Goldstein's Return

HAL 2001: The Apolitical Politics of Hacking

You'll never guess who I had in my tent the other night. That Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the resistance from 1984. He's changed a fair bit in the last seventeen years. Hacking is his thing now, as well as annoying Ford Motors and campaigning to get fellow hacker Kevin Mitnick freed from jail. On the side, he runs a little magazine called 2600. It's about as close as hacking gets to a social voice these days, but still a long way from Goldstein's heyday as an anti-establishment cold war warrior.

Whatever, I wondered as we chatted away, happened to the old Goldstein? From the public talks he gave at this year's Hacking At Large festival in Eschede, Holland, it was clear that he hadn't completely forgotten the resistance. Emmanuel knew there was still a fight going on, still a few who hadn't completely given in. But he was, it seemed, a shadow of his former self. You couldn't help wondering whether the leader of the resistance should really be spending his time and (considerable) expertise registering names like fuckgeneralmotors.com and fending off the ensuing court cases, when 300,000 people are braving brutal police tactics in Genoa to protest the lack of any discernible ethical component in modern capitalism. Wouldn't Goldstein's time be better spent hooking up with these struggles and donating his talents to the cause?

Well maybe, and maybe not. After three days at HAL 2001, it was all too easy to become disenchanted with the absolute, blinkered obsession with technology-for-technology's sake, easy to poke fun at three thousand hackers gathering in a field to drink Jolt cola, smoke skunk, eat Dutch sweets and mount Trojan horse attacks on each other's machines. And although there were presentations on issues like 'Hacker Ethics', the Cybercrime Convention and 'Cybersquatting and Freedom of Speech,' these were pretty much the only places you could hear such matters discussed. Everywhere else it was Linux boxes, Free BSD, the merits of wireless networking - and woe betide anyone who tried to talk about anything involving politics and economics- or the Windows operating system.

Indeed, if you came to HAL 2001 looking for hackers with a social conscience then you were pretty much going home disappointed. They were few and far between. But the only people actually *looking* for hackers with a social conscience were journalists, wannabes and people who (like me) really didn't understand the first thing about hacking. I had one conversation with an artist who was convinced that 'What we need now is a European EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) to unite these hackers and give them a political basis.'

That was when I smelled a big rat. Firstly, the EFF, a front for the ghastly neo-liberalist claptrap promulgated by the likes of Messrs Barlow and Kelly, is clearly better left as and where it is. Secondly, it was abundantly clear from the turnout at HAL that any attempt to unite these hackers behind any single flag whatever would be totally futile: the scene today is absolutely atomised, absolutely individualistic (another reason why the EFF needs no encouragement), and, to all appearances, virtually inimical to any attempt at union-ising or some kind of conscious politicisation.

We learnt this at HAL, though perhaps we knew it already: the network can unite, but it can also untie. Despite the gigabit uplink, the miles of ethernet connecting us all together across the fields, I found myself crying out loud for something to take part in. I was laughed right out of the shop, but still: there was a definite lack of group activities going on, if you didn't count sitting in a big tent to listen to someone talk or eating terrible food or staring intently at your own computer screen surrounded by a thousand others doing the same. And the level of segregation - between Unix and non-Unix, hardware and software hackers, network enthusiasts, those who secretly used NT or Windows 2000 and those who ritually burned Microsoft manuals (they really did); between the various crews, between the so-called 'Elite' hackers and the rest - was mind boggling. Each of these seemed to find it all but impossible to converse meaningfully with each other, partly because they were so specialised, and partly because they held each other in varying degrees of contempt. The idea of bringing all these constituencies together to (say) fight the G8 or hack the IMF is quite simply laughable. But it is also, as I eventually realised, misguided.

Because in a sense, Goldstein is right to to have given up on open politicking, to focus instead on discrete hacks and constrained causes. His interest in exploiting the gaps inherent in organised technical systems is the one thing that unites hackers right now, the one thing they all seem to find exciting, that everyone agrees is a worthy pastime. During the dialogue on 'Cybersquatting and Freedom of Speech', one could sense that Andy Mueller-Maguhn of the Chaos Computer Club and lately a board member of ICANN, wished it were otherwise. 'There has to be more than just playing around with stuff,' he said, looking gloomily at Goldstein. 'We have to take some kind of political position.' But then Mueller-Maguhn would say that: he's been at the sharp-end of ICANN's decision-making for a while now, and the CCC is famously political anyway. For most everyone else, the hacking is the politics: piecemeal and distributed, informed by nothing but a critical curiosity in systems, software and technology. And my feeling is that it's best left way.

After all, isn't this exactly the kind of criticism levelled at the so-called 'Anti-Globalisation' protestors, that they lack coherence and a consistent ideology? And isn't it this very lack of consistency, this profligacy of intent, that makes the protestors a moving target, that keeps them from becoming just another political party, another faction? As long as the hackers remain unrepresentable (as, it seems, they currently are) - as long as they lend their talents to the projects that interest them in a piecemeal fashion, they will continue to be a potent - if somewhat frustrating - force. What's more, it is precisely through the concentration on 'purely technical issues' that hacking remains politcally interesting.

The Sealand project, for example: it's a hack, and although the guy who runs it, Ryan Lackey, seems to care pretty little about its political ramifications (what constitutes a state, so on and so forth) it has become an intensely political project for many people. Cryptographers like Phil Zimmerman, who talked at HAL about the history of PGP, are interested in cryptography pure and simple, but the political dimension to such work is obvious and well-documented. Likewise the hacking of the CSS, which was done not to create a copyright-free film library, but to bring DVD playback to the Linux OS. What could be geekier, and yet what (bar Napster) has had greater consequences for the intellectual property regime online?

Let the ideologues leave the hackers alone. Politics or no politics, it seems that simply by virtue of monkeying about with informational systems they will disrupt the status quo. Which is why, even without a manifesto (without even a manual), they can be a politically powerful force. Which is why Emmanuel Goldstein isn't such a terrible soubriquet for the 2600 representative to have chosen, and why it's okay for him to just mess around with stuff, because he can. When you get three thousand Goldsteins in a field, all just messing around with stuff, the governments get interested, the security agencies come sniffing around, the establishment sits up and pays attention. And if that's not the mark of a political meeting that actually matters, I don't know what is.