Hacktivism lecture 1: The deep origins of hacktivism

• Neo meets Morpheus
• Situationists

Debord: The Society of the Spectacle
• 1
• In societies dominated by modern conditions
of production, life is presented as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. Everything that
was directly lived has receded into a
representation.

• 2
• The images detached from every aspect of life merge
into a common stream in which the unity of that life
can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of
reality regroup themselves into a new unity as
aseparate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The
specialization of images of the world evolves into a
world of autonomized images where even the
deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete
inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the
nonliving.

• 3
• The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as
society itself, as a part of society, and as a means
of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal
point of all vision and all consciousness. But due
to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in
reality the domain of delusion and false
consciousness: the unification it achieves is
nothing but an official language of universal
separation.

• 4
• The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is
a social relation between people that is
mediated by images.

• 5
• The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere
visual excess produced by mass-media
technologies. It is a worldview that has
actually been materialized, a view of a world
that has become objective.

• 6
• Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the
result and the project of the dominant mode of
production. It is not a mere decoration added to the
real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s
unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news,
propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the
spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is
the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that
have already been made in the sphere of production
and in the consumption implied by that production.

• 12
• The spectacle presents itself as a vast
inaccessible reality that can never be
questioned. Its sole message is: “What
appears is good; what is good appears.” The
passive acceptance it demands is already
effectively imposed by its monopoly of
appearances

• 16
• The spectacle is able to subject human beings
to itself because the economy has already
totally subjugated them. It is nothing other
than the economy developing for itself. It is at
once a faithful reflection of the production of
things and a distorting objectification of the
producers.

• 17
• The first stage of the economy’s domination of social
life brought about an evident degradation
of being into having — human fulfillment was no
longer equated with what one was, but with what one
possessed. The present stage, in which social life has
become completely dominated by the accumulated
productions of the economy, is bringing about a
general shift from having to appearing — all “having”
must now derive its immediate prestige and its
ultimate purpose from appearances.

• 18
• When the real world is transformed into mere images,
mere images become real beings — dynamic figments
that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic
behavior. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various
specialized mediations in order to show us a world that
can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates
the sense of sight to the special preeminence once
occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily
deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the
generalized abstraction of present-day society.

• 20
• Philosophy — the power of separate thought and the thought of
separate power — was never by itself able to supersede theology.
The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.
Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into
which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it
has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that
even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable
and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total
denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is
embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological
version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the
culmination of humanity’s internal separation.

• 24
• The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop
discourse about itself, its never-ending
monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the
stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of
life. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity
in spectacular relations conceals their true
character as relations between people and
between classes: a second Nature, with its own
inescapable laws, seems to dominate our
environment.

• 26
• The general separation of worker and product tends to
eliminate any direct personal communication between
the producers and any comprehensive sense of what
they are producing. With the increasing accumulation
of separate products and the increasing concentration
of the productive process, communication and
comprehension are monopolized by the managers of
the system. The triumph of this separation-based
economic system proletarianizes the whole world.

• 28
• The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of
isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation,
and they contribute to that same isolation. From
automobiles to television, the goods that the
spectacular system chooses to produce also serve
it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the
conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” With
ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle
recreates its own presuppositions.

• 29
• The spectacle was born from the world’s loss
of unity, and the immense expansion of the
modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this
loss. The abstractifying of all individual labor
and the general abstractness of what is
produced are perfectly reflected in the
spectacle, whose manner of being concrete is
precisely abstraction.

• 32
• The spectacle’s social function is the concrete
manufacture of alienation. Economic
expansion consists primarily of the expansion
of this particular sector of industrial
production. The “growth” generated by an
economy developing for its own sake can be
nothing other than a growth of the very
alienation that was at its origin.

• 33
• Though separated from what they produce,
people nevertheless produce every detail of
their world with ever-increasing power. They
thus also find themselves increasingly
separated from that world. The closer their
life comes to being their own creation, the
more they are excluded from that life.

• 34
• The spectacle is capital accumulated to the
point that it becomes images.

Abbie Hoffman on trial
1. One thing that I was very particular about was
that we didn't have any concept of leadership
involved. There was a feeling of young people
that they didn't want to listen to leaders. We
had to create a kind of situation in which
people would be allowed to participate and
become in a real sense their own leaders.

2. Anita [Hoffman] said that "Yippie" would be
understood by our generation, that straight
newspapers like the New York Times and the U.S.
Government and the courts and everything
wouldn't take it seriously unless it had a formal
name, so she came up with the name: "Youth
International Party." She said we could play a lot
of jokes on the concept of "party" because
everybody would think that we were this huge
international conspiracy, but that in actuality we
were a party that you had fun at.

3. Nancy [Kursham] said that fun was an integral
ingredient, that people in America, because they were
being programmed like IBM cards, weren't having
enough fun in life and that if you watched television,
the only people that you saw having any fun were
people who were buying lousy junk on television
commercials, and that this would be a whole new
attitude because you would see people, young people,
having fun while they were protesting the system, and
that young people all around this country and around
the world would be turned on for that kind of an
attitude.

4. I said that fun was very important, too, that it
was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and
morals that were being put forth in the country
to keep people working in a rat race which didn't
make any sense because in a few years that
machines would do all the work anyway, that
there was a whole system of values that people
were taught to postpone their pleasure, to put all
their money in the bank, to buy life insurance, a
whole bunch of things that didn't make any sense
to our generation at all, and that fun actually was
becoming quite subversive.

5. Jerry said that because of our action at the
Stock Exchange in throwing out the money,
that within a few weeks the Wall Street
brokers there had totally enclosed the whole
stock exchange in bulletproof, shatterproof
glass, that cost something like $20,000
because they were afraid we'd come back and
throw money out again.

6. He said that for hundreds of years political
cartoonists had always pictured corrupt
politicians in the guise of a pig, and he said
that it would be great theater if we ran a pig
for President, and we all took that on as like a
great idea and that's more or less---that was
the founding.

Revolution toward a free society,
Yippie, by A. Yippie.
"This is a personal statement. There are no spokesmen
for the Yippies. We are all our own leaders. We realize
this list of demands is inconsistent. They are not really
demands. For people to make demands of the
Democratic Party is an exercise in wasted wish
fulfillment. If we have a demand, it is simply and
emphatically that they, along with their fellow inmates
in the Republican Party, cease to exist. We demand a
society built along the alternative community in Lincoln
Park, a society based on humanitarian cooperation and
equality, a society which allows and promotes the
creativity present in all people and especially our
youth. ”

3. Why we prank. (Nolan Void)
• Some folks say that we prank just to burn off
testosterone. Others say that pranks are useful
for building our own morale but little else. Still
others have argued that pranks are merely
symbolic gestures. This last view is the closest
to being correct. Pranks are symbolic gestures,
but they are not merely symbolic gestures.
They are symbolic weapons ideally suited to
vanquish foes that rule in turn by the use of
symbols.

• Contrary to popular opinion, armies and police rule by
symbols, not by force. My favorite example of this is
found in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_. An army officer is
standing on a barrel exhorting the troops not to desert.
Of course, the top of the barrel breaks, and the officer
plunges in. At that moment the illusion of his authority
is shattered. It becomes obvious that here was a man
who by the symbolic act of standing on a platform, had
established his authority. Of course, he was hoping to
project as well the authority vested in him by the
government. But when the barrel gave way the troops
saw that all his authority was purely symbolic -- that in
reality he was incapable of projecting any force at all.

• The authority that the police enjoy is way out of
proportion to the physical force they are capable
of projecting. In terms of physical force, all they
are good for is beating up on the occasional
"stranded citizen." The citizens cower and hide
from these morality police, when in fact even 1%
of the population, in open revolt, would
overwhelm them. Yet by virtue of their symbols --
their badges and uniforms and shiny black boots -
- that these forces continue to rule. It is the job of
the prankster to show that forces such as these
are in point of fact powerless.

• A good prank has two elements. First, it
punctures the air of invincibility that the target
has cultivated. Is there an unbreachable fortress?
That is the fortress that the prankster wants to
breach. Indeed, mere entry is not the goal. Given
a choice between a locked door and an unlocked
door the prankster will always take the locked
door. That door, of course, is the symbol of the
target's invincibility. That is the symbol that must
be defeated.

• Second, a good prank will not injure the
target, but merely humiliate the target.
Physical damage counts for little in a war of
symbols. Worse, it can generate sympathy for
the target. It is important to remember that in
this game, a symbolic victory is a total victory.

Some examples:
• Let’s go to the video…
• Two from the Antics Roadshow
• Joey Skaggs
• Negativland
– Chicken Diction
– Helter Stupid

Hacktivism lecture 1: The deep origins of hacktivism

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