relies on an informed customer who is able to chose reasonably between commodities. By constructing freedom and community as monolithic concepts, Internet libertarians and free software activists might themselves contribute to the closure of the net-scapes.

Another Public Space

How can we then conceive a public domain in which hacking as a deficient amateur practice could take place? At the heart of our attempt at a more fruitful conceptualization of the public domain might lie the recognition that “Public space does not exist except as a reification” (Critical Art Ensemble 1995: 40). If we want to open up the public domain for our reformulated hacking practice, we will have to disavow any homogeneous concept of community as a “a too harmonious, catholic term for the social dynamics within lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, and web sites” (Lovink 2002: 229). Outside of the discourses of hackers and free software activists lies the practice of the activist group Public Space Initiative (PSI). The goal of this group is to “spread democracy like a virus through the creation of public space” with the help of so-called Public Space Kits, manuals that describe the group’s understanding of public space (Public Space Initiative 2003). These manuals contain a very useful insight: “Public space is more like a verb than a noun, meaning it must be continually created and recreated.” Following PSI, we then have to replace our static notion of public space with a more fluid one and define our public domain as “the act of debating what is legitimate and what is illegitimate in a democratic society.” In cultural studies discourse, we might call such a more active notion of public space the turn to a radically constituted public domain. Hakim Bey has termed his version of such a public space in progress the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). Although Bey does not explicitly mention net-scapes, his definition might also be applied to activisms on the Internet:

The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace (Bey 2002: 117).

But even though Bey’s metaphor of the TAZ places a strong emphasis on the active nature of the struggles over public space, his version still presupposes a relatively monolithic state power and it purports a romanticized picture of a guerrilla force. In addition, it does not allow for a changing concept of public space as a verb in the course of the struggle for ‘liberation.’

The Sarai Project has perhaps developed a more useful concept of the public domain. Sarai is a media lab in Delhi that seeks to connect scholars, media activists, software programmers, and artists internationally through its website and locally in the lab itself. On its website www.sarai.net, the group emphasizes that its essential aim is to facilitate meetings between people rather than to predetermine the rules for a discussion: in many south Asian languages, sarai means simply “An enclosed space in a city, or, beside a highway, where travelers and caravans can find shelter, sustenance and companionship.” The Sarai Project then understands public space different from Bey. Its public domain “comes into being whenever people gather and begin to communicate, using whatever means that they have at hand, beyond the range of the telescope or the merchant, and outside the viewing platform of the microscope of the censor” (Lovink and Sengupta 2001: v). Thus, it is the sarai that might serve as an ideal setting for storytelling as a “representation of shared beliefs” that is characteristic of communication as a ritual (Carey 1989: 18). The open notion of public space that the sarai entails might then serve us as a metaphor for the kind of public space that we need to combine networks of knowledge on different levels: ‘amateur,’ street knowledge, technical knowledge, and critical academic discourse alike.

3. Activisms

Tactical media are post-1989 formations. They are a set of dirty little practices, digital micro-politics if you like. Tactical media inherit the legacy of ‘alternative media’ without the counterculture label and ideological certainty of previous decades.

—Geert Lovink

Outside of much writing about more prominent groups of dissent such as hackers and the free software movement lie the so-called new social movements. Although these movements have attracted the attention of sociology (Bourdieu 1998, Touraine 1971), they largely remain a blank spot for cultural studies. If cultural studies should turn to fluid notions of amateur activism that take place in a digital sarai, some of the Internet extensions of these new social movements might provide useful insights. For instance, activisms such as Free Radio Berkeley, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or Witness combine everyday hacking with old and ‘new media’ alike into a sort of electronic bricolage. To be sure, there is also a version of hacking that follows such a notion: the ‘hacktivism’ movement that emphasizes an amateur tinkering with electronics as opposed to rational conversation theory and a mathematical world model that has the computer and the hero-programmer at its center. Hacktivism and other activist micro-movements then constitute ‘dirty little practices’ that are using the net-scapes for a “process of mutual discovery, recognition, and reinforcement” instead of a systematic ‘resistance’ (Dyer-Witheford 1999: 129). We should hasten to add at this point, however, that such micro-movements should not serve as the next revolutionary subject of cultural studies after hackers and free software programmers failed our test of politics. Rather, these movements should remind us that we have to qualify our own cultural studies practice: they can inspire us to replace our sense of inevitability and despair with a more optimistic outlook of political possibility and make us realize that the spectacle also reaches into the academic sphere.

Hacktivism

What is hacktivism? In what way does its practice differ from traditional notions of hacking? Hacktivist practices take place on many levels: the New York Times website has been replaced by hacktivists with a call for the release of jailed hacker Kevin Mitnick; political activists have defaced the Indian government’s website by including photo documentation that calls attention to government-backed human rights violations in Kashmir, and the company Nike has been ‘hijacked’—the browsers of visitors to the company’s website were automatically redirected to an Australian labor rights organization. One historical, real-world precursor of the hacktivism movement was perhaps what critic Mark Dery describes as ‘cultural jamming.’ According to Dery (Dery 1993), the essential question of culture jamming is the problem of access to information: can activists appropriate the control over a corporation’s public image? At the height of what we have called above ‘semiotic radicalism,’ cultural jammers were engaged in semiotic struggles over advertisements on billboards and other means of symbolic communication. The Billboard Liberation Front (BLF), an activist group from San Francisco, was probably the first organization to prominently make use of such a ‘guerrilla semiotics.’ Recognizing that “to advertise is to exist and to exist is to advertise,” the BLF began to modify “the messenger RNA of capitalism” in 1977 by altering billboard messages (Napier & Thomas 2003). In a recent action, the group defaced one of the motives of Apple’s notorious ‘Think Different’ campaign: the claim was changed into ‘Think Disillusioned,’ and the company’s rainbow-colored apple logo became a skull. However, as billboards and magazine advertisements lose strategic importance to the practice of ‘fractal marketing’ in our time, cultural jamming loses the effectiveness that it had in the cycles of struggle during the semiotic turn of capitalism.

Hacktivism is a practice that has attempted to incorporate fractal capitalism into its outlook. The central insight of this movement is that capital becomes vulnerable in the net-scapes because it has become information. Or, as the Internet activist group Critical Art Ensemble puts it, “as far as power is concerned, the streets are dead capital” (Critical Art Ensemble 1995: 11). As a result, CAE has developed the notion of ‘electronic disturbance’ that follows this insight. As Ricardo Dominguez of the CAE writes, “If you disturb the Pentagon, it doesn’t really disturb the power; it doesn’t really disturb the tanks. […] But if you are a virtual company that only exists online, it’s an extremely powerful tool” (Dominguez 2002: 394). Supported by members of CAE, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas has relied on such practice of electronic disturbance (Kowal 2002). It could in fact be argued that the CAE’s FloodNet tool has been instrumental in some of the success of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN): originating from a farmer’s rebellion in a rural region in southern Mexico, North American supporters of this group have conceived the tool and a website www.ezln.org to continue to inform the mainstream media about its actions over the Internet. FloodNet is a simple program that is freely available on the Internet. The program sends multiple requests to a website, and as a result this website is effectively blocked from viewing when a sufficient number of users call up the site repeatedly with the tool. Similar to a highway blockage, FloodNet blocks Internet bandwidth ineffectively: not only the targeted website is rendered dysfunctional, but also its Internet neighborhood. With tools such as FloodNet, the notion of electronic disturbance then does not follow the hacker paradigms of efficiency and functionality on a high technical level while is also undermines the rhetoric of high-level computer crime of the government and the corporations.

Micro-Movements

While hacktivism is one way to use the Internet as a platform for action, there is a network of new social movements that use the net-scapes to enhance their real-life struggles. The way in which these new social movements use the Internet differs from the way in which hackers, for instance, use technology in that their websites constitute a map of activism in the form of interlinked .org-domain names: “A reader, a user, an audience member of a resistant web site can connect easily to another such site and in this way […] travel through a territory of cyberspace that has been occupied by a series of interconnected resistant websites” (Dominguez 1994). Such activist website can therefore enhance very different forms of real struggles that take place in different media. As a result, what might seem a conservative use of the Internet to promote the interests of a real-life activist group makes cyberspace in fact

important as a political arena, not, as some postmodern theorists suggest, because it is a sphere where virtual conflicts replace real struggles ‘on the ground,’ but because it is a medium within which terrestrial struggles can be made visible and linked with one another (Lovink 2002: 128).

For instance, the website of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) enhances the organization’s local struggle for labor rights to the Internet. CIW is a powerful traditional union based in Immokalee, Florida’s most important center for agricultural production. It represents the needs of a large population of Immokalee farm workers who spend most of the year in Southwest Florida and travel north to get jobs during the summer. On the website www.ciw-online.org, CIW makes its demands known to a national audience. The organization requests “stronger laws and stronger enforcement against those who would violate workers’ rights, the right to organize on our jobs without fear of retaliation, and an end to indentured servitude in the fields” (Coalition of Immokalee Workers 2003). With the help of its Internet platform, CIW has succeeded in winning a negotiation about higher wages for its workers that even involved a direct intervention by Governor Jeb Bush. Similar to the EZLN, the Internet has proved a valuable forum for CIW to make their local struggle known to a wider audience.

Activist groups that are involved with struggles in different media also use the Internet as an enhancement for their practice. One of these groups is the video activist organization Witness. In 1991, the beating of Rodney King was filmed by a bystander with a home video camera. In the wake of the impact of resulting trials, musician Peter Gabriel founded Witness, an organization with the goal to make video equipment and training available to victims of human rights violations so that they will be able to record such violations. In its handbook Video for Change, Witness informs that it has trained over 125 groups from 47 countries in video advocacy and argues that it “has proven that technology offers rights defenders a powerful way to expose injustice and to uphold fundamental rights” (Witness 2000). Essentially, Witness makes possible a technologically a kind of enhanced storytelling that can be spread to almost anywhere in the world as a visual commodity to be inserted into a weak spot of the spectacle.

An often overlooked form of technocultural activism is micro radio activism (Fiske 1996). One of the influential groups of radio activists