SYMBOLIC AND NON-SYMBOLIC ACTIONS

What do we mean by the defeat of the enemy? Simply the destruction of his forces, whether by death, injury, or any other means—either completely or enough to make him stop fighting. . . . The complete or partial destruction of the enemy must be regarded as the sole object of all engagements. . . . Direct annihilation of the enemy’s forces must always be the dominant consideration.

Carl von Clausewitz²⁹¹

EARLY IN THIS BOOK I MENTIONED THE BLACK BLOC, A GROUP OF anarchists who during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests broke windows of targeted corporations, and I hinted I had a quibble with their tactics. It basically boils down to their violation of Wee Willie Keeler’s accidental dictum of guerrilla warfare. If your goal is to break windows at Starbucks or otherwise cause economic damage, why do it in the middle of a huge protest with phalanxes of cops in full riot gear just blocks away? Wouldn’t it make more sense to hit and run at four in the morning? You’d probably be able to cause a lot more damage.

But of course my analysis is superficial. The primary purpose of the Black Bloc actions was—and I’m guessing because I was neither involved nor to my knowledge have I spoken about it with anyone who was—never to simply break windows. The purpose was to break the illusion that significant social change can come through means deemed acceptable or moderately unacceptable to those in power and to those, for example police, who serve those in power. The primary aim of the Black Bloc was to send a message. The economic damage caused to Starbucks and its insurers was secondary. The Black Bloc’s actions, then, were primarily symbolic.

I have nothing against symbolic actions—I am, after all, a writer, and to write a book is almost as purely a symbolic action as you can get, since it is first and foremost an attempt to send a message—and I have nothing against the Black Bloc except that they’ve not yet succeeded in bringing down civilization. Of course I have the same problem with the rest of us, including myself.

But I want to take this opportunity to explore a distinction almost entirely ignored among those seeking social change, which is the difference between symbolic and nonsymbolic actions. A symbolic action is one primarily intended to convey a message. A non-symbolic action is one primarily intended to create some tangible change on its own.

A lot of people can’t tell the difference. Some have told me, for example, that I should never blow up a dam because then my message would get lost amidst all of the dramatic action. I always reply that if I want to send a message I’ll write a book. If I remove a dam it’s to liberate a river. The symbolism would be at most secondary.

Not only activists fail to think clearly about distinctions between symbolic and nonsymbolic actions. I don’t think many people in general think clearly about them. This shouldn’t be surprising, since we’re systematically trained to not be able to think at all.

The way the word terrorist is thrown around provides an example of the fuzziness of most people’s thinking, and also a case study into how whether something is or is not a symbolic act has far less to do with the act itself than with the motivation behind it.

Let’s talk about terrorism. We’re going to ignore legal definitions of terrorism, because they’re designed explicitly by those in power to protect themselves and to demonize their enemy du jour: U.S. soldiers or police (or to be fair, any government’s or corporation’s soldiers or police) murdering unarmed, unresisting (and often surrendered) civilians is not under their definition called terrorism, whereas when someone who opposes (especially U.S.) governmental or corporate interests kills unarmed unresisting civilians it is called terrorism.²⁹² To make even more clear the absurdity of allowing those in power (and those who serve those in power) to define the term, recall the editorial naming glassy-winged sharpshooters terrorists because they suck sap from grapevines. Just to let you know I’m not picking one insane example, the Oregon state legislature has repeatedly considered bills defining terrorism as any act that impedes commerce. As clear as that makes the primacy of premise five of this book, it makes a mockery of reasonable discourse.

Let’s define terrorism, much more reasonably I think, as any act motivated by a desire to inspire terror or extreme fear in another in an attempt to change this other’s (or a third person’s) behavior. An act of terrorism is then an attempt to send a message. It is primarily a symbolic act.

If an Iraqi civilian kills a U.S. soldier (or civilian) to try to frighten others into leaving Iraq, this would be an act of terrorism. If the civilian were to kill the U.S. soldier or civilian in order to reduce by one the number of invaders—one down, a hundred and eighty-some thousand to go—that would not be an act of terrorism. Note that the person is just as dead in either case. Note also that the motivations can be mixed, with any particular killing being to varying degrees an attempt to both intimidate and eradicate invaders.

Similarly, if U.S. (or other) troops kill civilians (or soldiers) because they’re fighting back (or because they’re standing in the way, or for any other tangible reason) that is not an act of terrorism. It is not a symbolic act. If the purpose of the killing is to frighten other would-be resistors into compliance—the phrase shock and awe comes to mind—that would be an act of terrorism. It would be a symbolic act.

Likewise, if someone were to kill a vivisector in order to stop that particular vivisector from torturing animals, that would not be an act of terrorism. That would not be a symbolic act. If someone were to kill a vivisector in order to dissuade others from pursuing careers in vivisection, that would be an act of terrorism. That would be a symbolic act.

I don’t want to beat this to death,²⁹³ but I want to make sure this distinction between symbolic and nonsymbolic actions is clear, because to be honest it’s not something we often talk about. Rather we more often confuse or conflate the two. So I want to give two more examples. If the state imprisons someone who has committed some crime, and the primary purpose of this imprisonment is to remove this person from society—to prevent this particular person from committing more heinous acts against society at large—that would not be a symbolic act, nor an act of terrorism. If on the other hand the state imprisons this person in an attempt to intimidate others out of committing similar acts—sentencing Jeffrey Leuers to more than twenty-two years in prison for burning three SUVs would certainly qualify—that would then be a terrorist, and symbolic, act.

Likewise, if someone were to kill a CEO to remove that person from society, either for retribution for acts of murder, theft, and ecocide the CEO has already committed—and you know that most CEOs have committed these acts, by the very “nature” of corporations—or to prevent that particular CEO from committing any more heinous acts against society at large, that would not be a terrorist act. It would not be a symbolic act. If, on the other hand, someone were to kill a CEO as a warning to other CEOs that they should stop committing murder, theft, and ecocide, this would be an act of terrorism, and would be a symbolic act.

I’m not conflating symbolism and terrorism, of course. I’m just using this as an example. Other symbolic acts could include writing letters, creating paintings, throwing pies, holding protests: any act intended primarily to send a message, as opposed to accomplishing something tangible. Me going to get my mail is a nonsymbolic act. I am attempting to make no statement to my neighbors or to anyone else by walking to the mailbox. I’m just picking up my mail.

Note that throughout all of this I am simply trying to be clear. I am not saying that symbolic acts are either better or worse than nonsymbolic acts. Clearly there are times when one is more appropriate than the other and times when the other is more appropriate than the one. It’s the same, by the way, for acts of terrorism: I would have no moral problem, to use an obvious example, killing a tyrant like Hitler both to remove him from society and as a possible deterrent to other tyrants.

The problem comes, as it so often does, when we confuse or conflate things that should not be confused or conflated, in this case symbolic and non-symbolic actions. This misperception can go either direction. Sometimes people sending messages forget or ignore the fact that their message carries with it huge costs paid by those who, to them, are nothing more than the medium for their message. Those who run the U.S. military machine may be sending a message to would-be militants when they drop bombs on villages in a display of “shock and awe,” but that message is written in the splattered blood of all those blown to bits who were, prior to their extinguishment, beings with lives and purposes all their own. When Harry Truman and the U.S. war machine dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a potent message was delivered to the Soviet Union, but the message was delivered on the charred and sloughing flesh of those dying from radiation poisoning. These messages had their costs, paid by those who had little, if anything, to do with the message or its primary recipients.

This is not to say that one should only send cost-free messages—this book is written on the pulped flesh of trees, delivered to you through the use of oil, with all of its attendant costs, and I hope the message that is this book ultimately (and proximately) helps forest communities to survive. It’s just to point out the blitheness with which those in power and the servants of those in power (I’m thinking again of the judge who sentenced Jeffrey Leuers) send messages involving costs paid inevitably by those perceived as lower than they on the social hierarchy.

This is yet another variation of premises four and five of this book. Within this culture it is acceptable, often desirable, for those higher on the hierarchy to use the bodies of those lower on the hierarchy to send messages. It follows that the messages of those higher on the hierarchy are, like their property, considered to be worth more than the lives of those below.

This whole situation can get very complicated and messy very quickly. This last week Chechen militants took over a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan in southern Russia. For fifty-three hours they held more than 1,000 children and adults hostage, and in the end killed about 320 of them. Why did they do this? A former hostage reported that one of the hostage-takers said to her, “Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours.” Chechen commander Shamil Basayev, whom many think planned the takeover of the school, expanded on this: “However many children in that school were held hostage, however many of them will die (and have already died) . . . it is incomparably less than the 42,000 Chechen children of school age who have been killed by Russian invaders.” He continued, “Dead children, dead adults— brutal murder of more than 250,000 Chechen peaceful civilians by the invaders—all of it cries to heaven and demands retribution. And whoever these ‘terrorists’ in Beslan might be, their actions are the result of [Russian leader] Putin’s policies in the Caucasus [and] in response to terrorism and crimes committed by the Kremlin’s camarilla, which is still continuing to kill children, flood the Caucasus with blood and poison the world with its deadly bacilli of Russism.” The website where this was posted then quotes the Bible: “What measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you.” Basayev’s got a point, in that this well-publicized atrocity is tiny compared to the routine atrocities committed by Russians in Chechnya that go unmentioned in the world at large (quick: name three massacres in Chechnya by Russians—heck, name three towns in Chechnya). It was noted in many accounts of the massacre that some of the killers were women. What was less often noted are the mass rapes of Chechen women by Russian soldiers. As Dr. Cerwyn Moore, a senior lecturer at England’s Nottingham Trent University who has been studying the emergence of female suicide bombers, said, “There has been widespread use of war rape by contract soldiers. The subject is very delicate and hard to get facts on. But when you have Russian contract soldiers looting and raping—and I believe it’s the accepted norm—you’re going to have things happen later.” And it’s not just rape. It’s murder. Moore noted that about 60 percent of confirmed female suicide bombers had lost husbands, and commented, “When you have a woman who’s lost much of her identity because of her husband and family being killed, it’s easier for her to be recruited.”²⁹⁴

I think we can take Basayev and the killers at their word, that this killing was done in retribution for the killing of their own children: you kill ours, we kill yours, fair enough? But I believe it’s also true that the Chechens were trying to send a message which I believe would run something like this: stop killing our children. The next question is: to whom are they trying to send the message? If they’re trying to send it to the people of Beslan, I think they’re trying to send it to the wrong people. I think it’s safe to say that Russia is no more of a democracy than the United States, which means even if the people of Beslan receive the message loud and clear—even if they’re terrorized into not supporting Russia’s occupation of Chechnya—it probably won’t cause the Russian government to withdraw from Chechnya. The people from Beslan almost undoubtedly have no more influence on Russian policy than the people of Crescent City, California have on United States policy.

I’d imagine Basayev and the others are fully aware of this. This makes me suspect that their message was intended not just for the people of Beslan but for Putin and the others who run the Russian government, those who could actually make the decision to withdraw from Chechnya. But there’s a big problem with this logic: it presumes that Putin and others of the Russian elite give a shit about the people of Beslan, an extremely doubtful proposition. Consider the United States: do you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney care about your life, or the lives of your family? Their rhetoric aside, do you think they honestly care about the lives of American citizens? Do you think they care more for human beings than for corporations, production, personal financial gain, or increasing their personal and political power? If so, how could they possibly promote the use of pesticides? How could they promote the toxification of the total environment, with the consequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year? If Bush, Cheney, and company cared about human lives, they would help us to prepare for the end of civilization. But they don’t. They don’t care about humans in general. They don’t care about American citizens. They don’t care about this or that small town. If Chechens obliterated the entire town of Crescent City, California, certainly the United States government would use that as an excuse to bump up repression at home and to conquer yet another oil-extracting country, but I can guarantee you George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would feel no pain.

The same holds true for retribution. The point of retribution seems to be: you cause me pain, and I cause you pain so you know how it feels. But I’m guessing Putin feels no pain over the deaths of these children. He undoubtedly feels a bit of a panic as he tries to deal with the public relations nightmare this situation has created. But pain? No.

Putin will almost undoubtedly follow Jefferson’s lead in saying, “In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”²⁹⁵ But I realize now that Jefferson was lying all along, and what he really meant was: “In war they shall kill some of those whose lives we don’t much care about anyway, and the troops we command shall destroy all of them.”

I’m not saying that killing hundreds of children in some small town in southern Russia is a morally acceptable way to send a message to those in power. Nor am I saying it is not understandable that if some group is systematically killing your sons and daughters and husbands and wives and sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and lovers and friends that you may want to lash out at members of that larger group. I am saying that there are much longer levers they could have used. If they were trying to send a message to Putin or others of the Russian elite, it probably would not have been a bad idea to strike closer to their home.

How would this play out differently if instead of killing children in Beslan, the Chechens killed Putin’s children and the children of the others who command Russian soldiers to loot, rape, and kill in Chechnya? What if they skipped the children and went straight after the perpetrators? Would Putin then feel pain? Would that be a more understandable retribution? Would that send a message Putin could understand? Would Putin be so quick to commit more troops to this murderous occupation if he knew that by doing so he was placing his own life and the lives of those nearest to him at risk? Let me put this another way: Do you believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would have been so eager to invade Iraq—oops, to order other people’s sons and daughters to invade Iraq—if they themselves would have been in serious danger of being maimed or killed, and if they knew their children would be the first to die?

Not on your life. Not on theirs either.

Now, Basayev could probably respond that they were in fact doing a smart thing—although still not a good thing—by hitting ’em where they ain’t. But I would say that he’s not even hitting ’em—by which I mean in this case his enemy—at all. He could argue that Putin and those close to him would be too well-protected to hit. I would say, tough. Proper creativity could find a way to get at them. And certainly Basayev could find a way to get closer than some semi-random school kids in some town far away from the center of Russian power. But to this Basayev could argue, correctly, that North Ossetia hosts one of the region’s biggest Russian military installations and plays a key role in Russian efforts to keep the Caucasus under its control, and could argue further that the people of North Ossetia are generally more pro-Russian than those of the other small states between the Caspian and Black Seas. What, he might well ask, are our options?

To which I’d respond that going after this school would have been like anti-Nazi partisans blowing up a German school. What’s the use of that? If you can’t get to Hitler, why not hit a munitions factory, an oil refinery, or a train switching station? That, I would say, is hitting ’em where they ain’t. Hit those places, hit them hard, hit them again, and hit them again, until you’ve crippled the economy.

Perhaps it’s time to add something to Wee Willie Keeler’s statement. If you want to win a guerrilla war, you should not only hit ’em where they ain’t but you should also hit them where it hurts them the most. Every time. As hard as you can. As often as you can.

Environmentalists and other social change activists often make the opposite mistake: we pretend that symbolic victories translate to tangible results. We hold great protests, make great puppets and witty signs to carry, write huge books, hang banners from bridges, get mentioned in newspapers, sing empowering songs, chant empowering prayers, burn sacred incense, hit politicians and CEOs with vegan cream pies, and participate in thousands of other symbolic acts, but the salmon still go extinct, phytoplankton populations still plummet, oceans still get vacuumed, factories still spew toxins, there are still 2 million dams in this country, oil consumption still continues to rise, ice caps still melt, hogs and hens and cows still go insane in factory farms, scientists still torment animals in the name of knowledge and power, indigenous people are still driven off their land, still exterminated.

We especially in the environmental movement are so used to losing that we have come to celebrate and often even live for whatever symbolic victories we can gain, whatever symbolic victories are allowed us by those in power. We lock down on logging roads and stop logging at this one place for one hour, one morning, one day, one week, and then we’re removed, and so is the forest that has stood on this ground for thousands of years. But we do sometimes get some good press.

I have no problem with symbolic victories. Sending a message can be important, and is indispensable for recruiting as well as for shaping public discourse. Sometimes sending messages even makes a difference in the real world. I often think about a story a friend told me, about symbolic actions in response to violence. She wrote: “My friend Erica worked at the local Whole Foods Market (I know, the evil empire). There’s a small but visible Tibetan immigrant community in the area, and a number of them had jobs at Whole Foods. This one Tibetan man had immigrated a few years back, saved up money and sent for his wife. She arrived and one day soon after he hit her. First thing to note is that she packed her bags and never went back to him. Second thing to note is that everyone else in that community would have taken her in for as long as she needed—she had multiple safe places to go. And third—this is the part I like the most—he was shunned by everyone. Nobody would speak to him. They would turn their faces sideways so as not to look at him and even put their hands up over their eyes to block the sight of him. If he tried to speak to people they would ignore him or walk away. When Erica started working at Whole Foods, this had been going on for two years! So it can be done. We could live in a world where violence against women had severe consequences that wouldn’t even necessitate the removal of body parts.”²⁹⁶

This is an important case study, but I hesitated to include it in this book because I have a concern that too many of us—I’m thinking especially of pacifists, but this concern applies to all of us—will attempt to too generously generalize this example. Too many of us will be tempted to say that because this shunning might have had an effect on this Tibetan man that we should do the same to George W. Bush and Charles Hurwitz. If only we avert our eyes, if only we make these larger-scale abusers feel supremely unwelcome, they will stop destroying the planet. But turning one’s face away would only work within a face-to-face community. It only works when the other cares what we think. Hurwitz no more cares what I think about him than he cares about the forests he is destroying. Part of the key then is to force these others to care what we think.

For a symbolic act to bring about change in the real world, at least two conditions must be in place. The first is that the recipient of this message must be reachable. We can send all the postcards we want to Bush and Hurwitz beseeching them to stop killing forests, and it won’t make a bit of difference. Here’s an example. Although Bill Clinton’s environmental record was disgraceful, he did enact a moratorium on punching roads into the relatively few remaining roadless federal lands.²⁹⁷ He did this only after a public comment period lasting three years, during which the feds received more than 2.5 million comments, approximately 95 percent in favor of the moratorium. Now Bush has rescinded the moratorium, citing insufficient public comments and support.²⁹⁸ The response by most environmental organizations has been to ask their members to send letters to Bush respectfully requesting he reinstate the moratorium.²⁹⁹ Neither Bush nor Hurwitz—and by extension most of those in their positions—is reachable through these means. Neither of them gives a shit about forests, except as dollars on the stump. Sending them a million postcard messages—or a million messages on signposts, or a message from streets filled with a million protesters—will make neither of them do the right thing.

And it’s not just those directly in power who are not particularly reachable. As we discussed earlier, I do not think the mass of the civilized will ever rise up to stop the destruction of the world.

But there are those who will.

The second necessary precondition for a symbolic act to bring about change in the real world is that the recipient of the message must be in a position to bring about that change. That is, the person must not only be willing, but able. This doesn’t mean the person has to be in power, in fact I would say that for the most part those in power don’t fit the first necessary precondition, in that they’re not reachable, and if they are reachable (and get reached), as we’ve discussed earlier, they’ll simply lose their power to someone else more well-suited to the psychopathology the system requires of those who make the decisions. It just means that while broadcasting a message can certainly be a good thing, we should also prioritize our efforts to recruit. One willing person with the right skills may help us more than a hundred semi-willing people who can write postcards.

The necessary preconditions for symbolic actions leading to significant social change are not often in place. Most of our actions are frighteningly ineffective. If that weren’t the case we would not be witnessing the dismantling of the world. Yet we keep on doing the same old symbolic actions, keep on calling the making of this or that statement a great victory. Now, don’t get me wrong, symbolic victories can provide great morale boosts, which can be crucial. But we make a fatal and frankly pathetic error when we presume that our symbolic victories—our recruiting and our morale boosting—by themselves make tangible differences on the ground. And we should never forget that what happens on the ground is the only thing that matters.

There comes a time in the lives of many long-term activists when symbolic victories—rare even as these can be sometimes—are no longer enough. There comes a time when many of these activists get burned out, discouraged, demoralized. Many fight despair.

I think fighting against this despair is a mistake. I think this despair is often an unacknowledged embodied understanding that the tactics we’ve been using aren’t accomplishing what we want, and the goals we’ve been seeking are insufficient to the crises we face. Activists so often get burned out and frustrated because we’re trying to achieve sustainability within a system that is inherently unsustainable. We can never win. No wonder we get discouraged.

But instead of really listening to these feelings, we so often take a couple of weeks off, and then dive back into trying to put the same old square pegs into the same old round holes. The result? More burnout. More frustration. More discouragement. And the salmon keep dying.

What would happen if we listened to these feelings of being burned out, discouraged, demoralized, and frustrated? What would those feelings tell us? Is it possible they could tell us that what we’re doing isn’t working, and so we should try something else? Perhaps they’re telling us, to switch metaphors, that we should stop trying to save scraps of soap and try to bust out of the whole concentration camp.

I hate wasting time on makework. It’s not that I’m lazy, far from it. I love accomplishing things that I want to accomplish, and love working furiously when I see movement. But I’m extremely sensitive as to whether the work I’m doing is actually accomplishing anything. And the feeling I get when I’m working futilely feels a lot like burnout, discouragement, frustration, and so on. I’ve felt this sensation often enough to know that it doesn’t mean I need to take two weeks off and then come back and do the same damn useless job, nor does it mean I need to work even harder at this damn useless job. Nor does it mean I need to collapse into a sobbing heap of self-pity. None of those do any good. It usually just means I need to change my approach so that I accomplish something in the real physical world.

Useful work and tangible accomplishments make burnout go away quickly.

This once again raises the question of what we really want. Do we want to slow the grinding of the machine just a little bit? Do we want to stop it completely? Do we want the Giants to win the World Series and oh, by the way, it would be nice if we still have a world? Do we want to keep our cars and computers and lawns and grocery stores even at the expense of life on the planet? More to the point, do we want to allow others to keep their cars and computers and lawns and grocery stores even at the expense of life on the planet, which of course includes at the expense of poor humans?

Most of the people I know recognize that the choice really is between life and civilization, and if they could snap their fingers and make civilization go away they’d do it in a heartbeat. I know many people who were hoping and praying that Y2K would bring it all down. Now the big hope is peak oil. Some would not be unhappy if a virus took us all out. Anything to stop civilization’s grotesque destructiveness.

Look, however, at what these three hopes all hold in common: they’re beyond our control. There are many of us who want civilization gone, and who would even conjure it away through magical means if we had them, but in the real physical world don’t know how to bring it down, or if we have some useful knowledge, we do not want to take responsibility for actually doing what needs to be done. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there are those who are willing to take on that responsibility.

I talk again to Brian. This time we’re alone. This time we meet at a Chinese buffet, not too long before closing time.

I love buffets. Partly because I have Crohn’s disease—a disease caused by civilization—my metabolism is remarkably inefficient, and I need to consume prodigious amounts just to keep going. I’m usually the skinniest person in line at the buffet, but my plate is fuller even than those who clearly don’t need the food. Quantity is always perforce more important to me than quality, and when I’m planning on eating some fine food or when someone takes me to dinner, I usually try to eat beforehand so when the real meal comes I can eat more like a normal person. Only at buffets do I ever get enough to eat, and Chinese buffets are the best.

But I also hate buffets. They’re too-perfect mirrors of the way we the civilized perceive the world. There laid out before us is the entire planet ready for us to eat. Plate after plate of pieces of the world, a steady stream from the kitchen brought to us by smiling servants, plates without end, all for us to consume, with no reckoning save an entirely too-small financial payment.

This buffet has piles of disembodied crab legs, frozen shrimp, lobster, pork, beef, broccoli, chicken, noodles, rice.

I do not mind the fact that when I eat I am consuming death. Life does feed off life. Someday someone will consume my life, and my death. I do mind that I live in an entire culture that keeps itself willfully ignorant of the fundamental predator-prey relationship, else it would cease to be the culture that it is. This means that when I eat wild creatures I am too often contributing to their terminal decline. I also mind that eating domesticated creatures—and I include plants in this—means I’m eating misery. And perhaps more even than this I hate the unforgivable wastefulness of it all, the by-catch and poisons and other disregarded side effects of gathering or growing, transporting, storing, and preparing this seemingly never-ending buffet.

That said, I’m glad the restaurant is near closing, because that way I won’t feel guilty abut consuming all this food, which would otherwise just go into the dumpster. Fill the plates, boys! I’m surprised to see the heapings on Brian’s plate: he’s as thin as I, and doesn’t even have an intestinal disease as an excuse for how much he eats.

He dives right in: “Why are people afraid of hackers? Actually their fear has little to do with us, but instead it’s with the realization—a realization they avoid as much as they possibly can—that they have entrusted their lives and the fabric of their communities to a device about which they have no understanding.”

“What device is that?”

He looks as though he’s disappointed I even had to ask. “Computers,” he says. “Despite the media claims, when serious hackers write viruses, worms, and so on, we generally act not out of depravity, boredom, or any other petty thing. It’s not mere caprice; the vast majority of us are highly aware of the politics of computing and information. We understand the weight of our actions. That’s a prerequisite for any sophisticated hack. When people realize that the macro-based mail viruses that make worldwide headlines affect only Microsoft and particularly Outlook—many free software alternatives are immune—then they might stop getting mad at the hacker nuisance and start looking at the fact that one corporation controls international communications.”

“But most people don’t care about the politics,” I say. “They just want to send emails.”

He throws back his head and laughs, a gesture I’m already growing fond of. “And most people don’t care about salmon or forests or songbirds or phytoplankton. They just want to watch their televisions after working the jobs they hate. Just because people don’t care about the political or environmental underpinnings and consequences of the technologies in their lives doesn’t mean these underpinnings and consequences don’t exist.”

“But messing with people’s internet access won’t help. It’s just going to piss them off.”

Brian laughs again. “And taking out dams won’t piss people off? How about taking down civilization? You’re being silly. Besides, if people’s email stopped working, they might have to talk to each other. And if their computers stopped working completely, they might go outside and begin to directly experience the world around them. I’d personally like to see some more people pissed off at the corporations whose inferior products and nefarious business practices have made even simple letter writing so burdensome.”

I break open a crab leg.

Brian chews on some broccoli. He swallows, then says, “I’ve read articles in the mainstream press, what I guess you would call the capitalist press, that say that a lot of hackers are interested in control or power, in that we want to control the way people access the internet. But that’s not true. Hacking is about breaking—or at the very least braking—the control large corporations and governments have over that access. Those in power use computers to control us: do you think the current levels of surveillance, for example, would be possible without computers? And if you think today’s levels are obscene, wait till tomorrow. No, we don’t want power. We want to fuck up those in power. We want to restore freedoms.”