anybody know what came of t-fish cult of the dead cows work?

coderman coderman at gmail.com
Sat Aug 15 07:57:35 PDT 2015


On 8/14/15, John Young <jya at pipeline.com> wrote:
> Good beginning of common knowledge, Sir Hettinga, do please continue
> doxing the l0pht multi-layered spin-offs. A de-hirsuted facial recognition
> diagram of the seedling's growth would be a swell calendar of naked
> founding members of Boston CrypTea Party.

some even in the Cascadia Freedom Zone, stirring mischievousness.


what i want to know, is l0pht perspective on hacker/infosec gentrification.[0]
;)


best regards,


0. "The hacker ethos is wild and anarchic, indifferent to the
trappings of success. Or it was, until the gentrifiers moved in"
  - http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos/

---


The hacker hacked
by Brett Scott


The hacker ethos is wild and anarchic, indifferent to the trappings of
success. Or it was, until the gentrifiers moved in

Any large and alienating infrastructure controlled by a technocratic
elite is bound to provoke. In particular, it will nettle those who
want to know how it works, those who like the thrill of transgressing,
and those who value the principle of open access. Take the US
telephone network of the 1960s: a vast array of physical
infrastructure dominated by a monopolistic telecoms corporation called
AT&T. A young Air Force serviceman named John Draper – aka Captain
Crunch – discovered that he could manipulate the rules of
tone-dialling systems by using children’s whistles found in Cap’n
Crunch cereal boxes. By whistling the correct tone into a telephone
handset, he could place free long-distance calls through a chink in
the AT&T armour.

Draper was one of the first phone phreakers, a motley crew of jokers
bent on exploring and exploiting loopholes in the system to gain free
access. Through the eyes of conventional society, such phreakers were
just juvenile pranksters and cheapskates. Yet their actions have since
been incorporated into the folklore of modern hacker culture. Draper
said in a 1995 interview: ‘I was mostly interested in the curiosity of
how the phone company worked. I had no real desire to go rip them off
and steal phone service.’

But in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), the
US journalist Steven Levy went so far as to put up Draper as an avatar
of the ‘true hacker’ spirit. Levy was trying to hone in on principles
that he believed constituted a ‘hacker ethic’. One such principle was
the ‘hands-on imperative’:
Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the
systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they
work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting
things.

For all his protestations of innocence, it’s clear that Draper’s
curiosity was essentially subversive. It represented a threat to the
ordered lines of power within the system. The phreakers were trying to
open up information infrastructure, and in doing so they showed a
calculated disregard for the authorities that dominated it.

This spirit has carried through into the modern context of the
internet, which, after all, consists of computers connected to one
another via physical telecommunications infrastructure. The internet
promises open access to information and online assembly for individual
computer owners. At the same time, it serves as a tool for corporate
monopolists and government surveillance. The most widely recognised
examples of modern ‘hackers’ are therefore groups such as Anonymous
and WikiLeaks. These ‘cypherpunks’ and crypto-anarchists are internet
natives. They fight – at least in principle – to protect the privacy
of the individual while making power itself as transparent as
possible.
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This dynamic is not unique to the internet. It plays out in many other
spheres of life. Consider the pranksters who mess with rail operators
by jamming ticket-barrier gates to keep them open for others. They
might not describe themselves as hackers, but they carry an ethic of
disdain towards systems that normally allow little agency on the part
of ordinary individuals. Such hacker-like subcultures do not
necessarily see themselves in political terms. Nevertheless, they
share a common tendency towards a rebellious creativity aimed at
increasing the agency of underdogs.

Unlike the open uprising of the liberation leader, the hacker impulse
expresses itself via a constellation of minor acts of insurrection,
often undertaken by individuals, creatively disguised to deprive
authorities of the opportunity to retaliate. Once you’re attuned to
this, you see hacks everywhere. I see it in capoeira. What is it? A
dance? A fight? It is a hack, one that emerged in colonial Brazil as a
way for slaves to practise a martial art under the guise of dance. As
an approach to rebellion, this echoes the acts of subtle disobedience
described by James Scott in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of
Peasant Resistance (1986).

Hacking, then, looks like a practice with very deep roots – as
primally and originally human as disobedience itself. Which makes it
all the more disturbing that hacking itself appears to have been
hacked.
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Despite the hive-mind connotations of faceless groups such as
Anonymous, the archetype of ‘the hacker’ is essentially that of an
individual attempting to live an empowered and unalienated life. It is
outsider in spirit, seeking empowerment outside the terms set by the
mainstream establishment.

Perhaps it’s unwise to essentialise this figure. A range of quite
different people can think of themselves in those terms, from the
lonely nerd tinkering away on DIY radio in the garage to the
investigative journalist immersed in politicised muckraking. It seems
safe to say, though, that it’s not very hacker-like to aspire to
conventional empowerment, to get a job at a blue-chip company while
reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The hacker
impulse is critical. It defies, for example, corporate ambitions.

In my book The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance (2013), I used this
figure of the hacker as a model for readers wishing to challenge the
global financial system. The machinery of global capital tends to be
seen as complex, disempowering and alienating. The traditional means
of contesting it is to build groups – such as Occupy Wall Street – to
influence politicians and media to pressure it on your behalf. But
this sets up a familiar dynamic: the earnest activist pitted against
the entrenched interests of the business elite. Each group defines
itself against the other, settling into a stagnant trench warfare. The
individual activists frequently end up demoralised, complaining within
echo-chambers about their inability to impact ‘the system’. They build
an identity based on a kind of downbeat martyrdom, keeping themselves
afloat through a fetishised solidarity with others in the same
position.
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I was attracted to the hacker archetype because, unlike the
straightforward activist who defines himself in direct opposition to
existing systems, hackers work obliquely. The hacker is ambiguous,
specialising in deviance from established boundaries, including
ideological battle lines. It’s a trickster spirit, subversive and hard
to pin down. And, arguably, rather than aiming towards some specific
reformist end, the hacker spirit is a ‘way of being’, an attitude
towards the world.

Take, for example, the urban explorer subculture, chronicled by
Bradley Garrett in Explore Everything: Placehacking the City (2013).
The search for unusual detours – through a sewer system, for example –
is exhilarating because you see things that you’re not supposed to be
interested in. Your curiosity takes you to places where you don’t
belong. It thus becomes an assertion of individual defiance of social
norms. The byproduct of such exploration is pragmatic knowledge, the
disruption of standard patterns of thought, and also dealienation –
you see what’s behind the interfaces that surround us, coming closer
to the reality of our social world.

    the hacker modifies the machine to make it self-destruct, or
programmes it to frustrate its owners, or opens its usage to those who
don’t own it

This is a useful sensibility to cultivate in the face of systems that
create psychological, political and economic barriers to access. In
the context of a complex system – computer, financial or underground
transit – the political divide is always between well-organised,
active insiders versus diffuse, passive outsiders. Hackers challenge
the binary by seeking access, either by literally ‘cracking’
boundaries – breaking in – or by redefining the lines between those
with permission and those without. We might call this appropriation.

A figure of economic power such as a factory owner builds a machine to
extend control. The activist Luddite might break it in rebellion. But
the hacker explores and then modifies the machine to make it
self-destruct, or programmes it to frustrate the purpose of it owners,
or opens its usage to those who do not own it. The hacker ethic is
therefore a composite. It is not merely exploratory curiosity or
rebellious deviance or creative innovation within incumbent systems.
It emerges from the intersection of all three.

The word ‘hacker’ came into its own in the age of information
technology (IT) and the personal computer. The subtitle of Levy’s
seminal book – Heroes of the Computer Revolution – immediately
situated hackers as the crusaders of computer geek culture. While some
hacker principles he described were broad – such as ‘mistrust
authority’ and ‘promote decentralisation’ – others were distinctly
IT-centric. ‘You can create art and beauty on a computer,’ read one.
‘All information should be free,’ declared another.

Ever since, most popular representations of the hacker way have
followed Levy’s lead. Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash
(1992) featured the code-wielding Hiro as the ‘last of the freelance
hackers’. The film Hackers (1995) boasted a youthful crew of
jargon-rapping, keyboard-hammering computer ninjas. The media
stereotype that began to be constructed was of a precocious computer
genius using his technological mastery to control events or battle
others. It remains popular to this day. In the James Bond film Skyfall
(2012), the gadget-master Q is reinvented by the actor Ben Whishaw as
a young hacker with a laptop, controlling lines of code with almost
superhuman efficiency, as if his brain was wired directly into the
computer.

    In the hands of a sensationalist media, the ethos of hacking is
conflated with the act of cracking computer security

In a sense, then, computers were the making of the hacker, at least as
a popular cultural image. But they were also its undoing. If the
popular imagination hadn’t chained the hacker figure so forcefully to
IT, it’s hard to believe it ever would have been demonised in the way
it has been, or that it could have been so effectively defanged.

Computers, and especially the internet, are a primary means of
subsistence for many. This understandably increases public anxiety at
the bogeyman figure of the criminal ‘hacker’, the dastardly villain
who breaches computer security to steal and cause havoc. Never mind
that in ‘true’ hacker culture – as found in hackerspaces, maker-labs
and open-source communities around the world – the mechanical act of
breaking into a computer is just one manifestation of the drive to
explore beyond established boundaries. In the hands of a
sensationalist media, the ethos of hacking is conflated with the act
of cracking computer security. Anyone who does that, regardless of the
underlying ethos, is a ‘hacker’. Thus a single manifestation of a
single element of the original spirit gets passed off as the whole.

Through the lens of moral panic, a narrative emerges of hackers as a
class of computer attack-dogs. Their primary characteristics become
aggression and amorality. How to guard against them? How, indeed, to
round out the traditional good-versus-evil narrative? Well, naturally,
with a class of poacher-turned-gamekeepers. And so we find the
construction of ‘white-hat’ hackers, protective and upstanding
computer wizards for the public good.

Here is where the second form of corruption begins to emerge. The
construct of the ‘good hacker’ has paid off in unexpected ways,
because in our computerised world we have also seen the emergence of a
huge, aggressively competitive technology industry with a serious
innovation obsession. This is the realm of startups, venture
capitalists, and shiny corporate research and development departments.
And, it is here, in subcultures such as Silicon Valley, that we find a
rebel spirit succumbing to perhaps the only force that could destroy
it: gentrification.

Gentrification is the process by which nebulous threats are pacified
and alchemised into money. A raw form – a rough neighbourhood,
indigenous ritual or edgy behaviour such as parkour (or free running)
– gets stripped of its otherness and repackaged to suit mainstream
sensibilities. The process is repetitive. Desirable, unthreatening
elements of the source culture are isolated, formalised and
emphasised, while the unsettling elements are scrubbed away.

Key to any gentrification process are successive waves of pioneers who
gradually reduce the perceived risk of the form in question. In
property gentrification, this starts with the artists and disenchanted
dropouts from mainstream society who are drawn to marginalised areas.
Despite their countercultural impulses, they always carry with them
traces of the dominant culture, whether it be their skin colour or
their desire for good coffee. This, in turn, creates the seeds for
certain markets to take root. A WiFi coffeeshop appears next to the
Somalian community centre. And that, in turn, sends signals back into
the mainstream that the area is slightly less alien than it used to
be.

If you repeat this cycle enough times, the perceived dangers that keep
the property developers and yuppies away gradually erode. Suddenly,
the tipping point arrives. Through a myriad of individual actions
under no one person’s control, the exotic other suddenly appears
within a safe frame: interesting, exciting and cool, but not
threatening. It becomes open to a carefree voyeurism, like a tiger
being transformed into a zoo animal, and then a picture, and then a
tiger-print dress to wear at cocktail parties. Something feels
‘gentrified’ when this shallow aesthetic of tiger takes over from the
authentic lived experience of tiger.

This is not just about property. In cosmetics shops on Oxford Street
in London you can find beauty products blazoned with pagan
earth-mother imagery. Why are symbols of earth-worship found within
the citadels of consumerism, printed on products designed to
neutralise and control bodily processes? They’ve been gentrified.
Pockets of actual paganism do still exist, but in the mainstream such
imagery has been thoroughly cleansed of any subversive context.

At the frontiers of gentrification are entire ways of being –
lifestyles, subcultures and outlooks that carry rebellious impulses.
Rap culture is a case in point: from its ghetto roots, it has crossed
over to become a safe ‘thing that white people like’. Gentrification
is an enabler of doublethink, a means by which people in positions of
relative power can, without contradiction, embrace practices that were
formed in resistance to the very things they themselves represent.

We are currently witnessing the gentrification of hacker culture. The
countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the
preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The
association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with
an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds
tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx
into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected
individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening
elements of hacking over the subversive ones.

Silicon Valley has come to host, on the one hand, a large number of
highly educated tech-savvy people who loosely perceive themselves as
rebels set against existing modes of doing business. On the other
hand, it contains a very large pool of venture capital. The former
group jostle for the investor money by explicitly attempting to build
network monopolies – such as those created by Facebook and Google –
for the purpose of extracting windfall profit for the founders and for
the investors that back them, and perhaps, for the large corporates
who will buy them out.

    the revised definition of the tech startup entrepreneur as a
hacker forms part of an emergent system of Silicon Valley doublethink

In this economic context, curiosity, innovation and iterative
experimentation are ultimate virtues, and this element of the hacker
ethic has proved to be an appealing frame for people to portray their
actions within. Traits such as the drive for individual empowerment
and the appreciation of clever solutions already resemble the traits
of the entrepreneur. In this setting, the hacker attitude of playful
troublemaking can be cast in Schumpeterian terms: success-driven
innovators seeking to ‘disrupt’ old incumbents within a market in an
elite ‘rebellion’.

Thus the emergent tech industry’s definition of ‘hacking’ as
quirky-but-edgy innovation by optimistic entrepreneurs with a love of
getting things done. Nothing sinister about it: it’s just on-the-fly
problem-solving for profit. This gentrified pitch is not just a cool
personal narrative. It’s also a useful business construct, helping the
tech industry to distinguish itself from the aggressive squares of
Wall Street, competing for the same pool of new graduates.

Indeed, the revised definition of the tech startup entrepreneur as a
hacker forms part of an emergent system of Silicon Valley doublethink:
individual startups portray themselves as ‘underdogs’ while
simultaneously being aware of the enormous power and wealth the tech
industry they’re a part of wields at a collective level. And so we see
a gradual stripping away of the critical connotations of hacking. Who
said a hacker can’t be in a position of power? Google cloaks itself in
a quirky ‘hacker’ identity, with grown adults playing ping pong on
green AstroTurf in the cafeteria, presiding over the company’s
overarching agenda of network control.

This doublethink bleeds through into mainstream corporate culture,
with the growing institution of the corporate ‘hackathon’. We find
financial giants such as Barclays hosting startup accelerators and
financial technology hackathons at forums such as the FinTech
Innovation Lab in Canary Wharf in London, ostensibly to discover the
‘future of finance’… or at least the future of payment apps that they
can buy out. In this context, the hacker ethic is hollowed out and
subsumed into the ideology of solutionism, to use a term coined by the
Belarusian-born tech critic Evgeny Morozov. It describes the
tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for
(profitable) solutions.

This process of gentrification becomes a war over language. If enough
newcomers with media clout use the hollowed-out version of the term,
its edge grows dull. You end up with a mere affectation, failing to
challenge otherwise conventional aspirations. And before you know it,
an earnest Stanford grad is handing me a business card that says,
without irony: ‘Founder. Investor. Hacker.’

Any gentrification process inevitably presents two options. Do you
abandon the form, leave it to the yuppies and head to the next wild
frontier? Or do you attempt to break the cycle, deface the
estate-agent signs, and picket outside the wine bar with placards
reading ‘Yuppies Go Home’?

The answer to this depends on how much you care. Immigrant
neighbourhoods definitely care enough to mobilise real resistance
movements to gentrification, but who wants to protect the hacker
ethic? For some, the spirit of hacking is stupid and pointless anyway,
an individualistic self-help impulse, not an authentic political
movement. What does it matter if it gets gentrified?

We need to confront an irony here. Gentrification is a pacification
process that takes the wild and puts it in frames. I believe that
hacking is the reverse of that, taking the ordered rules of systems
and making them fluid and wild again. Where gentrification tries to
erect safe fences around things, hacker impulses try to break them
down, or redefine them. These are two countervailing forces within
human society. The gentrification of hacking is… well, perhaps a
perfect hack.
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Or maybe I’ve romanticised it. Maybe hacking has never existed in some
raw form to be gentrified. Perhaps it’s always been part of the
capitalist commodification processes. Stuff is pulled down and then
reordered. Maybe the hackers – like the disenchanted artists and
hipsters – are just the vanguard charged with identifying the next
profitable investment. Perhaps hacking has always been a contradictory
amalgam that combines desire for the unstable and queer with the
control impulse of the stable and straight. Certainly in mainstream
presentations of hacking – whether the criminal version or the Silicon
Valley version – there is a control fetish: the elite coder or
entrepreneur sitting at a dashboard manipulating the world, doing
mysterious or ‘awesome’ things out of reach of the ordinary person.

I’m going to stake a claim on the word though, and state that the true
hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets. The
hacker impulse should not just be about redesigning products, or
creating ‘solutions’. A hack stripped of anti-conventional intent is
not a hack at all. It’s just a piece of business innovation.

The un-gentrified spirit of hacking should be a commons accessible to
all. This spirit can be seen in the marginal cracks all around us.
It’s in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in
maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of ‘open’
scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around
3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of
manufacture. In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable
economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance.
Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the
profit-fetish, not a route to profit.

Go home, yuppies.

10 August 2015




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