“Hacktivism” is a cool-sounding portmanteau word combining “hacking” and “activism”. Activism means political organisation and activity directed toward particular issues. Hacking can mean either “creative mastery and reworking” or “breaking and entering” of various systems, usually computer systems. The latter is more properly called “cracking”. Hacktivism tends to mean cracking rather than creative hacking. This means that hacktivism usually identifies, at most, a negativist posture of technological resistance to socioeconomic ills.

Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas have spun this ideological straw into critical gold. Their book Abstract Hacktivism is a collection of essays that reconsider the possibilities of activism and hacking, wrapped in an introduction and a postscript that draws these ideas together. It’s available as a very readable PDF or as a print version, which is an excellent example of how to make something that is available for free worth paying for.

The introduction introduces various ideas that will be found in both essays, notably hacktivism and the historical concept of society as various kinds of machines, and provides some context for each.

The first essay, “Hacking and Heresy” by von Busch, compares hacking to religious heresy, notably the socially inspired and socially flavoured Liberation Theology of South America. Hacking as heresy is a theologically and historically interesting metaphor. The history of liberation theology is of interest outside of immediate religious or socialist thought as a real-world case study in emergent alternative social and political organisation.

Hacking is immanent critique; it is in its practice and its products critique of an existing system, and it does bear comparison to critique of systems of thought expressed theologically or economically as well as technologically.

In my opinion, the mode of critique that hacking best bears comparison to is philosophy rather than heresy, the cargo cult of “killer apps”, and the convert’s zeal of a hacker with a new programming language or framework notwithstanding.

That said, von Bush’s specific comparison of hacking to the simultaneously theological and economic heresy of Liberation Theology is very instructive. Not for the first time the irrational (the unrepresentable or unrepresented) and the creative produced a space of resistance to the flattening effects of totalising forms of knowing or rationalising, be they economic, theological or technological. Liberation Theology is a socioeconomic-theological hack, modifying old forms to produce new forms that include previously excluded and denied possibilities.

To borrow another term from computer culture, Liberation Theology is also an “exploit”. It is a script for cracking the systems of society as expressed economically, politically and theologically for the benefit of the cracker(s). Exploits become known to the maintainer’s system they are against in time, and the system will be “patched” to withstand them. This has been the case for Liberation Theology, as von Busch shows.

“After Counterculture” by Palmas provides a context for these kinds of system and network-based considerations of social phenomena. Palmas describes how both culture and counterculture have moved from a 19th-century self-image based on machines and flows between reservoirs and motors to a 21st-century self-image based on hierarchy-free rhizomatic networks and how these models have been adopted both by corporate culture and those who seek to critique it.

In considering the symmetry between 1968 revolutionaries’ and corporate MBAs’ views of the world as a post-industrial hierarchy-free flatland, Palmas treads a similar path to Christine Harold’s more recent book “OurSpace”. Palmas shares Harold’s critique of AdBuster’s style 1990s anticorporatism. But where OurSpace catalogues, contextualizes and reinvigorates the strategies that both political activism and advertising have taken from Situationism, “After Counterculture” details the cultural context in which these strategies currently play out and how what is unique to network and free software thinking can supplant older strategies.

The socioeconomic hacks or exploits that Palmas considers include microeconomics, a success story that neither global capital nor negativist critique could produce. Microeconomics is definitely not an exploit. It does not compromise an existing system. Rather, it is a hack, creating a new possibility that extends both the system of global finances and the options available to those formerly excluded from it. This is precisely the kind of creative reworking of a system that earns the title of “hack” and is a form of political activism. The difference between microeconomics and trying to crash a corporation’s website could not be more marked.

The postscript draws together examples of both hacking and activism to caution against techno-determinism or believing that these ideas are somehow unknown to the existing economic or political order and to call for these ideas to be applied practically rather than simply as cool metaphors.

Abstract Hacktivism abstracts the concepts of computer hacking and political activism away from tired existing ideas of hacktivism, contextualises them, finds concrete examples of historical parallels, and recasts hacktivism as a positive extension and recreation of social and economic systems to realise progressive political aims within society. This move away from the literal cracking of existing computer systems in the service of negativist gesture politics is a powerful hack on the very concept of hacktivism. Hopefully, this will be embraced as an enlightening new philosophy rather than shunned as a political heresy.

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