Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference Hacktivism: Fighting the Society of Control Theyre trashing

our rights! Hack the planet! -Dade Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller),Hackers The preceding quote was shouted as young Dade Murphy was carted away by the authorities in the film Hackers due to his involvement in crashing a large multinational corporations supercomputer server alongside his friends and a global network of hackers. While this was a work of fiction it had the prescience to envision the future of activism, dubbed hacktivism, against corporations and governments who would perpetrate perceived injustices against a variety of people and groups. While the phenomena of hacktivism has been around for some time, only recently did it gain prominence in the wake of large scale activities against a variety of websites owned by credit card companies, financial institutions, and governments perpetrated by groups such as Anoymous, Lulsec, and Antisec. Gilles Deleuze would call these companies, governments, and institutions part of the society of control. Put forth in his work Postscript on the Societies of Control, he illustrated the chronological successor to the discipline society that Foucault located as starting in the 18th and 19th centuries and reaching their pinnacle at the beginning of the 20th. As Galloway imparts upon us in Protocol speaking on Deleuzes work, . begins to define a chronological period after the modern age that is founded neither on the central control of the sovereign nor on the decentralized control of the prison or the factory.1 Instead, as Galloway describes, it is controlling computer technologies that define the control society. In a compelling turn, these technologies are currently being employed in mass movements as a means of protest against the analogical models of the control society, the corporations. As Deleuze notes in the piece, there is no need to fear or hope but to only look for

Protocol, 30.

Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference new weapons. It seems that we have found them in the form of an anonymous hacktivist army composed of groups like Anonymous and Lulsec that is able to resist the codification necessary for the control society to carry out its mission. I. The Society of Control Deleuze described the society of control in a short work titled, Postscript on the Society of Control. In just five pages, he described a successor to what Michel Foucault called the discipline society. The discipline society was characterized by vast spaces of enclosure that people ceaselessly moved between.2 This would come to characterize the school, hospitals, and factories. This put forth the disciplinary societys analogical model as the prison, the ultimate space of enclosure. He notes that in Europa 51, the heroine of the film could exclaim I thought I was seeing convicts at the sight of some laborers.3 This piece then attempts to define a chronological period after the modern age that is neither founded on the central control of the sovereign nor the decentralized control of the prison or factory.4 If the prison is the analogical model for the discipline society, then it is the corporation, as Deleuze reveals, which is the model for the control society. He states that it has replaced the factory in a variety of ways. For example, there are differences in the approach to salaries in each model. The factory fixes salaries in a way that seeks to pay as little as possible while getting the highest possible in terms of production.5 The corporation approaches this differently and employs a variety of incentives to create a perpetual metastability of the salary. These

2 3

Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, 1 Ibid, 1 4 Galloway, Protocol, 30. 5 Ibid, 2

Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference incentives come in the form of challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions.6 If you have ever taken part in any sort of corporate meeting or seminar, you will be party to the nonsensical antics that take place therein. Deleuze could not have said it better when he expressed that the most idiotic game shows are so successful because they express the corporate situation with great precision.7 For Deleuze, humanity turned away from a society that stressed enclosure as a means of organization to one of control that uses openness. The control societies, much like the Borg of Star Trek, assimilate and adapt for each situation where the discipline society is fixed. Machinery is of central importance in the control society. In the same way that the disciplinary societies correspond to thermodynamic machines, cybernetic machines and computers correspond to control societies.8 That is, each society is highly dependent on these machines to enact their organizational mission. Deleuze notes these machines as well as he intimates, the old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines-levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses.9 It is no small coincidence that he mentions piracy and the introduction of viruses. In 1992 (when Postscript was written), there had already been a number of incidences of these phenomena in the form of hacking.

6 7

Ibid,2. Ibid, 2. 8 Galloway, Protocol, 49. 9 Deleuze, 4.

Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference II. Hacking Hacking is a phenomenon that seems to have arisen out of the society of control. It employs the machinery of said society in a way that often is problematic for the controllers. Hackers can be defined as those who exploit weaknesses in computer and internet security protocols for a variety of reasons.10 Many of them have excellent programming skills to the point of understanding computer code as a second language, albeit one that is not often if ever spoken. One writer, Steven levy, went so far as to delineate a set of ethics that hackers may use as a manifesto of sorts:
Access to computersshould be unlimited and total. All information should be free. Mistrust authority-promote decentralization. Hackers should be judged by their hacking and not by bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better.11

In this manifesto one notes the rejection of the closed (discipline) society in favor of a more open one, where access to information is readily available. This alludes to this phenomenon being borne of the control society, which is open and free flowing. It may be that hackers have a better understanding of the control that Galloway has labeled protocol. IN his work of the same name he describes protocol as the principle of organization native to computers in distributed networks.12 This organizational principle, combined with distributed networks and the novel technology that is the digital computer, have formed the control that is central to control societies. Galloway reminds us that you have not sufficiently understood power relationships in the
10 11

Sterling, Bruce (1993). "Part 2(d)". The Hacker Crackdown. McLean, Virginia: IndyPublish.com. p. 61 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), p. ix. 12 Galloway, Protocol, 3.

Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference control society unless you have understood how it works and who it works for.13 I would put forth that few understand how it works and who it works for better than hackers. Hackers view computers and code in a similar fashion as the protagonist of the Matrix Neo sees a green ethereal coding underlying his reality. They understand this language better than most, often with little or no formal training, just by looking at it. With the advent of hacktivism we can also assume they know who it works for. III. Hacktivism Hacktivism is an excellent way to describe the extent to which some hackers are willing to apply ethical considerations to hacking. While often illegal, hacktivism is hacking done as a means of protest; a true combination of non-violent activism and hacking. It was first coined in 1996 by a hacker under the alias Omega.14 Their methods range from defacing websites to denial of service attacks where entire servers can crash due to a flood of activity. Distributed denial of service attacks are much like sit-ins in the fact that people are simply going to a specified website in such heavy volumes that the site gets overloaded and shuts down. One instance where this type of hacktivism was employed was against the major credit card companies who refused to accept payment on behalf of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in 2010. The group that perpetrated the aforementioned act calls itself Anonymous. This is and important thing to point out as anobnymity is one of the great strengths hacktivism has. The main way that the society of control views people is in code. Deleuze writes the numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become dividuals, and
13 14

Ibid., 14. Old-time hacktivists: Anonymous, you've crossed the line"." CNet News, March 30, 2012. Retrieved March 30, 2012.

Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference masses, samples, data, markets, or banks.15 While hackers may look at and understand code, they do nto see themselves as code. This can be seen when a hacker adopts an often creative alias. The film Hackers does an excellent job of illustrating this rejection of the codification of the person. In the film, all of the hackers and thus main characters have aliases. Zero Cool, Acid Burn, Cereal Killer, and Lord Nikon were all main characters in the film. Even the hacker who works for the corporation in the film went by the moniker Plague. In reality, the names are much more creative and thought provoking, as they maintain anonymity while giving someone credit for an action. One of the largest actions by the group Anonymous was in response to prosecution of the operators of Megaupload, a popular file sharing website. IN January of 2012, hackers and anonymous supporters around the world launched a massive distributed denial of service attack upon US government and entertainment websites in response to what was seen as unfair prosecution. In just a few hours, Anonymous had brought down the largest government websites in the US while crippling the entertainment worlds biggest corporations. The corporations are, I will remind you, the analogical models of the control society. It seems that these analogical models are ill suited to deal with a group of loose knit hackers who fundamentally disagree with the control they offer. There is another facet of hacktivism that seems to focus upon governments and espionage. Wikileaks seems to be an excellent example of this. Their brand of hacktivism is directly ided by certain people acquiring information then passing on to the website. One could call say this is more in the realm of jopurnalism; however, the recent releases by Wikileaks were

15

Deleuze, 3.

Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference a direct result of hacking into a corporations (namely Stratfor) sensitive files. This may be where journalism and hacktivism complement one another as hackers do not often fear reprisal thanks to their presumed anonymity and sites like Wikileaks simply provide a place to showcase the information. Do not think that hackers should not worry about prosecution or arrest. It seems much of their anonymity may be simply imagined. Recently, the FBI released a statement that participating in distributed denial of service attacks is a punishable by up to ten years in prison.16 People from turkey to the Netherland have been arrested in connection with the activities of anonymous. Interpol recently released warrants for 25 people ranging from 17-40 in connection with the activities of anonymous.17 Interestingly, it seems those in power are somewhat afraid of retaliation as well. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that officials names are now kept private for fear of retaliation against those who would prosecute hackers.18 One chief security officer of a tech firm noted that this move showed deference to the sophistication and resolve of the hacker subculture and went on to say, The Internet is a lawless place, and we've seen a turning point where governments and regimes no longer have a monopoly on technology."19 This seems to be the very undoing of the control society as their technology has been turned against them. IV. Conclusion

16

Previous post Next post (January 27, 2011). "FBI Knocks Down 40 Doors in Probe of ProWikiLeaks Attackers". Wired. Retrieved August 30, 2011. 17 By staff writers (February 29, 2012). "25 alleged Anonymous members arrested after Interpol investigation". Washington Post. Retrieved March 1, 2012.
18 19

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203363504577185364230417098.html Ibid.

Gino Zarrinfar POLS April 9, 2012 New Directions Conference The compelling relationship between hacktivism and the society of control is one that is hard to deny. It seems that hackers and hacktivism are exactly what Deleuze was alluding to when he beckoned us to search for new weapons. The interconnectedness that is part of the society of control, alongside the free flow of information is exactly what hackers have been able to employ in their fights against the perceived injustices of corporations and governments. Until corporations and governments decide that control is not what they seek, I imagine we will see many more instances of hacktivism in the futures.