[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism x

[MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>]

[IN RESPECTFUL RESPONSE TO TJ'S COMMENTS. . .]


Whoa! Are we talking about real hackers here (Mitnick etc.), or about
groups that emulate the motions of hacking within an artistic context
(Rtmark etc.)? There is, I believe, a distinct difference, which I
thought was the point of the original statement I was challenging,
namely, that artists have somehow become passe/ and hackers are now
filling the void left in their wake. Possibly some of us are indulging
in metaphoric excess here and seek to imbue hacking with meanings that
lie beyond my modest interpretation. If so, then I guess we will simply
have to disagree about the scope of its significance and take separate
paths.

I can't imagine anything more oxymoronic than the notion of a hacker
"culture." Culture serves to circumscribe a common ethos within society.
Hackers are by nature antisocial and anti-groupthink. (Not all, but
many.) Magazines like 2600 strike me as being intended less to create
secure social bonds between like-minded individuals than to pass along
various tricks of the trade such as how to crack a payphone or
something. Whatever culture might tentatively emerge from such (for me)
tedious and silly pranks is ephemeral at best, and remains part of an
uncharted underground that can vanish as quickly as it arises. If you
want to call that a culture of sorts, go ahead, but to me it lacks the
staying power and solidarity - not to mention abiding legacy - of truly
transformative cultural energies such as was once to be had in various
art movements like Cubism, Dada, etc. and that continues - albeit
spottily - in the art movements of today. Hacking is more an inchoate
form of anti-culture, if you will, and a somewhat valid if woefully
marginal form of social protest. But even to call it protest is probably
to give it more of a positive patina than it deserves. Perhaps we should
see hacking more as merely a form of idle noodling at the computer by
youthful malcontents who otherwise would be masturbating all day. In
sum, not everything we do in defiance of our world contains enough yeast
and vitamin-energy to rise to the level of cultural dissent, and thus
bring progress (in Benjamin's sense of the word) and growth to an open
society. I think we need to make this distinction clear if we are to
give these ideas their proper weight.

<< And I suppose writers are glorified dictionaries. . . >>

Writers aren't glorified anything. They just write, - hopefully well
enough for others to want to read them. I guess what I really am
objecting to in the statements I was criticizing is the notion of
glorification itself as a way of assigning status within the culture (or
without), as it implies a disavowal of critical thinking. Down with
glory, guts and god!

Cultural status is arrived at due to consensual assent and assimilation
rather than mystical glorification. This is true, say, of a work of art
that once may have been shocking to the public but eventually becomes a
highlighted inspiration point of the common cultural landscape. Such a
hypostasis occurs, not because the work is somehow glorified into
notoriety, but because its provocations no longer rub against what the
culture allows within its bounds of acceptability. Hacking has already
become somewhat of a mainstream cultural activity, with large
corporations even hiring hackers to ferret out internal weaknesses,
sabotage copyright violators etc. Hacking hardly threatens the social
order in any big way anymore (if it ever did). At worst a few hundred
credit card #s might get pilfered now and again, causing capitalism to
burp slightly in releasing the gas of greed that has been building up
inside of its toxic bubble. Art, by contrast (borrowing Blanchot's
distinction), remains a force that lies astringently outside of culture,
threatening to undermine it by exposing its contradictions and defining
where it is most self-destructively undermining itself. I know of no
other way to do this, other than through political violence. That even
the most intransigent of art inevitably reverts back to culture over
time is not a strike against it, but an acknowledgment of its abiding
potency and value. Art lives on, indeed prevails, if only because
culture keeps refusing to believe in it.


Freedom is a slippery word. I frankly don't know what it really means
within the context of cultural dissent. I guess I will let you have that
one, if you want it. Or maybe I will ponder it at greater length, once I
can find the freedom to do so within my own petty life of boundaries and
limits.


Sorry for these disorganized comments! I may have let my enthusiasms on
this topic carry me beyond the limits of ordinary reason. Ah, well. Ah,
well. Nothing new in that!


MP

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