Hacktivism

The term “hacktivism” is a combination of the words “hack” and “activism” and refers to intentional hacking for social and political change.

Here, a hack is an act, often performed in design, that intervenes in an existing system (technology) to create a new value beyond mere rational improvement. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the birthplaces of hacking, has constructed a system of a unit of length called a smoot (one smoot is 67 inches/170.18 cm), which is attributed to the height of a real person, Oliver Smoot. This system was used to calculate the total length of the nearby Harvard Bridge (364.4 smoot + an ear) in the 1950s. Levy’s Hackers (1984) focused on “hackers,” those who are passionate about hacking computers, and interviewed more than 100 people, including Richard Stallman, a proponent of free software. It introduces their ethics of access to systems, free use of information, and suspicion of authority. In this way, hacks that attempt to discover unexpected uses for various technologies, rather than simply using systems that have been built with sometimes large amounts of capital invested, can be seen as intelligent and sophisticated pranks that rebel against existing value systems, so to speak. The R2-D2 (car stop) on the Ohashi campus of Kyushu University is one example of this.

Activism, however, is a term sometimes translated as “aggressive activism,” and in the past it was often used to describe political protest or opposition, and in more confrontational cases was often confused with terrorism. In recent years, however, the term has been used to refer to active efforts for change that do not necessarily involve protest or opposition, such as shareholder activism, which refers to demands by shareholders for improved governance and increased corporate value.

Hacktivism, a combination of the two terms, as well as activism, originally meant hacking as a political statement of intent. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a pioneering encryption technology announced by Phil Zimmerman in 1991, appealed for the realization of a society that respected the freedom and privacy of its citizens to the maximum extent possible by encrypting individual e-mails and files with this technology. One of his activities was to publish the source code of cryptography, which the US government regarded as a weapon at the time, as a book so that it could be legally used in countries other than the United States.

Alexandra Samuel classifies this hacktivism into three categories based on its origin (hackers/artists) and orientation (transgressive/outlaw): political cracking, performative hacktivism, and political coding.

Political cracking is a movement that is willing to deviate from the law to achieve its goals, such as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that makes websites inaccessible by massively requesting data from servers on the Internet.

Performative hacktivism is a practice conducted by artists, often in the form of artworks. One example is The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio; “GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself)” (2005), which uses Google’s AdSense advertising revenue program to purchase Google stock with Google’s own funds; “Amazon Noir” (2006), which creates a book from Amazon’s content search function; and “Face to Facebook” (2011), which builds a fictional dating site from the data of public Facebook photos. These works critique the very mechanisms of these companies, which have become the foundation of the Internet, through the construction of a working system.

The third type, political coding, is an attempt to circumvent political measures by hacking. De-Content Scramble System (DeCSS) (1999), a program to lift restrictions on access to DVD videos by Jon Reck Johansen, and a series of activities to circumvent censorship on the Internet by Hacktivismo (1999–) are early examples. If we consider various cryptocurrencies such as Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin (2008) as an example of hacking the centralized monetary system of the state, then it can be said that the plan is succeeding well.

In recent years, the target of hacking has expanded to physical space again, after passing through the interior of computers and the Internet. Among them are “USB Dead Drops” (2010) by Aram Bartholl and his colleagues, in which USB sticks are embedded in the walls of public spaces to enable anonymous file sharing separated from the Internet (see figure). Simon Weckert’s “Google Maps Hacks” (2020), in which he created traffic jams on Google Maps by carrying 99 smartphones in a wheelbarrow, is a good example of a hack that has the initial mischievousness of a hack, but also warns against the non-anonymity of the Internet and our over-reliance on online information. These attempts are positioned as theatrical hacktivism according to Samuel’s definition. In terms of questioning the system that exists as a matter of course through individual practice, they correspond to the trends of tactical urbanism, which promotes the transformation of urban space through small actions by citizens, and personal fabrication, which aims to shift manufacturing from mass production of a small number of products by large corporations to mass production of a large number of products by individuals.

At a time when not only individual lives but also corporate activities and even national trends are influenced by technological platforms such as social networking sites, if we take our faculty’s slogan of “humanizing technology” as an outpouring of individual will, then we cannot ignore the hacktivist attitude of intervening in existing systems and actively working to change them.

References

• Levy, Steven (1984), Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Anchor Press/Doubleday.（スティーブン・レビー（1987）『ハッカーズ』古橋芳恵・松田信子訳、工学社）
• Samuel, Alexandra Whitney (2004), Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation, Harvard University.