We have finally arrived at the question that has guided our long journey through the computer underground: what is the relevance of hacking to the future of capitalism? Our reply must be the same as the one given by a minister of Mao Tsetung, when he allegedly was asked about the relevance of the French revolution. He answered that it was too early to tell. It is much too early to say anything for certain about the FOSS development movement. And yet, we wouldn’t have gone through all the effort without some hunch, and, perhaps, some hope. This study has been a search for hope in a time permeated by cynicism and opportunism towards the possibility of radical social change. The peril here is not so much to become dejected as to jump at false promises of hope. For sure, optimism is plentiful in the futurist literature where utopian longings are tied to the development of information technology. Hope is cheaply had which only testifies to its high marketability. Hardly any more convincing than the futurists are the post-modern, left-of-the-centre academics, who seek to restore hope through a general disregard of power relations that are more tangible than those flowing from the interpretation of texts. The invisibility of capitalist relations in the writings of these authors is deceptive. Capitalism has become omnipresent to the point of disappearing from their horizon altogether. If we want an analysis that gives some gravity and proportion back to the world, we must insist on bringing to the fore the formative power of commodity relations, private property, and the social division of labour. The hacker movement can be of assistance in this attempt. By putting some distance between their doing and the wage relation, FOSS developers have set the contours of the capitalist relation in relief. Concurrently, however, if we are to abide to the pledge of proportionality, we better not make too much out of hacking. Placed next to the likely outcomes of global warming, the injustices committed against the global poor, or, the force of a hangar ship, the hacker movement is a very minor player indeed. The relevance of hacking to capitalism, if any, must be sought in a potentiality that points beyond the marginal existence of the hacker community and the issues debated there.
The emphasis of this book, in affinity with our mission statement above, has been on the totality of social relations that is inscribed in the practice of hacking. We have argued that facts and polls about the hacker movement can be assessed correctly only with an eye on the alienation of labour in capitalism. This claim is valid both for the cracker breaking into computers and for the hacker writing software code. Hacking, for short, ought to be understood in terms of class struggle. It is an odd proposition to make about an activity that diverges so far from what is usually considered to be political, and stranger still to hear in a time when class struggle as a concept has almost disappeared from the social sciences. The computer underground, along with the Internet, came to maturity in a decade when despair had overtaken most of the traditional left. A short breeze of May 1968 was sensed with the rise of the anti-globalisation movement. The collapse of the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle in 1999 gave activists around the world the impression that they could put a halt to neo-liberal expansion. But the spirit was soon to be extinguished under escalated violence, even before the turning point of September 11th. The anti-globalisation movement has since been set on the defensive by a world order rewritten by War on Terror. The millions of people, who marched on the streets against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to no avail, merely demonstrated the ineffectiveness of this kind of protest. In the old days, the threat of labour strikes put teeth into the manifestations of the left. It was a threat that could move mountains. Welfare provisions, universal suffrage and the rights of minorities are some very concrete gains of working class struggles in the past century. Nowadays, attempts by labour to create hold-ups in the flow of capital are quickly isolated and the disturbances generated by struggle give new energy to the adversary. When every point in the circulation of capital is productive to capital, it becomes hard even to see what unionised resistance could mean. We could go as far as to say that the post-modern condition of late capitalism boils down to this loss of labour’s former bargaining strength.
The situation is not as novel as it first might appear. With a longer perspective, we will find that the period when the strength of organised labour could match the power of the ruling class was something of a parenthesis in history. Neither is the demise of the dominance of unionised struggle all bad. In order to contest capital’s supremacy, labour organisations had to be in agreement with their opponent on the terms of conflict. The existence of the wage relation, and, thus, the prevalence of the social division of labour, were conditions taken for granted by both sides. Disputes were concentrated to decisions over the exchange rate of wage labour. The deadlock on these issues has been broken and we are therefore freer to re-conceptualise our critique of capitalism. A sign hereof is renewed scholarly interest in miscellaneous dissent that for long had been overshadowed by the pre-eminence of trade unionism. Historians are unearthing struggles that took place in class societies previous to the forming of a strong, coherent working class-for-itself. Concurrently, activists and theorists take inspiration from eighteenth and nineteenth century insurgencies of sabotage and refusal when envisioning tactics for the future. A recurring theme in this literature is studies of the mob. Since the poor lacked a foothold in the capitalist production process, their negotiation strength vis-à-vis the ruling class consisted mainly in the threat of violence. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has famously described machine breaking as a kind of ‘collective bargaining by riot’. Such demands were most effectively delivered in big numbers. No less important was that the mob provided some anonymity in confrontations with the enemy. The individuals could not as easily be singled out for retaliation when they acted as a crowd. These historical reflections on anonymity versus identification are actualised once more in the debate about Internet surveillance. Dissent against intellectual property, for instance, is facilitated by that individuals can seek refuge from law authorities in the anonymity of the computer network. The politics of hacking have quite a few things in common with eighteenth century plebeian struggle. Similar to those insurgencies, campaigns by hackers against government eavesdropping, censorship and copyright law are often furtive, spontaneous and leaderless in character.
But the intent here is not to suggest a historical return to old forms of social conflict. While archaic elements have refigured in this narrative, the social bandit, the Luddite, etc., the aim of the discussion is to highlight the opportunities of a renewed cycle of struggle. These are treacherous waters to pass since so many claims for newness have been made in association with information systems. It better be stated once more, we are not expecting anything new to come from the technology. What we are looking for, the holy Grail in this day and age, is a substitute for labour’s threat of blocking bottlenecks in the production process. The potency of that threat has faded as networked capital has turned every stage of production into a node subject to redundancy. It does not follow that all resistance therefore is futile, but the conditions for fighting capitalism have been radically transformed. An aspect of this new terrain is captured in the hacker proverb: “don’t resist what you can circumvent”. The saying suggests that the capitalist relation itself has turned into a node in the network subject to redundancy. An example of how circumvention works in practice can be found in conflicts over filesharing networks. Markets in information are not attacked directly by hackers but are rendered superfluous when the same goods are made available for free elsewhere on the Internet. In their challenge against intellectual property law, the preferred strategy is to decentralise the flow of information and leave authorities without any targets to pursue. Hackers routing around markets, private property, and the state apparatus are promising cases in themselves. What makes it all possible is something even more enticing. The hacker movement has demonstrated how to disconnect capital from the production process, at least in a restricted sense and as far as the production of computer algorithms is concerned. Of course, we are talking about a potentiality in hacking. The actually existing hacker community has neither disembodied itself from capitalist relations nor expressed a strong will to do so. Nevertheless, without necessarily intending it, they have set an example by which we can extrapolate an alternative to capitalism, and concretise some ideas about how to get there. In the theoretical sections of the book, three longstanding objections against the likelihood of a socialist society have been confronted. Chapter four responded to the notion, cherished by post-modern critics, that semiotic consumption has dashed all hopes of transcending scarcity. The following chapter spun on Marx’s old prediction that the proletariat could out-perform capital in terms of productivity, a belief running contrary to the common wisdom about the superiority of the market economy. A third classic stumbling block for socialists was discussed in the chapter on circulation, namely: how to allocate resources without the guidance of neither a market price nor state planning. Our answers to these questions derived in one way or another from the social relations that organise the activity of hackers. Those relations and that activity we have elected to call ‘play’.
The strategy of blockades and that of circumvention refer back to the disposition of labour struggle in contrast to play struggle. These two types of struggle differ chiefly in how the proletariat relates to its class antagonist. Labour unions build their strength on a social relation where both parts are tied together in mutual dependencies. Sit-downs and strikes are effective to the extent that capital requires the workers to work. The workers, in turn, are for economical and social reasons bound to resist capital, backs to the wall, in their function as employees. In the last few decades, capital has got the upper hand over its antagonist by fleeing into the so-called weightless economy. New methods for valorisation have been created in the circulation of capital that, though, in the final instance deriving from living labour, do not depend on any one particular site of production. Partly because of this course of events, and partly due to the flight from alienation by the working class, living labour too is distancing itself from the employment status. We have studied the FOSS development model as a showcase hereof. Labour activities organised outside the wage relations are characterised by a high degree of freedom of movement. Hackers are free to move in and out of a development project in the same way a player may enter and leave the magic circle of a game. From the perspective of traditional struggle, mobility of this sort is a weakness that undermines the collective strength of organised labour. Individual members must be discouraged from defecting from the common cause, as is typified in the stigmatisation of blackfoots. In the hacker community, on the contrary, mobility is a precondition for collective existence and is a right to be defended. Indeed, the right of any individual to leave and/or fork a development project is one of the key points of FOSS licenses. The freedom of users to vote with their feet puts a restraint on how power can be exercised inside the community, thus it helps to maintain the community as we know it. Still, one might for good reasons doubt the fortitude of a group where no economic hardship forces its members to stick together and endure. But the objection could be turned around. The fact that individual hackers take the risk of heavy fines and imprisonment when defying political and economic interests, even though they could easily walk away or sell out, tells us something about the quality of play struggles. That is not to say that hackers are exceptionally loyal to their cause. Quite the opposite, what is intriguing is that defection and opportunism is anticipated and built into the calculation from the start. The hacker movement sustains its singularity in the midst of a perpetual flux of additions and loses of individual members. Scaring individuals away or paying them off, as capital frequently do, buys no decisive advantage over the movement since the individuals in question are quickly sidestepped. The principle of mobility that organises the hacker community internally translates into a mode of dealing with external adversaries, that is, the strategy of circumvention. Rather than entering heads-on confrontations with opposing forces, hackers route around obstacles. The class antagonist is made irrelevant to the point that one acts as if no bipolar conflict existed to begin with. From the perspective of traditional labour struggle, no doubt, such radical disinterest among hackers looks no different from political naivety.
Skeptics might object that the significance of computer hobbyists has been blown out of proportion, much in the same way as some post-modern scholars have overstated the importance of consumer resistance and conflicts over representation. A few readers will have Theodor Adorno’s denouncement of the radio amateur ringing in their ears: “As radio ham he becomes the discoverer of just those industrial products which are interested in being discovered by him. He brings nothing home which would not be delivered to his house”1 The radio amateur was included in Adorno’s rant against what he considered to be a consumerist attitude among music listeners. The commodity triumphs when the retarded listener attempts to revolt against fetishism only to succumb more deeply into the pseudo-activities of fandom, Adorno charged back in 1938. He was not wrong in bundling together consumers of popular culture and users of home electronics. All the suspicions that consumer politics give rise to can with some justice be thrown at the politics of the hacker movement as well. Both draw from an individualistic, liberal and commonsensical worldview, and, thus, are vulnerable to recuperation. Nonetheless, we have previously speculated in that repression and micro-management by the dominant power structure will impose a different reality upon the hacker community. The reason is the greater relevance of the dealings of the tinkerer compared to the average consumer. This claim can be illustrated by a note published by the BBC in 2003. The media network reported that a hobbyist in New Zealand, previously a member of the model air plane community, had decided to put his skills to a different end. He claimed to have built a do-it-yourself cruise missile capable of carrying a ten kilo warhead and with the range of 100 kilometers. The design was similar to a German V1 rocket but with improved accuracy due to an added gps-system. According to the hobbyist, all the components had been ordered on e-Bay and it had cost him less than $5000. The existence and performance of the weapon is not confirmed, but the threat was serious enough to alert the U.S. and New Zealand governments.2 The anecdote provides a reality check when judging the political significance of hacking. We must decide against Adorno’s debunking that tinkerers never bring home any products other than those that would have been delivered to them by the industry anyway. The alignment between the democratisation of the means of production, on one side, and the democratisation of the means of destruction, on the other, is quite evident from the example above. The distinction between production and destruction comes down to a point of perspective. Hence, the efforts by intellectual property advocates to equate pirate sharing with terrorism is not without a grain of truth, though the connection looks very different from how it is presented by them. The War on Terror signals that the state has lost its violence monopoly and that loss is analogous to capital’s lost monopoly over the production process. We would have fooled ourselves to think that the means of production could be expropriated in a peaceful manner. Question is if the restraint on violence that has been upheld in developed, capitalist countries, partly due to the fact that the class antagonists are tied together by mutual dependencies, will count when the capitalist class confronts an opponent that is external to the valorisation process? Our talk about play and aesthetics should not lead anyone on to think that what is at stake in this struggle is of lesser gravity.
The tradition of labour struggle is simultaneously continued and transcended in play struggle. Labour conflicts and conflicts centred on play relate to each other in the same way as the struggle against unfreedom relates to the struggle for freedom. The two are not identical as it first might seem, and, indeed, occasionally one contradicts the other. A case in point is the conflict of interest between professional artists and fan media producers. Some of the tension between the two owes to capital’s strategy of pitching volunteer labour against in-house staff. While defending their working conditions, however, professionals also defend their position vis-à-vis amateurs and, thus, they inadvertently come to brace up the division of labour in society. Putting cultural workers out of work is a step towards putting culture back into the life of everyone else. The same goes for user-centred development models where decisions over technological development are spread outside the confines of the wage relation. As a result, the influence of white-coated, Taylorist professionals and the veto of investment funds and governments over technology is rendered less important. Play struggle, while confused and weak at present, takes us a bit closer towards abolishing the social division of labour. This is, in the final analysis, the potential of hacking. In the future, perhaps we can do one thing today and another tomorrow, to fish in the afternoon and hack computers after dinner, without ever becoming fishermen or computer programmers.