Resisting the Hackers: Activism and Metaphor

I knew absolutely nothing about hacking before I tackled the topic for this week’s class. I mean, of course I had heard vaguely about a hacking attack on Pay Pal (I recall I had to change my information afterwards) and it has been a common trope to hear that a site had been hacked, or the ubiquitous, “someone hacked into my Facebook account” to explain embarrassing non sequiturs. As I wrote to a friend Tuesday morning, “I have to go start my reading for my 614 class this week. The topic of the week is hacking – I’m not sure I care! But I’m open to being convinced I am wrong!”

            A few days later I’m not sure I am convinced, but two aspects embedded in the whole discussion of hacking did interest me, and have allowed me a way in to an intellectual curiosity about the issue; activism and metaphor. Activism allows me to consideration a motivation that I otherwise can’t understand for the doing of hacking. Metaphor allows me to consider the issues of communication and rhetoric that underlie the divide between the technology of practitioners who do and the rest of us who seek to understand why.

                        The issue of activism caught my interest since I had never encountered that element as a justification for hacking. I had a fairly naïve, unsubtle understanding (and still do!) of certain motivations for hacking based on mischief-making, monetary gain, and general mayhem. I wish now that I had been more aware of where and when I came to develop these understandings, since I would like to reconsider whether my understandings were the result of my own avoidance of the issue or a legitimate bias in the ways that hacking is reported in the news and is represented in popular culture such as television and film. Is the more altruistic, philosophical, or political agendas for hacking being edited out of the versions of hacking that get reported to the public? From the perspective of someone like myself, with my generally liberal and socially-conscious beliefs, activist sympathy is an easy button to push, and as I read Olson’s chapter on Anonymous, I was noticing how easily I was being pulled into a more sympathetic view towards hacking. Emotional appeals aside, I felt I needed to be more analytical, and of course, at a second glance, all sorts of complexities present themselves. Is this a thoughtful and targeted activism by those concerned? Or is it anarchism and egotism adopting the dress of activism? What are the social goals of such an activism? I think Olson’s ultimate point in the chapter that the large-scale hacking of groups like Anonymous are dominated hugely by the egotism of a few rather than the social ideologies of the many, is a valuable one. But the activism angle did open up the possibility that a few activist-hackers, working as the technological spearhead for a larger social interest group, could engage in what might be a “good” activism via hacking. What troubles me, though, is whether it fits my definition of good activism by being a peaceful act of civil disobedience, or whether it transgresses into damage and aggression.

            The other issue that interested me, particularly in the Parmy Olson chapter we read, was the complex ways in which metaphor featured in the explication of what the hackers were doing. Mediating the exchange between the technological complex and publicly accessible was a wide range of interesting imagery and metaphor that attempted to offer a way in to understanding what hackers do. This chapter and our other readings were riddled with allusions to pathways and roads, tunnels and circuitry, weapons and assaults, hives and pods and all the rest. It left me bewildered because there seemed such a disconnect between what was really happening within these groups and the technologies they were utilizing, and how it was being explained. I fundamentally wanted to know how they did some of these things, not in great depth, but just in a way that would help me understand how the whole process worked. The vehicle for communication made itself very apparent, and the signifier seemed dangerously removed from what was being signified. While I can see why a certain amount of metaphor can help us to conceptualize these complex activities, I am still pondering how the ways in which these things are rendered simple condition how we view them. If we can only understand hacking via certain stereotypical and widely applied imagery, how does our perception also lack in complexity, ideological as well as technological? A stereotypical language of imagery and metaphor, saturated with certain conventional ways of explication probably does indeed narrow our understanding of hacking, possibly in profound ways. Even as somewhat of a technological nitwit, I feel frustrated that I am being controlled by a language that keeps me at a distance while demanding an intellectual and/or emotional response.