{"id":3009,"date":"2018-03-19T11:29:42","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T15:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=3009"},"modified":"2018-03-19T11:29:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T15:29:42","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-hacktivism-and-the-problem-of-ideological-drift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-hacktivism-and-the-problem-of-ideological-drift\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Hacktivism and the Problem of Ideological Drift"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is challenging to critically explore and theorize \u201chacktivism\u201d the same week that the revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica<\/a> return to the front page and that President Trump fires F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe<\/a> for his purported role in the investigation of Russian hacking of American institutions and voters.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, perhaps, hacking and hacktivism were much more solidly associated with anarchist-leaning attacks on the establishment. They were almost exclusively linked to radical Leftist forms of truth-telling and whistleblowing\u2014to the hacker collaborative Anonymous, to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, to Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. In effect, to forms of political contestation that had an anarchist, sometimes libertarian, but certainly radical nature to them, predominantly on the Left, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist side of the spectrum.<\/p>\n

To be sure, as Gabriella Coleman emphasizes in her article \u201cWeapons of the Geek<\/a>,\u201d we need to be more nuanced about the politics of hackers\u2014as she correctly argues, \u201cthe ideological sensibilities that animate hacker politics are diverse: just as we can locate liberal hackers and projects, so too can we identify radical hackers and projects and see how both engender social change\u201d (p. S98).<\/p>\n

But it is fair to say that these sensibilities were and still are predominantly on the more radical Left. Emmanuel Goldstein provides a brilliant history in his essay on \u201cHacktivism and the Hacker Promise<\/a>,\u201d as does Coleman in her article. The political valence was linked, theoretically and historically, to what Coleman refers to as \u201cthe cultural cultivation of antiauthoritarianism\u201d within hacker circles (p. S95).<\/p>\n

This remains true today and one can hear a powerful expression of it in Simona Levi\u2019s marvelous essay \u201cWorking Notes for a R-evolution<\/a>.\u201d It rings loudly in her call to \u201cstudy the law, understand it, explain it in other words, make fun of it, hack it to render it useless, destroy its authority by replacing it with a positive one that will ultimately be coopted with the bad taste and time-lag that characterises the system, clearing away whatever had been there previously and leaving a blank slate.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I worry that, today, things may be changing, at least in the public imagination. Hacking has undergone some kind of ideological drift\u2014no longer so tightly associated with resistance to power, and often, now, connected to more authoritarian political tendencies. If I had to identify a moment, a tipping point, I think it would be when Julian Assange threw his support, effectively, behind Donald Trump. It was at that moment that hacktivism began to feel as much authoritarian as anarchist.<\/p>\n

Today, I fear, it almost seems as if hacking has become superpowered and militarized. It is as if the power of hacking was recognized to be so great, in our digitized age and geopolitics, that it was captured by the military superpowers. With news stories about Russia\u2019s ability to turn off the American power grid<\/a>, for instance, now dominating the public imagination of hacking, at least more so than denial of service attacks, there is a new militarized valence to hacking.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I am wrong. I would like to be corrected\u2014especially after having embraced forms of hacktivism in my previous book, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age<\/a><\/em>. I hope that our seminar Uprising 11\/13 will straighten me out on all this. Surely, when I read Emmanuel Goldstein\u2019s essay<\/a>, I think otherwise and am persuaded that, in his words, \u201cFighting the level of surveillance that we now know is being built and used against us became the raison d\u2019\u00eatre for a growing number in the hacker community. And here we are, as relevant to politics as any community is.\u201d And when I read about Simona Levi\u2019s work and Xnet<\/a>, I see the continuity in action.<\/p>\n

But I confess that this does raise, for me at least, one pressing question: Have hacking and hacktivism drifted from a mode of resistance to merely a technology, a weapon? Has the ideological drift substantively transformed hacking from a modality of uprising to simply a technological tool? Gabriella Coleman talks about hacker\u2019s \u201ctechnological artifacts\u201d (p. S91). Are these artifacts now the weapons of everyone, including authoritarian players?<\/p>\n

Another way to ask this is, does hacking still have a political or ethical valence, or is it now just like a machine gun or armored vehicle that can be used and deployed by any faction? In his fascinating post<\/a>, Emmanuel Goldstein defines hacktivism as \u201cthe subversive use of computers and\/or computer networks to further societal\/political change.\u201d The question is, do we need to qualify the term \u201cchange\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt\u00a0 It is challenging to critically explore and theorize \u201chacktivism\u201d the same week that the revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica return to the front page and that President Trump fires F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe for his purported… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38976],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-11-13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}