[Nettime-bold] digital hooliganism

[Pit Schultz <pit@klubradio.de>]

hacking as a cultural metaphor for a new kind of critique can become a
misleading abstraction when you've just been hacked. hacker tools
developed by high skilled security system experts are available to everyone 
who
can use search engines and are as easy to install and use as virus scanners.

last autumn a number of cultural net projects with a strong dedication to open
access and free speech got hacked and their content erased using such tools.
(ssh exploits and linux root kits) among them was a well known open audio
archive where thousands of audio files got lost. it is rather difficult to 
find
a cultural net project which didn't have problems with hackers over the 
last few
months. for most, the damage wasn't more than what can be fixed by 
installing a
new system, others lost unique digital art projects.

the spiral of technification in the security sector goes further. the result
is that small providers or self-run co-locations, public access sites of
universities and libraries, move over from a policy of the free digital 
commons
to a strategy of paranoid enclosure, while the security experts and service
industry prospers. in their midst former hackers who still perform their sport
like innocent boy-scouts praised by the net culture discourse as role models.

transmediale 2.0 in Berlin featured a workshop on 'hacking techniques'. it's
software art competition was 'hacked' by a guy using a 'fork bomb' script as
object-trouvee. Mckenzie Wark's hacker manifesto makes the hacker a hero
positioned to inherit an outdated model of traditional criticism. since years
hollywood movies, and tv documentaries, books and club tracks have featured
the hacker as the subject of full souvereignity of our times.

the dream of a vivid hacker culture, an elite with its own ethics and social
orders, is over when everyone can download the skills of generations of 
hackers
in a piece of ordinary code. once started on a script-kiddie's pc all social
and cultural knowledge is stripped from the software, and its pure subversive
potential can unfold. call it digital hooliganism, or cyber black block, 
once a
software is released only another piece of code can make it stop. while the
skills embedded in the code get more and more complex, the skills to run the
code zero out. in the end it doesn't matter if the wizard wears a black or 
white
hat.

but hacking becomes more than just 'cool' in exactly the moment when operation
homeland security, the law inforcements agencies of international 
copyright, and
new national infowarrior divisions in almost every country criminalize and
militarize the act of hacking while at the same time thousands of 
out-of-the-box
hackers popularize the practise in countless vandalizations and destruction 
of websites and open file archives.

hacking is more than a metaphor, whereever there's a hack, a virtual border 
has
been crossed illegally. the erosion of security leads to new models of
distribution and storage which make the 'copy-me' an axiom of sustainability.
the strongest tools of the web at the moment, p2p filesharing networks are 
built
on the principle of open system architectures with minimal access 
restrictions.
insecurity in terms of openness is a basic feature of the net. maybe one 
has to
embrace it to get hacked and celebrate?

how detached does the "media culture" discourse have to get from the phenomena
of everyday digital life to finally become a full part of the reactionary 
logic
which it seems to try to critique?




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