I’m sorry this is so scattered and brief-- i’ve been sick with that flu for a week
I’ve actually got a good idea of what I’m doing for my sound project and have about half of the recording done as of right now—it’s going to be a mix of hip hop beats and news samples primarily from DemocracyNow! and Sean Hannity with a focus on racism and racial dialogue in America. The clips are everything from headlines of hate/race crimes to disparity statistics to one-on-one debates. The idea is to show how race is still a real and volatile issue that has not gone away and will not go away just because we elect black men president or because x amount of time has passed since slavery, civil rights movement, etc.
The music i’m going to use is “Kill My Television” by Alias who is a musician from the Anticon label out of the bay area—I plan on cutting it up quite a bit and looping it underneath the vocals for effect.
Today I’m going to bring in the clips I have recorded and show some of the music and clips that I was thinking about using---It’s hard to say what i’ve been directly influenced by. I’ll try to bring in some of that as well, but I feel like discussing my project as it is now and getting feedback as I move forward is more important right now.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
hackers, yes men, and media bias
After reading a bit more about hactivism and watching the yes men I have a better grasp on what/who a hacker is and what it means to be one. I’m still very much interested in the term “class” rather than group, club etc. Mostly it has to do with the loaded nature of the word, but also its conceptual, amorphous, and possibly fractured nature—especially when compared to a term like “group” or “club.” It seems to me a hacker is someone who utilizes technology to cause some sort of societal disruption in order to achieve a socio-political mean. Like any collection of people, I’m skeptical that the hacker class is homogenous.
I was thinking about Wark and the idea that all hacks are important. Well I saw this one today in the February 9th edition of the Colorado Daily: “A hacked electronic highway sign in northwestern Texas carried an international message that seemed to predate, well, the use of electricity. The sign Friday briefly flashed: ‘OMG The British R coming. They R watching you.’” I guess I can see importance here more in the idea of possibility than anything else—that in this case hacking highway signs can be done anonymously and successfully. But again, as far as importance goes I bet 99% of drivers simply laughed at its ridiculousness and dismissed it outright. What’s frustrating about that to me is that in the highway context the message isn’t even funny—what context is appropriate? Why not use this opportunity to put up actual information/inform the public? Maybe statistics about police profiling, pulling over minorities, illegal car searches, etc. How different would the message have been if it was “The government is coming. It is watching you” or the like? Maybe that’s just as easy to dismiss because of its dramatic 1984-esque language. I don’t know if I have an answer to the question: if you had access to the sign what would you write on it? What I’m wondering is: is this a commentary on hactivism itself? Is it that self-aware? Or is it that clueless? It’s hard to tell. I guess like the yes men, it’s more about media attention, and getting the concept moving, rather than the actual event or the message conveyed during the event itself. However, the blurb fell under the headline “WTF?” which is this highly dismissive entertainment section of the paper which also featured blurbs entitled “One Monster Doughnut Run” and “Man Hits Brother with Tire Iron over Jeans.” It’s clear that here they’re not interested in actually informing; there was no attempt to contextualize hactivism or scrutinize the incident with any significance. I don’t mean to criticize the Colorado Daily (maybe I should), but you can see that most news agencies consider hacking “fun” and “entertaining” more than anything else.
The only news program I’ve found that considers hactivism and the yes men a serious and important cultural force is the NPR program “Democracy Now!” with Amy Goodman. This is from the November 13th 2008 edition of their program:
“Yes Men” Spoof NYT, Denounce Iraq War in Latest Hoax
And the Yes Men have struck again. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of copies of a fake edition of the New York Times were handed out in New York and Los Angeles. The front-page headline declares an end to the Iraq war and an admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. Other fake stories report the congressional passage of universal healthcare, the public ownership of oil giant ExxonMobil and the use of evangelical churches to house Iraqi refugees. The paper is said to come from the Yes Men, a group responsible for several hoaxes meant to highlight corporate and government complicity in unpunished crimes. One previous prank had a Yes Men member posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to announce responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, forcing the company to remind the world it had done anything but. The Yes Men say the hoax resulted from a collaboration of many people, including a few New York Times staffers. Activist Jordan White was among those handing out copies of the fake newspaper in New York’s Times Square.
Jordan White: “Well, see, the thing about this is, is that, you know, we just got a new president elected. It’s a very big year, and it’s a big promotion for change and stuff like that. And, you know, it’s just the sort of thing of like, I don’t know, maybe that—could we achieve it? Maybe it’s so, maybe not. But it’s something to kind of look forward to.”
The paper also pokes fun at the New York Times editors, who apologize in a fake editorial for echoing the Bush administration’s faulty claims on Iraqi WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It also contains a fake resignation letter from columnist Thomas Friedman, who says he has no business to ever write again after vocally backing the US invasion of Iraq. The prank edition of the New York Times is available online at nytimes-se.com.
I think that this program and programs like it are the most important in spreading the yes men message and giving it legitimacy—it’s not just fun and jokes; this issue of the “New York Times” isn’t simply another version of “The Onion.” Part of Democracy Now!’s support has to do with their stance on the iraq war, the American media, and how they have been quite transparently in support of the yes men’s socio-political ideologies/agendas since their inception. Obviously it’s hard not to take a political stance when reporting on these guys—I’m imagining a fox news report about them loaded with terms like “pranksters, funny men, liberal activists etc.” When I went to the website and searched for the same NYT incident I found the terms “pranksters, liberal activists, and prankster group.” They used the space of the article to undercut and dismiss the yes men agenda without engaging its contents and used the incident as fodder against the New York Times as an example of an irresponsible liberal paper.
I was thinking about Wark and the idea that all hacks are important. Well I saw this one today in the February 9th edition of the Colorado Daily: “A hacked electronic highway sign in northwestern Texas carried an international message that seemed to predate, well, the use of electricity. The sign Friday briefly flashed: ‘OMG The British R coming. They R watching you.’” I guess I can see importance here more in the idea of possibility than anything else—that in this case hacking highway signs can be done anonymously and successfully. But again, as far as importance goes I bet 99% of drivers simply laughed at its ridiculousness and dismissed it outright. What’s frustrating about that to me is that in the highway context the message isn’t even funny—what context is appropriate? Why not use this opportunity to put up actual information/inform the public? Maybe statistics about police profiling, pulling over minorities, illegal car searches, etc. How different would the message have been if it was “The government is coming. It is watching you” or the like? Maybe that’s just as easy to dismiss because of its dramatic 1984-esque language. I don’t know if I have an answer to the question: if you had access to the sign what would you write on it? What I’m wondering is: is this a commentary on hactivism itself? Is it that self-aware? Or is it that clueless? It’s hard to tell. I guess like the yes men, it’s more about media attention, and getting the concept moving, rather than the actual event or the message conveyed during the event itself. However, the blurb fell under the headline “WTF?” which is this highly dismissive entertainment section of the paper which also featured blurbs entitled “One Monster Doughnut Run” and “Man Hits Brother with Tire Iron over Jeans.” It’s clear that here they’re not interested in actually informing; there was no attempt to contextualize hactivism or scrutinize the incident with any significance. I don’t mean to criticize the Colorado Daily (maybe I should), but you can see that most news agencies consider hacking “fun” and “entertaining” more than anything else.
The only news program I’ve found that considers hactivism and the yes men a serious and important cultural force is the NPR program “Democracy Now!” with Amy Goodman. This is from the November 13th 2008 edition of their program:
“Yes Men” Spoof NYT, Denounce Iraq War in Latest Hoax
And the Yes Men have struck again. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of copies of a fake edition of the New York Times were handed out in New York and Los Angeles. The front-page headline declares an end to the Iraq war and an admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. Other fake stories report the congressional passage of universal healthcare, the public ownership of oil giant ExxonMobil and the use of evangelical churches to house Iraqi refugees. The paper is said to come from the Yes Men, a group responsible for several hoaxes meant to highlight corporate and government complicity in unpunished crimes. One previous prank had a Yes Men member posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to announce responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, forcing the company to remind the world it had done anything but. The Yes Men say the hoax resulted from a collaboration of many people, including a few New York Times staffers. Activist Jordan White was among those handing out copies of the fake newspaper in New York’s Times Square.
Jordan White: “Well, see, the thing about this is, is that, you know, we just got a new president elected. It’s a very big year, and it’s a big promotion for change and stuff like that. And, you know, it’s just the sort of thing of like, I don’t know, maybe that—could we achieve it? Maybe it’s so, maybe not. But it’s something to kind of look forward to.”
The paper also pokes fun at the New York Times editors, who apologize in a fake editorial for echoing the Bush administration’s faulty claims on Iraqi WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It also contains a fake resignation letter from columnist Thomas Friedman, who says he has no business to ever write again after vocally backing the US invasion of Iraq. The prank edition of the New York Times is available online at nytimes-se.com.
I think that this program and programs like it are the most important in spreading the yes men message and giving it legitimacy—it’s not just fun and jokes; this issue of the “New York Times” isn’t simply another version of “The Onion.” Part of Democracy Now!’s support has to do with their stance on the iraq war, the American media, and how they have been quite transparently in support of the yes men’s socio-political ideologies/agendas since their inception. Obviously it’s hard not to take a political stance when reporting on these guys—I’m imagining a fox news report about them loaded with terms like “pranksters, funny men, liberal activists etc.” When I went to the website and searched for the same NYT incident I found the terms “pranksters, liberal activists, and prankster group.” They used the space of the article to undercut and dismiss the yes men agenda without engaging its contents and used the incident as fodder against the New York Times as an example of an irresponsible liberal paper.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
what a hacker thinks what a hacker wants
The first two questions I had when first encountering McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto were: “what the hell is a hacker?” and “is he poking fun at revolutionary speak, the importance of his cause?” Wark places himself (whether ironically or not) in the midst of the Marxist/Anarchist tradition where he appropriates the language, style, and tone of the Communist Manifesto (there are sections titled, property, class, production, abstraction, etc) in order to explain and define a new societal class; the hacker. This hacker class is above, beyond, and outside “constructed” society which means they are not really even a part of it in the traditional sense—they operate outside its boundaries and laws in order to de stabilize and create new societal dynamics within the old system. Wark spends most of the manifesto attempting to detail the “new conditions of oppression, struggle” which for him are primarily information based. Therefore the work brings up questions of expression—how does/should a marginalized group express itself? Part of what this manifesto serves is giving a voice to this “class,” but it’s also about the recognition of power and the declaration of power and ultimately, legitimization and acceptance of its existence.
Because it is a manifesto and appropriating this grand revolutionary language, the piece is highly abstract and difficult to literally interpret or reduce. To return to my first question: “what is a hacker?” It’s not totally clear by the end of the manifesto what this is, but because I assume Wark is part of this class I’ve been able to come away with these bullet points:
Hackers operate outside of what we traditionally call society
Hackers live in the virtual (computers?)
Hacker identity is fluid
There are “ever-new” versions of reality, or as Wark says “the actual”
Hackers produce these new versions
Hackers will change the concept of property, ownership
Hackers believe in the unconditional free flow of information and the knowledge to use it
Hackers promote an alternative practice to everyday life
What I think is particularly interesting is his assertion that information has been has been turned into a kind of physical property and sold as commodity through (but not limited to) institutions of education and higher-learning. He asks, “whose property is knowledge?” This is what I find truly revolutionary about the piece and what makes me think he’s putting this out there with some sincerity; this seems like an actual problem/dynamic that many people would agree exists and should be solved or changed. That seems like a problem the internet has created by simply existing.
I’m not sure what 1989 revolts Wark is speaking of although I might guess it could be Tiananmen Square or Tibet/China unrest—maybe even the Florida race riots. Most likely he’s talking about some unseen hacker revolt that was squashed by the government—but by leaving out that specificity there’s no limit to how large the “1989 revolts” can be. I’m interested in 1989 as a turning point or springboard that would allow this manifesto to be written
Because it is a manifesto and appropriating this grand revolutionary language, the piece is highly abstract and difficult to literally interpret or reduce. To return to my first question: “what is a hacker?” It’s not totally clear by the end of the manifesto what this is, but because I assume Wark is part of this class I’ve been able to come away with these bullet points:
Hackers operate outside of what we traditionally call society
Hackers live in the virtual (computers?)
Hacker identity is fluid
There are “ever-new” versions of reality, or as Wark says “the actual”
Hackers produce these new versions
Hackers will change the concept of property, ownership
Hackers believe in the unconditional free flow of information and the knowledge to use it
Hackers promote an alternative practice to everyday life
What I think is particularly interesting is his assertion that information has been has been turned into a kind of physical property and sold as commodity through (but not limited to) institutions of education and higher-learning. He asks, “whose property is knowledge?” This is what I find truly revolutionary about the piece and what makes me think he’s putting this out there with some sincerity; this seems like an actual problem/dynamic that many people would agree exists and should be solved or changed. That seems like a problem the internet has created by simply existing.
I’m not sure what 1989 revolts Wark is speaking of although I might guess it could be Tiananmen Square or Tibet/China unrest—maybe even the Florida race riots. Most likely he’s talking about some unseen hacker revolt that was squashed by the government—but by leaving out that specificity there’s no limit to how large the “1989 revolts” can be. I’m interested in 1989 as a turning point or springboard that would allow this manifesto to be written
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