The Hacker's Encyclopedia 1998/hackers_encyclopedia.iso/etc/misc/counterc.hac

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                HACKING AWAY AT THE COUNTERCULTURE

                                by

                           ANDREW ROSS

                       Princeton University
     Copyright (c) 1990 by Andrew Ross, all rights reserved.
         _Postmodern Culture_ vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990).



[1]       Ever since the viral attack engineered in November

     of 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris on

     the national network system Internet, which includes

     the Pentagon's ARPAnet data exchange network, the

     nation's high-tech ideologues and spin doctors have

     been locked in debate, trying to make ethical and

     economic sense of the event.  The virus rapidly

     infected an estimated six thousand computers around the

     country, creating a scare that crowned an open season

     of viral hysteria in the media, in the course of which,

     according to the Computer Virus Industry Association in

     Santa Clara, the number of known viruses jumped from

     seven to thirty during 1988, and from three thousand

     infections in the first two months of that year to

     thirty thousand in the last two months.  While it

     caused little in the way of data damage (some richly

     inflated initial estimates reckoned up to $100m in

     down time), the ramifications of the Internet virus

     have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but

     transformed everyday "computer culture."

[2]       Following the lead of DARPA's (Defence Advance

     Research Projects Agency) Computer Emergency Response

     Team at Carnegie-Mellon University, anti-virus response

     centers were hastily put in place by government and

     defence agencies at the National Science Foundation,

     the Energy Department, NASA, and other sites.  Plans

     were made to introduce a bill in Congress (the

     Computer Virus Eradication Act, to replace the 1986

     Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which pertained solely to

     government information), that would call for prison

     sentences of up to ten years for the "crime" of

     sophisticated hacking, and numerous government agencies

     have been involved in a proprietary fight over the

     creation of a proposed Center for Virus Control,

     modelled, of course, on Atlanta's Centers for Disease

     Control, notorious for its failures to respond

     adequately to the AIDS crisis.

[3]       In fact, media commentary on the virus scare has

     run not so much tongue-in-cheek as hand-in-glove with

     the rhetoric of AIDS hysteria--the common use of terms

     like killer virus and epidemic; the focus on hi-risk

     personal contact (virus infection, for the most part,

     is spread on personal computers, not mainframes); the

     obsession with defense, security, and immunity; and the

     climate of suspicion generated around communitarian

     acts of sharing.  The underlying moral imperative being

     this: You can't trust your best friend's software any

     more than you can trust his or her bodily fluids--safe

     software or no software at all!  Or, as Dennis Miller

     put it on _Saturday Night Live_, "Remember, when you

     connect with another computer, you're connecting to

     every computer that computer has ever connected to."

     This playful conceit struck a chord in the popular

     consciousness, even as it was perpetuated in such sober

     quarters as the Association for Computing Machinery,

     the president of which, in a controversial editorial

     titled "A Hygiene Lesson," drew comparisons not only

     with sexually transmitted diseases, but also with a

     cholera epidemic, and urged attention to "personal

     systems hygiene."^1^  In fact, some computer scientists

     who studied the symptomatic path of Morris's virus

     across Internet have pointed to its uneven effects upon

     different computer types and operating systems, and

     concluded that "there is a direct analogy with

     biological genetic diversity to be made."^2^  The

     epidemiology of biological virus, and especially AIDS,

     research is being closely studied to help implement

     computer security plans, and, in these circles, the new

     witty discourse is laced with references to antigens,

     white blood cells, vaccinations, metabolic free

     radicals, and the like.

[4]       The form and content of more lurid articles like

     _Time_'s infamous (September 1988) story, "Invasion of

     the Data Snatchers," fully displayed the continuity of

     the media scare with those historical fears about

     bodily invasion, individual and national, that are

     often considered endemic to the paranoid style of

     American political culture.^3^  Indeed, the rhetoric of

     computer culture, in common with the medical discourse

     of AIDS research, has fallen in line with the paranoid,

     strategic style of Defence Department rhetoric.  Each

     language-repertoire is obsessed with hostile threats to

     bodily and technological immune systems; every event is

     a ballistic manoeuver in the game of microbiological

     war, where the governing metaphors are indiscriminately

     drawn from cellular genetics and cybernetics alike.  As

     a counterpoint to the tongue-in-cheek AI tradition of

     seeing humans as "information-exchanging environments,"

     the imagined life of computers has taken on an

     organicist shape, now that they too are subject to

     cybernetic "sickness" or disease.  So, too, the

     development of interrelated systems, such as Internet

     itself, has further added to the structural picture of

     an interdependent organism, whose component members,

     however autonomous, are all nonetheless affected by the

     "health" of each individual constituent.  The growing

     interest among scientists in developing computer

     programs that will simulate the genetic behavior of

     living organisms (in which binary numbers act like

     genes) points to a future where the border between

     organic and artificial life is less and less distinct.

[5]       In keeping with the increasing use of biologically

     derived language to describe mutations in systems

     theory, conscious attempts to link the AIDS crisis with

     the information security crisis have pointed out that

     both kinds of virus, biological and electronic, take

     over the host cell/program and clone their carrier

     genetic codes by instructing the hosts to make replicas

     of the viruses.  Neither kind of virus, however, can

     replicate themselves independently; they are pieces of

     code that attach themselves to other cells/programs--

     just as biological viruses need a host cell, computer

     viruses require a host program to activate them.  The

     Internet virus was not, in fact, a virus, but a worm, a

     program that can run independently and therefore

     _appears_ to have a life of its own.  The worm

     replicates a full version of itself in programs and

     systems as it moves from one to another, masquerading

     as a legitimate user by guessing the user passwords of

     locked accounts. Because of this autonomous existence,

     the worm can be seen to behave as if it were an

     organism with some kind of purpose or teleology, and

     yet it has none.  Its only "purpose" is to reproduce

     and infect.  If the worm has no inbuilt antireplication

     code, or if the code is faulty, as was the case with

     the Internet worm, it will make already-infected

     computers repeatedly accept further replicas of itself,

     until their memories are clogged.  A much quieter worm

     than that engineered by Morris would have moved more

     slowly, as one supposes a "worm" should, protecting

     itself from detection by ever more subtle camouflage,

     and propagating its cumulative effect of operative

     systems inertia over a much longer period of time.

[6]       In offering such descriptions, however, we must be

     wary of attributing a teleology/intentionality to worms

     and viruses which can be ascribed only, and, in most

     instances, speculatively, to their authors.  There is

     no reason why a cybernetic "worm" might be expected to

     behave in any fundamental way like a biological worm.

     So, too, the assumed intentionality of its author

     distinguishes the human-made cybernetic virus from the

     case of the biological virus, the effects of which are

     fated to be received and discussed in a language

     saturated with human-made structures and narratives of

     meaning and teleological purpose.  Writing about the

     folkloric theologies of significance and explanatory

     justice (usually involving retribution) that have

     sprung up around the AIDS crisis, Judith Williamson has

     pointed to the radical implications of this collision

     between an intentionless virus and a meaning-filled

     culture:

          Nothing could be more meaningless than a

          virus.  It has no point, no purpose, no plan;

          it is part of no scheme, carries no inherent

          significance.  And yet nothing is harder for

          us to confront than the complete absence of

          meaning.  By its very definition,

          meaninglessness cannot be articulated within

          our social language, which is a system _of_

          meaning: impossible to include, as an

          absence, it is also impossible to exclude--

          for meaninglessness isn't just the opposite

          of meaning, it is the end of meaning, and

          threatens the fragile structures by which we

          make sense of the world.^4^

[7]       No such judgment about meaninglessness applies to

     the computer security crisis.  In contrast to HIV's

     lack of meaning or intentionality, the meaning of

     cybernetic viruses is always already replete with

     social significance.  This meaning is related, first of

     all, to the author's local intention or motivation,

     whether psychic or fully social, whether wrought out

     of a mood of vengeance, a show of bravado or technical

     expertise, a commitment to a political act, or in

     anticipation of the profits that often accrue from the

     victims' need to buy an antidote from the author.

     Beyond these local intentions, however, which are

     usually obscure or, as in the Morris case, quite

     inscrutable, there is an entire set of social and

     historical narratives that surround and are part of the

     "meaning" of the virus: the coded anarchist history of

     the youth hacker subculture; the militaristic

     environments of search-and-destroy warfare (a virus has

     two components--a carrier and a "warhead"), which,

     because of the historical development of computer

     technology, constitute the family values of information

     techno-culture; the experimental research environments

     in which creative designers are encouraged to work; and

     the conflictual history of pure and applied ethics in

     the science and technology communities, to name just a

     few.  A similar list could be drawn up to explain the

     widespread and varied _response_ to computer viruses,

     from the amused concern of the cognoscenti to the

     hysteria of the casual user, and from the research

     community and the manufacturing industry to the morally

     aroused legislature and the mediated culture at large.

     Every one of these explanations and narratives is the

     result of social and cultural processes and values;

     consequently, there is very little about the virus

     itself that is "meaningless."  Viruses can no more be

     seen as an objective, or necessary, result of the

     "objective" development of technological systems than

     technology in general can be seen as an objective,

     determining agent of social change.

[8]       For the sake of polemical economy, I would note

     that the cumulative effect of all the viral hysteria

     has been twofold.  Firstly, it has resulted in a

     windfall for software producers, now that users' blithe

     disregard for makers' copyright privileges has eroded

     in the face of the security panic.  Used to fighting

     halfhearted rearguard actions against widespread piracy

     practices, or reluctantly acceding to buyers' desire

     for software unencumbered by top-heavy security

     features, software vendors are now profiting from the

     new public distrust of program copies.  So, too, the

     explosion in security consciousness has hyperstimulated

     the already fast-growing sectors of the security system

     industry and the data encryption industry.  In line

     with the new imperative for everything from

     "vaccinated" workstations to "sterilized" networks, it

     has created a brand new market of viral vaccine vendors

     who will sell you the virus (a one-time only

     immunization shot) along with its antidote--with names

     like Flu Shot +, ViruSafe, Vaccinate, Disk Defender,

     Certus, Viral Alarm, Antidote, Virus Buster,

     Gatekeeper, Ongard, and Interferon.  Few of the

     antidotes are very reliable, however, especially since

     they pose an irresistible intellectual challenge to

     hackers who can easily rewrite them in the form of ever

     more powerful viruses.  Moreover, most corporate

     managers of computer systems and networks know that by

     far the great majority of their intentional security

     losses are a result of insider sabotage and

     monkeywrenching.

[9]       In short, the effects of the viruses have been to

     profitably clamp down on copyright delinquency, and to

     generate the need for entirely new industrial

     production of viral suppressors to contain the fallout.

     In this respect, it is easy to see that the appearance

     of viruses could hardly, in the long run, have

     benefited industry producers more.  In the same vein,

     the networks that have been hardest hit by the security

     squeeze are not restricted-access military or corporate

     systems but networks like Internet, set up on trust to

     facilitate the open academic exchange of data,

     information and research, and watched over by its

     sponsor, DARPA.  It has not escaped the notice of

     conspiracy theorists that the military intelligence

     community, obsessed with "electronic warfare," actually

     stood to learn a lot from the Internet virus; the virus

     effectively "pulsed the system," exposing the

     sociological behaviour of the system in a crisis

     situation.^5^

          The second effect of the virus crisis has been

     more overtly ideological.  Virus-conscious fear and

     loathing have clearly fed into the paranoid climate of

     privatization that increasingly defines social

     identities in the new post-Fordist order.  The result--

     a psycho-social closing of the ranks around fortified

     private spheres--runs directly counter to the ethic

     that we might think of as residing at the architectural

     heart of information technology.  In its basic assembly

     structure, information technology is a technology of

     processing, copying, replication, and simulation,  and

     therefore does not recognize the concept of private

     information property.  What is now under threat is the

     rationality of a shareware culture, ushered in as the

     achievement of the hacker counterculture that pioneered

     the personal computer revolution in the early seventies

     against the grain of corporate planning.

[10]      There is another story to tell, however, about the

     emergence of the virus scare as a profitable

     ideological moment, and it is the story of how teenage

     hacking has come to be increasingly defined as a

     potential threat to normative educational ethics and

     national security alike.  The story of the creation of

     this "social menace" is central to the ongoing attempts

     to rewrite property law in order to contain the effects

     of the new information technologies that, because of

     their blindness to the copyrighting of intellectual

     property, have transformed the way in which modern

     power is exercised and maintained.  Consequently, a

     deviant social class or group has been defined and

     categorised as "enemies of the state" in order to help

     rationalize a general law-and-order clampdown on free

     and open information exchange.  Teenage hackers' homes

     are now habitually raided by sheriffs and FBI agents

     using strong-arm tactics, and jail sentences are

     becoming a common punishment.  Operation Sundevil, a

     nationwide Secret Service operation in the spring of

     1990, involving hundreds of agents in fourteen cities,

     is the most recently publicized of the hacker raids

     that have produced several arrests and seizures of

     thousands of disks and address lists in the last two

     years.^6^

[11]      In one of the many harshly punitive prosecutions

     against hackers in recent years, a judge went so far as

     to describe "bulletin boards" as "hi-tech street

     gangs."  The editors of _2600_, the magazine that

     publishes information about system entry and

     exploration that is indispensable to the hacking

     community, have pointed out that any single invasive

     act, such as that of trespass, that involves the use of

     computers is considered today to be infinitely more

     criminal than a similar act undertaken without

     computers.^7^  To use computers to execute pranks,

     raids, frauds or thefts is to incur automatically the

     full repressive wrath of judges urged on by the moral

     panic created around hacking feats over the last two

     decades.  Indeed, there is a strong body of pressure

     groups pushing for new criminal legislation that will

     define "crimes with computers" as a special category of

     crime, deserving "extraordinary" sentences and punitive

     measures.  Over that same space of time, the term

     _hacker_ has lost its semantic link with the

     journalistic _hack,_ suggesting a professional toiler

     who uses unorthodox methods.  So, too, its increasingly

     criminal connotation today has displaced the more

     innocuous, amateur mischief-maker-cum-media-star role

     reserved for hackers until a few years ago.

[12]      In response to the gathering vigor of this "war on

     hackers," the most common defences of hacking can be

     presented on a spectrum that runs from the appeasement

     or accommodation of corporate interests to drawing up

     blueprints for cultural revolution.  (a) Hacking

     performs a benign industrial service of uncovering

     security deficiencies and design flaws.  (b) Hacking,

     as an experimental, free-form research activity, has

     been responsible for many of the most progressive

     developments in software development.  (c) Hacking,

     when not purely recreational, is an elite educational

     practice that reflects the ways in which the

     development of high technology has outpaced orthodox

     forms of institutional education.  (d) Hacking is an

     important form of watchdog counterresponse to the use

     of surveillance technology and data gathering by the

     state, and to the increasingly monolithic

     communications power of giant corporations.  (e)

     Hacking, as guerrilla know-how, is essential to the

     task of maintaining fronts of cultural resistance and

     stocks of oppositional knowledge as a hedge against a

     technofascist future.  With all of these and other

     arguments in mind, it is easy to see how the social and

     cultural _management_ of hacker activities has become a

     complex process that involves state policy and

     legislation at the highest levels.  In this respect,

     the virus scare has become an especially convenient

     vehicle for obtaining public and popular consent for

     new legislative measures and new powers of

     investigation for the FBI.^8^

[13]      Consequently, certain celebrity hackers have been

     quick to play down the zeal with which they pursued

     their earlier hacking feats, while reinforcing the

     _deviant_ category of "technological hooliganism"

     reserved by moralizing pundits for "dark-side" hacking.

     Hugo Cornwall, British author of the bestselling

     _Hacker's Handbook_, presents a Little England view of

     the hacker as a harmless fresh-air enthusiast who

     "visits advanced computers as a polite country rambler

     might walk across picturesque fields."  The owners of

     these properties are like "farmers who don't mind

     careful ramblers."  Cornwall notes that "lovers of

     fresh-air walks obey the Country Code, involving such

     items as closing gates behind one and avoiding damage

     to crops and livestock" and suggests that a similar

     code ought to "guide your rambles into other people's

     computers; the safest thing to do is simply browse,

     enjoy and learn."  By contrast, any rambler who

     "ventured across a field guarded by barbed wire and

     dotted with notices warning about the Official Secrets

     Act would deserve most that happened thereafter."^9^

     Cornwall's quaint perspective on hacking has a certain

     "native charm," but some might think that this

     beguiling picture of patchwork-quilt fields and benign

     gentleman farmers glosses over the long bloody history

     of power exercised through feudal and postfeudal land

     economy in England, while it is barely suggestive of

     the new fiefdoms, transnational estates, dependencies,

     and principalities carved out of today's global

     information order by vast corporations capable of

     bypassing the laws and territorial borders of sovereign

     nation-states.  In general, this analogy with

     "trespass" laws, which compares hacking to breaking and

     entering other people's homes restricts the debate to

     questions about privacy, property, possessive

     individualism, and, at best, the excesses of state

     surveillance, while it closes off any examination of

     the activities of the corporate owners and

     institutional sponsors of information technology (the

     almost exclusive "target" of most hackers).^10^

[14]      Cornwall himself has joined the lucrative ranks of

     ex-hackers who either work for computer security firms

     or write books about security for the eyes of worried

     corporate managers.^11^  A different, though related,

     genre is that of the penitent hacker's "confession,"

     produced for an audience thrilled by tales of high-

     stakes adventure at the keyboard, but written in the

     form of a computer security handbook.  The best example

     of the "I Was a Teenage Hacker" genre is Bill (aka "The

     Cracker") Landreth's _Out of the Inner Circle_: The

     True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking

     the Nation's Most Secure Computer Systems_, a book

     about "people who can't `just say no' to computers."

     In full complicity with the deviant picture of the

     hacker as "public enemy," Landreth recirculates every

     official and media cliche about subversive

     conspiratorial elites by recounting the putative

     exploits of a high-level hackers' guild called the

     Inner Circle.  The author himself is presented in the

     book as a former keyboard junkie who now praises the

     law for having made a good moral example of him:

          If you are wondering what I am like, I can

          tell you the same things I told the judge in

          federal court: Although it may not seem like

          it, I am pretty much a normal American

          teenager.  I don't drink, smoke or take

          drugs.  I don't steal, assault people, or

          vandalize property.  The only way in which I

          am really different from most people is in my

          fascination with the ways and means of

          learning about computers that don't belong to

          me.^12^

     Sentenced in 1984 to three years probation, during

     which time he was obliged to finish his high school

     education and go to college, Landreth concludes:  "I

     think the sentence is very fair, and I already know

     what my major will be...."  As an aberrant sequel to

     the book's contrite conclusion, however, Landreth

     vanished in 1986, violating his probation, only to face

     later a stiff five-year jail sentence--a sorry victim,

     no doubt, of the recent crackdown.



     _Cyber-Counterculture_?

[15]      At the core of Steven Levy's bestseller _Hackers_

     (1984) is the argument that the hacker ethic, first

     articulated in the 1950s among the famous MIT students

     who developed multiple-access user systems, is

     libertarian and crypto-anarchist in its right-to know

     principles and its advocacy of decentralized

     technology.  This hacker ethic, which has remained the

     preserve of a youth culture for the most part, asserts

     the basic right of users to free access to all

     information.  It is a principled attempt, in other

     words, to challenge the tendency to use technology to

     form information elites.  Consequently, hacker

     activities were presented in the eighties as a romantic

     countercultural tendency, celebrated by critical

     journalists like John Markoff of the _New York Times_,

     by Stewart Brand of _Whole Earth Catalog_ fame, and by

     New Age gurus like Timothy Leary in the flamboyant

     _Reality Hackers_.  Fuelled by sensational stories

     about phone phreaks like Joe Egressia (the blind eight-

     year old who discovered the tone signal of phone

     company by whistling) and Cap'n Crunch, groups like the

     Milwaukee 414s, the Los Angeles ARPAnet hackers, the

     SPAN Data Travellers, the Chaos Computer Club of

     Hamburg, the British Prestel hackers, _2600_'s BBS,

     "The Private Sector," and others, the dominant media

     representation of the hacker came to be that of the

     "rebel with a modem," to use Markoff's term, at least

     until the more recent "war on hackers" began to shape

     media coverage.

[16]       On the one hand, this popular folk hero persona

     offered the romantic high profile of a maverick though

     nerdy cowboy whose fearless raids upon an impersonal

     "system" were perceived as a welcome tonic in the gray

     age of technocratic routine.  On the other hand, he was

     something of a juvenile technodelinquent who hadn't yet

     learned the difference between right and wrong---a

     wayward figure whose technical brilliance and

     proficiency differentiated him nonetheless from, say,

     the maladjusted working-class J.D. street-corner boy of

     the 1950s (hacker mythology, for the most part, has

     been almost exclusively white, masculine, and middle-

     class).  One result of this media profile was a

     persistent infantilization of the hacker ethic--a way

     of trivializing its embryonic politics, however finally

     complicit with dominant technocratic imperatives or

     with entrepreneurial-libertarian ideology one perceives

     these politics to be.  The second result was to

     reinforce, in the initial absence of coercive jail

     sentences, the high educational stakes of training the

     new technocratic elites to be responsible in their use

     of technology.  Never, the given wisdom goes, has a

     creative elite of the future been so in need of the

     virtues of a liberal education steeped in Western

     ethics!

[17]      The full force of this lesson in computer ethics

     can be found laid out in the official Cornell

     University report on the Robert Morris affair.  Members

     of the university commission set up to investigate the

     affair make it quite clear in their report that they

     recognize the student's academic brilliance.  His

     hacking, moreover, is described, as a "juvenile act"

     that had no "malicious intent" but that amounted, like

     plagiarism, the traditional academic heresy, to a

     dishonest transgression of other users' rights.  (In

     recent years, the privacy movement within the

     information community--a movement mounted by liberals

     to protect civil rights against state gathering of

     information--has actually been taken up and used as a

     means of criminalizing hacker activities.)  As for the

     consequences of this juvenile act, the report proposes

     an analogy that, in comparison with Cornwall's _mature_

     English country rambler, is thoroughly American,

     suburban, middle-class and _juvenile_.  Unleashing the

     Internet worm was like "the driving of a golf-cart on a

     rainy day through most houses in the neighborhood.  The

     driver may have navigated carefully and broken no

     china, but it should have been obvious to the driver

     that the mud on the tires would soil the carpets and

     that the owners would later have to clean up the

     mess."^13^

[18]      In what stands out as a stiff reprimand for his

     alma mater, the report regrets that Morris was educated

     in an "ambivalent atmosphere" where he "received no

     clear guidance" about ethics from "his peers or

     mentors" (he went to Harvard!).  But it reserves its

     loftiest academic contempt for the press, whose

     heroization of hackers has been so irresponsible, in

     the commission's opinion, as to cause even further

     damage to the standards of the computing profession;

     media exaggerations of the courage and technical

     sophistication of hackers "obscures the far more

     accomplished work of students who complete their

     graduate studies without public fanfare," and "who

     subject their work to the close scrutiny and evaluation

     of their peers, and not to the interpretations of the

     popular press."^14^  In other words, this was an inside

     affair, to be assessed and judged by fellow

     professionals within an institution that reinforces its

     authority by means of internally self-regulating codes

     of professionalist ethics, but rarely addresses its

     ethical relationship to society as a whole (acceptance

     of defence grants, and the like).  Generally speaking,

     the report affirms the genteel liberal ideal that

     professionals should not need laws, rules, procedural

     guidelines, or fixed guarantees of safe and responsible

     conduct.  Apprentice professionals ought to have

     acquired a good conscience by osmosis from a liberal

     education rather than from some specially prescribed

     course in ethics and technology.

[19]      The widespread attention commanded by the Cornell

     report (attention from the Association of Computing

     Machinery, among others) demonstrates the industry's

     interest in how the academy invokes liberal ethics in

     order to assist in the managing of the organization of

     the new specialized knowledge about information

     technology.  Despite or, perhaps, because of the

     report's steadfast pledge to the virtues and ideals of

     a liberal education, it bears all the marks of a

     legitimation crisis inside (and outside) the academy

     surrounding the new and all-important category of

     computer professionalism.  The increasingly specialized

     design knowledge demanded of computer professionals

     means that codes that go beyond the old professionalist

     separation of mental and practical skills are needed to

     manage the division that a hacker's functional talents

     call into question, between a purely mental pursuit and

     the pragmatic sphere of implementing knowledge in the

     real world.  "Hacking" must then be designated as a

     strictly _amateur_ practice; the tension, in hacking,

     between _interestedness_ and _disinterestedness_ is

     different from, and deficient in relation to, the

     proper balance demanded by professionalism.

     Alternately, hacking can be seen as the amateur flip

     side of the professional ideal--a disinterested love in

     the service of interested parties and institutions.  In

     either case, it serves as an example of professionalism

     gone wrong, but not very wrong.

[20]      In common with the two responses to the virus

     scare described earlier--the profitable reaction of the

     computer industry and the self-empowering response of

     the legislature-- the Cornell report shows how the

     academy uses a case like the Morris affair to

     strengthen its own sense of moral and cultural

     authority in the sphere of professionalism,

     particularly through its scornful indifference to and

     aloofness from the codes and judgements exercised by

     the media--its diabolic competitor in the field of

     knowledge.  Indeed, for all the trumpeting about

     excesses of power and disrespect for the law of the

     land, the revival of ethics, in the business and

     science disciplines in the Ivy League and on Capitol

     Hill (both awash with ethical fervor in the post-Boesky

     and post-Reagan years), is little more than a weak

     liberal response to working flaws or adaptational

     lapses in the social logic of technocracy.

[21]      To complete the scenario of morality play example-

     making, however, we must also consider that Morris's

     father was chief scientist of the National Computer

     Security Center, the National Security Agency's public

     effort at safeguarding computer security.  A brilliant

     programmer and codebreaker in his own right, he had

     testified in Washington in 1983 about the need to

     deglamorise teenage hacking, comparing it to "stealing

     a car for the purpose of joyriding."  In a further

     Oedipal irony, Morris Sr. may have been one of the

     inventors, while at Bell Labs in the 1950s, of a

     computer game involving self-perpetuating programs that

     were a prototype of today's worms and viruses.  Called

     Darwin, its principles were incorporated, in the

     eighties, into a popular hacker game called Core War,

     in which autonomous "killer" programs fought each other

     to the death.^15^

[22]      With the appearance, in the Morris affair, of a

     patricidal object who is also the Pentagon's guardian

     angel, we now have many of the classic components of

     countercultural cross-generational conflict.  What I

     want to consider, however, is how and where this

     scenario differs from the definitive contours of such

     conflicts that we recognize as having been established

     in the sixties; how the Cornell hacker Morris's

     relation to, say, campus "occupations" today is

     different from that evoked by the famous image of armed

     black students emerging from a sit-in on the Cornell

     campus; how the relation to technological ethics

     differs from Andrew Kopkind's famous statement

     "Morality begins at the end of a gun barrel" which

     accompanied the publication of the do-it-yourself

     Molotov cocktail design on the cover of a 1968 issue of

     the _New York Review of Books_; or how hackers' prized

     potential access to the networks of military systems

     warfare differs from the prodigious Yippie feat of

     levitating the Pentagon building.  It may be that, like

     the J.D. rebel without a cause of the fifties, the

     disaffiliated student dropout of the sixties, and the

     negationist punk of the seventies, the hacker of the

     eighties has come to serve as a visible public example

     of moral maladjustment, a hegemonic test case for

     redefining the dominant ethics in an advanced

     technocratic society.  (Hence the need for each of

     these deviant figures to come in different versions--

     lumpen, radical chic, and Hollywood-style.)

[23]      What concerns me here, however, are the different

     conditions that exist today for recognizing

     countercultural expression and activism.  Twenty years

     later, the technology of hacking and viral guerrilla

     warfare occupies a similar place in countercultural

     fantasy as the Molotov Cocktail design once did.  While

     I don't, for one minute, mean to insist on such

     comparisons, which aren't particularly sound anyway, I

     think they conveniently mark a shift in the relation of

     countercultural activity to technology, a shift in

     which a software-based technoculture, organized around

     outlawed libertarian principles about free access to

     information and communication, has come to replace a

     dissenting culture organized around the demonizing of

     abject hardware structures.  Much, though not all, of

     the sixties counterculture was formed around what I

     have elsewhere called the _technology of folklore_--an

     expressive congeries of preindustrialist, agrarianist,

     Orientalist, antitechnological ideas, values, and

     social structures.  By contrast, the cybernetic

     countercultures of the nineties are already being

     formed around the _folklore of technology_--mythical

     feats of survivalism and resistance in a data-rich

     world of virtual environments and posthuman bodies--

     which is where many of the SF-and technology-conscious

     youth cultures have been assembling in recent

     years.^16^

[24]      There is no doubt that this scenario makes

     countercultural activity more difficult to recognize

     and therefore to define as politically significant.  It

     was much easier, in the sixties, to _identify_ the

     salient features and symbolic power of a romantic

     preindustrialist cultural politics in an advanced

     technological society, especially when the destructive

     evidence of America's supertechnological invasion of

     Vietnam was being daily paraded in front of the public

     eye.  However, in a society whose technopolitical

     infrastructure depends increasingly upon greater

     surveillance, cybernetic activism necessarily relies on

     a much more covert politics of identity, since access

     to closed systems requires discretion and

     dissimulation.  Access to digital systems still

     requires only the authentication of a signature or

     pseudonym, not the identification of a real

     surveillable person, so there exists a crucial

     operative gap between authentication and

     identification.  (As security systems move toward

     authenticating access through biological signatures--

     the biometric recording and measurement of physical

     characteristics such as palm or retinal prints, or vein

     patterns on the backs of hands--the hacker's staple

     method of systems entry through purloined passwords

     will be further challenged.)  By the same token,

     cybernetic identity is never used up, it can be

     recreated, reassigned, and reconstructed with any

     number of different names and under different user

     accounts.  Most hacks, or technocrimes, go unnoticed or

     unreported for fear of publicising the vulnerability of

     corporate security systems, especially when the hacks

     are performed by disgruntled employees taking their

     vengeance on management.  So, too, authoritative

     identification of any individual hacker, whenever it

     occurs, is often the result of accidental leads rather

     than systematic detection.  For example, Captain

     Midnight, the video pirate who commandeered a satellite

     a few years ago to interrupt broadcast TV viewing, was

     traced only because a member of the public reported a

     suspicious conversation heard over a crossed telephone

     line.

[25]      Eschewing its core constituency among white males

     of the pre-professional-managerial class, the hacker

     community may be expanding its parameters outward.

     Hacking, for example, has become a feature of the young

     adult mystery-and-suspense novel genre for girls.^17^

     The elitist class profile of the hacker prodigy as that

     of an undersocialized college nerd has become

     democratized and customized in recent years; it is no

     longer exclusively associated with institutionally

     acquired college expertise, and increasingly it dresses

     streetwise.  In a recent article which documents the

     spread of the computer underground from college whiz

     kids to a broader youth subculture termed "cyberpunks,"

     after the movement among SF novelists, the original

     hacker phone phreak Cap'n Crunch is described as

     lamenting the fact that the cyberculture is no longer

     an "elite" one, and that hacker-valid information is

     much easier to obtain these days.^18^

[26]      For the most part, however, the self-defined

     hacker underground, like many other

     protocountercultural tendencies, has been restricted to

     a privileged social milieu, further magnetised by the

     self-understanding of its members that they are the

     apprentice architects of a future dominated by

     knowledge, expertise, and "smartness," whether human or

     digital.  Consequently, it is clear that the hacker

     cyberculture is not a dropout culture; its

     disaffiliation from a domestic parent culture is often

     manifest in activities that answer, directly or

     indirectly, to the legitimate needs of industrial R&D.

     For example, this hacker culture celebrates high

     productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy,

     and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance

     (and endorphin highs)--all qualities that are valorised

     by the entrepreneurial codes of silicon futurism.  In a

     critique of the myth of the hacker-as-rebel, Dennis

     Hayes debunks the political romance woven around the

     teenage hacker:

          They are typically white, upper-middle-class

          adolescents who have taken over the home

          computer (bought, subsidized, or tolerated

          by parents in the hope of cultivating

          computer literacy).  Few are politically

          motivated although many express contempt for

          the "bureaucracies" that hamper their

          electronic journeys.  Nearly all demand

          unfettered access to intricate and intriguing

          computer networks.  In this, teenage hackers

          resemble an alienated shopping culture

          deprived of purchasing opportunities more

          than a terrorist network.^19^

[27]      While welcoming the sobriety of Hayes's critique,

     I am less willing to accept its assumptions about the

     political implications of hacker activities.  Studies

     of youth subcultures (including those of a privileged

     middle-class formation) have taught us that the

     political meaning of certain forms of cultural

     "resistance" is notoriously difficult to read.  These

     meanings are either highly coded or expressed

     indirectly through media--private peer languages,

     customized consumer styles, unorthodox leisure

     patterns, categories of insider knowledge and

     behavior--that have no fixed or inherent political

     significance.  If cultural studies of this sort have

     proved anything, it is that the often symbolic, not

     wholly articulate, expressivity of a youth culture can

     seldom be translated directly into an articulate

     political philosophy.  The significance of these

     cultures lies in their embryonic or _protopolitical_

     languages and technologies of opposition to dominant or

     parent systems of rules.  If hackers lack a "cause,"

     then they are certainly not the first youth culture to

     be characterized in this dismissive way.  In

     particular, the left has suffered from the lack of a

     cultural politics capable of recognizing the power of

     cultural expressions that do not wear a mature

     political commitment on their sleeves.

          So, too, the escalation of activism-in-the-

     professions in the last two decades has shown that it

     is a mistake to condemn the hacker impulse on account

     of its class constituency alone.  To cede the "ability

     to know" on the grounds that elite groups will enjoy

     unjustly privileged access to technocratic knowledge is

     to cede too much of the future.  Is it of no political

     significance at all that hackers' primary fantasies

     often involve the official computer systems of the

     police, armed forces, and defence and intelligence

     agencies?  And that the rationale for their fantasies

     is unfailingly presented in the form of a defence of

     civil liberties against the threat of centralized

     intelligence and military activities?  Or is all of

     this merely a symptom of an apprentice elite's

     fledgling will to masculine power?  The activities of

     the Chinese student elite in the pro-democracy movement

     have shown that unforeseen shifts in the political

     climate can produce startling new configurations of

     power and resistance.  After Tiananmen Square, Party

     leaders found it imprudent to purge those high-tech

     engineer and computer cadres who alone could guarantee

     the future of any planned modernization program.  On

     the other hand, the authorities rested uneasy knowing

     that each cadre (among the most activist groups in the

     student movement) is a potential hacker who can have

     the run of the communications house if and when he or

     she wants.

[28]      On the other hand, I do agree with Hayes's

     perception that the media have pursued their romance

     with the hacker at the cost of underreporting the much

     greater challenge posed to corporate employers by their

     employees.  It is in the arena of conflicts between

     workers and management that most high-tech "sabotage"

     takes place.  In the mainstream everyday life of office

     workers, mostly female, there is a widespread culture

     of unorganized sabotage that accounts for infinitely

     more computer downtime and information loss every year

     than is caused by destructive, "dark-side" hacking by

     celebrity cybernetic intruders.  The sabotage, time

     theft, and strategic monkeywrenching deployed by office

     workers in their engineered electromagnetic attacks on

     data storage and operating systems might range from the

     planting of time or logic bombs to the discrete use of

     electromagnetic Tesla coils or simple bodily friction:

     "Good old static electricity discharged from the

     fingertips probably accounts for close to half the

     disks and computers wiped out or down every year."^20^

     More skilled operators, intent on evening a score with

     management, often utilize sophisticated hacking

     techniques.  In many cases, a coherent networking

     culture exists among female console operators, where,

     among other things, tips about strategies for slowing

     down the temporality of the work regime are circulated.

     While these threats from below are fully recognized in

     their boardrooms, corporations dependent upon digital

     business machines are obviously unwilling to advertize

     how acutely vulnerable they actually are to this kind

     of sabotage.  It is easy to imagine how organised

     computer activism could hold such companies for ransom.

     As Hayes points out, however, it is more difficult to

     mobilize any kind of labor movement organized upon such

     premises:

          Many are prepared to publicly oppose the

          countless dark legacies of the computer age:

          "electronic sweatshops," Military technology,

          employee surveillance, genotoxic water, and

          ozone depletion.  Among those currently

          leading the opposition, however, it is

          apparently deemed "irresponsible" to recommend

          an active computerized resistance as a source

          of worker's power because it is perceived as

          a medium of employee crime and "terrorism."

          ^21^

     _Processed World_, the "magazine with a bad attitude"

     with which Hayes has been associated, is at the

     forefront of debating and circulating these questions

     among office workers, regularly tapping into the

     resentments borne out in on-the-job resistance.

[29]      While only a small number of computer users would

     recognize and include themselves under the label of

     "hacker," there are good reasons for extending the

     restricted definition of _hacking_ down and across the

     caste system of systems analysts, designers,

     programmers, and operators to include all high-tech

     workers, no matter how inexpert, who can interrupt,

     upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured

     communications that dictates their positions in the

     social networks of exchange and determines the

     temporality of their work schedules.  To put it in

     these terms, however, is not to offer any universal

     definition of hacker agency.  There are many social

     agents, for example, in job locations that are

     dependent upon the hope of technological _reskilling_,

     for whom sabotage or disruption of communicative

     rationality is of little use; for such people,

     definitions of hacking that are reconstructive, rather

     than deconstructive, are more appropriate.  A good

     example is the crucial role of worker technoliteracy in

     the struggle of labor against automation and

     deskilling.  When worker education classes in computer

     programming were discontinued by management at the Ford

     Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, union (UAW) members

     began to publish a newsletter called the _Amateur

     Computerist_ to fill the gap.^22^  Among the columnists

     and correspondents in the magazine have been veterans

     of the Flint sit-down strikes who see a clear

     historical continuity between the problem of labor

     organization in the thirties and the problem of

     automation and deskilling today.  Workers' computer

     literacy is seen as essential not only to the

     demystification of the computer and the reskilling of

     workers, but also to labor's capacity to intervene in

     decisions about new technologies that might result in

     shorter hours and thus in "work efficiency" rather than

     worker efficiency.

[30]      The three social locations I have mentioned above

     all express different class relations to technology:

     the location of an apprentice technical elite,

     conventionally associated with the term "hacking"; the

     location of the female high-tech office worker,

     involved in "sabotage"; and the location of the shop-

     floor worker, whose future depends on technological

     reskilling.  All therefore exhibit different ways of

     _claiming back_ time dictated and appropriated by

     technological processes, and of establishing some form

     of independent control over the work relation so

     determined by the new technologies.  All, then, fall

     under a broad understanding of the politics involved in

     any extended description of hacker activities.


     [This file is continued in ROSS-2 990]

     [Andrew Ross, "Hacking Away at the Counter-culture,"
     part 2, continued from ROSS-1 990.  Distributed by
     _Postmodern Culture_ in vol. 1, no. 1 (Sep. 1990);
     copyright (c) 1990 by Andrew Ross, all rights reserved]

     _The Culture and Technology Question_

[31]      Faced with these proliferating practices in the

     workplace, on the teenage cult fringe, and increasingly

     in mainstream entertainment, where, over the last five

     years, the cyberpunk sensibility in popular fiction,

     film, and television has caught the romance of the

     popular taste for the outlaw technology of

     human/machine interfaces, we are obliged, I think, to

     ask old kinds of questions about the new silicon order

     which the evangelists of information technology have

     been deliriously proclaiming for more than twenty

     years.  The postindustrialists' picture of a world of

     freedom and abundance projects a sunny millenarian

     future devoid of work drudgery and ecological

     degradation.  This sunny social order, cybernetically

     wired up, is presented as an advanced evolutionary

     phase of society in accord with Enlightenment ideals of

     progress and rationality.  By contrast, critics of this

     idealism see only a frightening advance in the

     technologies of social control, whose owners and

     sponsors are efficiently shaping a society, as Kevin

     Robins and Frank Webster put it, of "slaves without

     Athens" that is actually the inverse of the "Athens

     without slaves" promised by the silicon

     positivists.^23^

[32]      It is clear that one of the political features of

     the new post-Fordist order--economically marked by

     short-run production, diverse taste markets, flexible

     specialization, and product differentiation--is that

     the New Right has managed to appropriate not only the

     utopian language and values of the alternative

     technology movements but also the marxist discourse of

     the "withering away of the state" and the more

     compassionate vision of local, decentralized

     communications first espoused by the libertarian left.

     It must be recognized that these are very popular

     themes and visions, (advanced most famously by Alvin

     Toffler and the neoliberal Atari Democrats, though also

     by leftist thinkers such as Andre Gortz, Rudolf Bahro,

     and Alain Touraine)--much more popular, for example,

     than the tradition of centralized technocratic planning

     espoused by the left under the Fordist model of mass

     production and consumption.^24^  Against the

     postindustrialists' millenarian picture of a

     postscarcity harmony, in which citizens enjoy

     decentralized, access to free-flowing information, it

     is necessary, however, to emphasise how and where

     actually existing cybernetic capitalism presents a

     gross caricature of such a postscarcity society.

[33]      One of the stories told by the critical left about

     new cultural technologies is that of monolithic,

     panoptical social control, effortlessly achieved

     through a smooth, endlessly interlocking system of

     networks of surveillance.  In this narrative,

     information technology is seen as the most despotic

     mode of domination yet, generating not just a

     revolution in capitalist production but also a

     revolution in living--"social Taylorism"--that touches

     all cultural and social spheres in the home and in the

     workplace.^25^  Through routine gathering of

     information about transactions, consumer preferences,

     and creditworthiness, a harvest of information about

     any individual's whereabouts and movements, tastes,

     desires, contacts, friends, associates, and patterns of

     work and recreation becomes available in the form of

     dossiers sold on the tradable information market, or is

     endlessly convertible into other forms of intelligence

     through computer matching.  Advanced pattern

     recognition technologies facilitate the process of

     surveillance, while data encryption protects it from

     public accountability.^26^

[34]       While the debate about privacy has triggered

     public consciousness about these excesses, the liberal

     discourse about ethics and damage control in which that

     debate has been conducted falls short of the more

     comprehensive analysis of social control and social

     management offered by left political economists.

     According to one marxist analysis, information is seen

     as a new kind of commodity resource which marks a break

     with past modes of production and that is becoming the

     essential site of capital accumulation in the world

     economy.  What happens, then, in the process by which

     information, gathered up by data scavenging in the

     transactional sphere, is systematically converted into

     intelligence?  A surplus value is created for use

     elsewhere.  This surplus information value is more than

     is needed for public surveillance; it is often

     information, or intelligence, culled from consumer

     polling or statistical analysis of transactional

     behavior, that has no immediate use in the process of

     routine public surveillance.  Indeed, it is this

     surplus, bureaucratic capital that is used for the

     purpose of forecasting social futures, and consequently

     applied to the task of managing the behavior of mass or

     aggregate units within those social futures.  This

     surplus intelligence becomes the basis of a whole new

     industry of futures research which relies upon computer

     technology to simulate and forecast the shape,

     activity, and behavior of complex social systems.  The

     result is a possible system of social management that

     far transcends the questions about surveillance that

     have been at the discursive center of the privacy

     debate.^27^

[35]      To further challenge the idealists' vision of

     postindustrial light and magic, we need only look

     inside the semiconductor workplace itself, which is

     home to the most toxic chemicals known to man (and

     woman, especially since women of color often make up

     the majority of the microelectronics labor force), and

     where worker illness is measured not in quantities of

     blood spilled on the shop floor but in the less visible

     forms of chromosome damage, shrunken testicles,

     miscarriages, premature deliveries, and severe birth

     defects.  In addition to the extraordinarily high

     stress patterns of VDT operators, semiconductor workers

     exhibit an occupational illness rate that even by the

     late seventies was three times higher than that of

     manufacturing workers, at least until the federal rules

     for recognizing and defining levels of injury were

     changed under the Reagan administration.  Protection

     gear is designed to protect the product and the clean

     room from the workers, and not vice versa.  Recently,

     immunological health problems have begun to appear that

     can be described only as a kind of chemically induced

     AIDS, rendering the T-cells dysfunctional rather than

     depleting them like virally induced AIDS.^28^  In

     corporate offices, the use of keystroke software to

     monitor and pace office workers has become a routine

     part of job performance evaluation programs.  Some 70

     percent of corporations use electronic surveillance or

     other forms of quantitative monitoring on their

     workers.  Every bodily movement can be checked and

     measured, especially trips to the toilet.  Federal

     deregulation has meant that the limits of employee work

     space have shrunk, in some government offices, below

     that required by law for a two-hundred pound laboratory

     pig.^29^  Critics of the labor process seem to have

     sound reasons to believe that rationalization and

     quantification are at last entering their most

     primitive phase.

[36]      These, then, are some of the features of the

     critical left position--or what is sometimes referred

     to as the "paranoid" position--on information

     technology, which imagines or constructs a totalizing,

     monolithic picture of systematic domination.  While

     this story is often characterized as conspiracy theory,

     its targets--technorationality, bureaucratic

     capitalism--are usually too abstract to fit the picture

     of a social order planned and shaped by a small,

     conspiring group of centralized power elites.

     Although I believe that this story, when told inside

     and outside the classroom, for example, is an

     indispensable form of "consciousness-raising," it is

     not always the best story to tell.

[37]      While I am not comfortable with the "paranoid"

     labelling, I would argue that such narratives do little

     to discourage paranoia.  The critical habit of finding

     unrelieved domination everywhere has certain

     consequences, one of which is to create a siege

     mentality, reinforcing the inertia, helplessness, and

     despair that such critiques set out to oppose in the

     first place.  What follows is a politics that can speak

     only from a victim's position.  And when knowledge

     about surveillance is presented as systematic and

     infallible, self-censoring is sure to follow.  In the

     psychosocial climate of fear and phobia aroused by the

     virus scare, there is a responsibility not to be

     alarmist or to be scared, especially when, as I have

     argued, such moments are profitably seized upon by the

     sponsors of control technology.  In short, the picture

     of a seamlessly panoptical network of surveillance may

     be the result of a rather undemocratic, not to mention

     unsocialistic, way of thinking, predicated upon the

     recognition of people solely as victims.  It is

     redolent of the old sociological models of mass society

     and mass culture, which cast the majority of society as

     passive and lobotomized in the face of the cultural

     patterns of modernization.  To emphasize, as Robins and

     Webster and others have done, the power of the new

     technologies to despotically transform the "rhythm,

     texture, and experience" of everyday life, and meet

     with no resistance in doing so, is not only to cleave,

     finally, to an epistemology of technological

     determinism, but also to dismiss the capacity of people

     to make their own uses of new technologies.^30^

[38]      The seamless "interlocking" of public and private

     networks of information and intelligence is not as

     smooth and even as the critical school of hard

     domination would suggest.  In any case, compulsive

     gathering of information is no _guarantee_ that any

     interpretive sense will be made of the files or

     dossiers, while some would argue that the increasingly

     covert nature of surveillance is a sign that the

     "campaign" for social control is not going well.  One

     of the most pervasive popular arguments against the

     panoptical intentions of the masters of technology is

     that their systems do not work.  Every successful hack

     or computer crime in some way reinforces the popular

     perception that information systems are not infallible.

     And the announcements of military-industrial

     spokespersons that the fully automated battlefield is

     on its way run up against an accumulated stock of

     popular skepticism about the operative capacity of

     weapons systems.  These misgivings are born of decades

     of distrust for the plans and intentions of the

     military-industrial complex, and were quite evident in

     the widespread cynicism about the Strategic Defense

     Initiative.  Just to take one empirical example of

     unreliability, the military communications system

     worked so poorly and so farcically during the U.S.

     invasion of Grenada that commanders had to call each

     other on pay phones: ever since then, the command-and-

     control code of Arpanet technocrats has been C5--

     Command, Control, Communication, Computers, and

     Confusion.^31^  It could be said, of course, that the

     invasion of Grenada did, after all, succeed, but the

     more complex and inefficiency-prone such high-tech

     invasions become (Vietnam is still the best example),

     the less likely they are to be undertaken with any

     guarantee of success.

[39]      I am not suggesting that alternatives can be

     forged simply by encouraging disbelief in the

     infallibility of existing technologies (pointing to

     examples of the appropriation of technologies for

     radical uses, of course, always provides more visibly

     satisfying evidence of empowerment), but

     technoskepticism, while not a _sufficient_ condition of

     social change, is a _necessary_ condition.  Stocks of

     popular technoskepticism are crucial to the task of

     eroding the legitimacy of those cultural values that

     prepare the way for new technological developments:

     values and principles such as the inevitability of

     material progress, the "emancipatory" domination of

     nature, the innovative autonomy of machines, the

     efficiency codes of pragmatism, and the linear

     juggernaut of liberal Enlightenment rationality--all

     increasingly under close critical scrutiny as a wave of

     environmental consciousness sweeps through the

     electorates of the West.  Technologies do not shape or

     determine such values.  These values already exist

     before the technologies, and the fact that they have

     become deeply embodied in the structure of popular

     needs and desires then provides the green light for the

     acceptance of certain kinds of technology.  The

     principal rationale for introducing new technologies is

     that they answer to already existing intentions and

     demands that may be perceived as "subjective" but that

     are never actually within the control of any single set

     of conspiring individuals.  As Marike Finlay has

     argued, just as technology is only possible in given

     discursive situations, one of which being the desire of

     people to have it for reasons of empowerment, so

     capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of

     the power that is often autonomously attributed to the

     owners and sponsors of technology.^32^

[40]      In fact, there is no frame of technological

     inevitability that has not already interacted with

     popular needs and desires, no introduction of new

     machineries of control that has not already been

     negotiated to some degree in the arena of popular

     consent.  Thus the power to design architecture that

     incorporates different values must arise from the

     popular perception that existing technologies are not

     the only ones, nor are they the best when it comes to

     individual and collective empowerment.  It was this

     kind of perception--formed around the distrust of big,

     impersonal, "closed" hardware systems, and the desire

     for small, decentralized, interactive machines to

     facilitate interpersonal communication--that "built"

     the PC out of hacking expertise in the early seventies.

     These were as much the partial "intentions" behind the

     development of microcomputing technology as deskilling,

     monitoring, and information gathering are the

     intentions behind the corporate use of that technology

     today.  The growth of public data networks, bulletin

     board systems, alternative information and media links,

     and the increasing cheapness of desktop publishing,

     satellite equipment, and international data bases are

     as much the result of local political "intentions" as

     the fortified net of globally linked, restricted-access

     information systems is the intentional fantasy of those

     who seek to profit from centralised control.  The

     picture that emerges from this mapping of intentions is

     not an inevitably technofascist one, but rather the

     uneven result of cultural struggles over values and

     meanings.

[41]      It is in this respect--in the struggle over values

     and meanings--that the work of cultural criticism takes

     on its special significance as a full participant in

     the debate about technology.  In fact, cultural

     criticism is already fully implicated in that debate,

     if only because the culture and education industries

     are rapidly becoming integrated within the vast

     information service conglomerates.  The media we study,

     the media we publish in, and the media we teach within

     are increasingly part of the same tradable information

     sector.  So, too, our common intellectual discourse has

     been significantly affected by the recent debates about

     postmodernism (or culture in a postindustrial world) in

     which the euphoric, addictive thrill of the

     technological sublime has figured quite prominently.

     The high-speed technological fascination that is

     characteristic of the postmodern condition can be read,

     on the one hand, as a celebratory capitulation on the

     part of intellectuals to the new information

     technocultures.  On the other hand, this celebratory

     strain attests to the persuasive affect associated with

     the new cultural technologies, to their capacity (more

     powerful than that of their sponsors and promoters) to

     generate pleasure and gratification and to win the

     struggle for intellectual as well as popular consent.

[42]      Another reason for the involvement of cultural

     critics in the technology debates has to do with our

     special critical knowledge of the way in which cultural

     meanings are produced--our knowledge about the politics

     of consumption and what is often called the politics of

     representation.  This is the knowledge which

     demonstrates that there are limits to the capacity of

     productive forces to shape and determine consciousness.

     It is a knowledge that insists on the ideological or

     interpretive dimension of technology as a culture which

     can and must be used and consumed in a variety of ways

     that are not reducible to the intentions of any single

     source or producer, and whose meanings cannot simply be

     read off as evidence of faultless social reproduction.

     It is a knowledge, in short, which refuses to add to

     the "hard domination" picture of disenfranchised

     individuals watched over by some by some scheming

     panoptical intelligence.  Far from being understood

     solely as the concrete hardware of electronically

     sophisticated objects, technology must be seen as a

     lived, interpretive practice for people in their

     everyday lives.  To redefine the shape and form of that

     practice is to help create the need for new kinds of

     hardware and software.

[43]      One of the latter aims of this essay has been to

     describe and suggest a wider set of activities and

     social locations than is normally associated with the

     practice of hacking.  If there is a challenge here for

     cultural critics, then it might be presented as the

     challenge to make our knowledge about technoculture

     into something like a hacker's knowledge, capable of

     penetrating existing systems of rationality that might

     otherwise be seen as infallible; a hacker's knowledge,

     capable of reskilling, and therefore of rewriting the

     cultural programs and reprogramming the social values

     that make room for new technologies; a hacker's

     knowledge, capable also of generating new popular

     romances around the alternative uses of human

     ingenuity.  If we are to take up that challenge, we

     cannot afford to give up what technoliteracy we have

     acquired in deference to the vulgar faith that tells us

     it is always acquired in complicity, and is thus

     contaminated by the poison of instrumental rationality,

     or because we hear, often from the same quarters, that

     acquired technological competence simply glorifies the

     inhuman work ethic.  Technoliteracy, for us, is the

     challenge to make a historical opportunity out of a

     historical necessity.

     _______________________________________________________

                             NOTES


          1. Bryan Kocher, "A Hygiene Lesson,"
     _Communications of the ACM_, 32.1 (January 1989): 3.

          2.  Jon A. Rochlis and Mark W. Eichen, "With
     Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's
     Perspective," _Communications of the ACM_, 32.6 (June
     1989): 697.

          3. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, "Invasion of the Body
     Snatchers," _Time_ (26 September 1988); 62-67.

          4. Judith Williamson, "Every Virus Tells a Story:
     The Meaning of HIV and AIDS," _Taking Liberties: AIDS
     and Cultural Politics_, ed. Erica Carter and Simon
     Watney (London: Serpent's Tail/ICA, 1989): 69.

          5. "Pulsing the system" is a well-known
     intelligence process in which, for example, planes
     deliberately fly over enemy radar installations in
     order to determine what frequencies they use and how
     they are arranged.  It has been suggested that Morris
     Sr. and Morris Jr. worked in collusion as part of an
     NSA operation to pulse the Internet system, and to
     generate public support for a legal clampdown on
     hacking.  See Allan Lundell, _Virus! The Secret World
     of Computer Invaders That Breed and Destroy_ (Chicago:
     Contemporary Books, 1989), 12-18.  As is the case with
     all such conspiracy theories, no actual conspiracy need
     have existed for the consequences--in this case, the
     benefits for the intelligence community--to have been
     more or less the same.

          6. For details of these raids, see _2600: The
     Hacker's Quarterly_, 7.1 (Spring 1990): 7.

          7. "Hackers in Jail," _2600: The Hacker's
     Quarterly_, 6.1 (Spring 1989); 22-23.  The recent
     Secret Service action that shut down _Phrack_, an
     electronic newsletter operating out of St. Louis,
     confirms _2600_'s thesis: a nonelectronic publication
     would not be censored in the same way.

          8.  This is not to say that the new laws cannot
     themselves be used to protect hacker institutions,
     however.  _2600_ has advised operators of bulletin
     boards to declare them private property, thereby
     guaranteeing protection under the Electronic Privacy
     Act against unauthorized entry by the FBI.

          9. Hugo Cornwall, _The Hacker's Handbook_ 3rd ed.
     (London: Century, 1988) 181, 2-6.  In Britain, for the
     most part, hacking is still looked upon as a matter for
     the civil, rather than the criminal, courts.

          10. Discussions about civil liberties and property
     rights, for example, tend to preoccupy most of the
     participants in the electronic forum published as "Is
     Computer Hacking a Crime?" in _Harper's_, 280.1678
     (March 1990): 45-57.

          11. See Hugo Cornwall, _Data Theft_ (London:
     Heinemann, 1987).

          12. Bill Landreth, _Out of the Inner Circle: The
     True Story of a Computer Intruder Capable of Cracking
     the Nation's Most Secure Computer Systems_ (Redmond,
     Wash.: Tempus, Microsoft, 1989), 10.

          13. _The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost of
     Cornell University on an Investigation Conducted by the
     Commission of Preliminary Enquiry_ (Ithaca, N.Y.:
     Cornell University, 1989).

          14. _The Computer Worm: A Report to the Provost_,
     8.

          15. A. K. Dewdney, the "computer recreations"
     columnist at _Scientific American_, was the first to
     publicize the details of this game of battle programs
     in an article in the May 1984 issue of the magazine.
     In a follow-up article in March 1985, "A Core War
     Bestiary of Viruses, Worms, and Other Threats to
     Computer Memories," Dewdney described the wide range of
     "software creatures" which readers' responses had
     brought to light.  A third column, in March 1989, was
     written, in an exculpatory mode, to refute any
     connection between his original advertisement of the
     Core War program and the spate of recent viruses.

          16. Andrew Ross, _No Respect: Intellectuals and
     Popular Culture_ (New York: Routledge, 1989), 212.
     Some would argue, however, that the ideas and values of
     the sixties counterculture were only fully culminated
     in groups like the People's Computer Company, which ran
     Community Memory in Berkeley, or the Homebrew Computer
     Club, which pioneered personal microcomputing.  So,
     too, the Yippies had seen the need to form YIPL, the
     Youth International Party Line, devoted to "anarcho-
     technological" projects, which put out a newsletter
     called TAP (alternately the Technological American
     Party and the Technological Assistance Program).  In
     its depoliticised form, which eschewed the kind of
     destructive "dark-side" hacking advocated in its
     earlier incarnation, _TAP_ was eventually the
     progenitor of _2600_.  A significant turning point, for
     example, was _TAP_'s decision not to publish plans for
     the hydrogen bomb (which the _Progressive_ did)--bombs
     would destroy the phone system, which the _TAP_ phone
     phreaks had an enthusiastic interest in maintaining.

          17. See Alice Bach's _Phreakers_ series, in which
     two teenage girls enjoy adventures through the use of
     computer technology.  _The Bully of Library Place_,
     _Parrot Woman_, _Double Bucky Shanghai_, and _Ragwars_
     (all published by Dell, 1987-88).

          18. John Markoff, "Cyberpunks Seek Thrills in
     Computerized Mischief," _New York Times_, November 26,
     1988.

          19. Dennis Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain: The
     Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era_ (Boston, South End
     Press, 1989), 93.
          One striking historical precedent for the hacking
     subculture, suggested to me by Carolyn Marvin, was the
     widespread activity of amateur or "ham" wireless
     operators in the first two decades of the century.
     Initially lionized in the press as boy-inventor heroes
     for their technical ingenuity and daring adventures
     with the ether, this white middle-class subculture was
     increasingly demonized by the U.S. Navy (whose signals
     the amateurs prankishly interfered with), which was
     crusading for complete military control of the airwaves
     in the name of national security.  The amateurs lobbied
     with democratic rhetoric for the public's right to
     access the airwaves, and although partially successful
     in their case against the Navy, lost out ultimately to
     big commercial interests when Congress approved the
     creation of a broadcasting monopoly after World War I
     in the form of RCA.  See Susan J. Douglas, _Inventing
     American Broadcasting 1899-1922_ (Baltimore: Johns
     Hopkins University Press, 1987), 187-291.

          20. "Sabotage," _Processed World_, 11 (Summer
     1984), 37-38.

          21. Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain_, 99.

          22. _The Amateur Computerist_, available from R.
     Hauben, PO Box, 4344, Dearborn, MI 48126.

          23. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, "Athens
     Without Slaves...Or Slaves Without Athens?  The
     Neurosis of Technology," _Science as Culture_, 3
     (1988): 7-53.

          24. See Boris Frankel, _The Post-Industrial
     Utopians_ (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

          25. See, for example, the collection of essays
     edited by Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, _The Political
     Economy of Information_ (Madison: University of
     Wisconsin Press, 1988), and Dan Schiller, _The
     Information Commodity_ (Oxford UP, forthcoming).

          26. Tom Athanasiou and Staff, "Encryption and the
     Dossier Society," _Processed World_, 16 (1986): 12-17.

          27.  Kevin Wilson, _Technologies of Control: The
     New Interactive Media for the Home_ (Madison:
     University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 121-25.

          28. Hayes, _Behind the Silicon Curtain_, 63-80.

          29. "Our Friend the VDT," _Processed World_, 22
     (Summer 1988): 24-25.

          30. See Kevin Robins and Frank Webster,
     "Cybernetic Capitalism," in Mosco and Wasko, 44-75.

          31. Barbara Garson, _The Electronic Sweatshop_
     (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 244-45.

          32. See Marike Finlay's Foucauldian analysis,
     _Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Technology_
     (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).  A more
     conventional culturalist argument can be found in
     Stephen Hill, _The Tragedy of Technology_ (London:
     Pluto Press, 1988).