A small anarchic community of wireheads and hackers made the mistake of giving fire to the masses. Nobody is going to give it back…. This wonderful community is not a community anymore. It’s a society. – John Markoff
In 1993 the New York Time’s John Markoff confirmed that the global network was “the world’s most fashionable rendezvous” an “on-line gathering spot for millions of users.”
In its infancy it was called the World Wide Web, a sterile space utilized mainly by corporations. The advancements of social networks and technology, however, transformed it into what is commonly known as the Internet today.
Now more than every before, people are spending increasing amounts of time living in cyberspace, forming pockets of small closed groups that are separate from the greater gathering ground. As a result communities have emerged forming a virtual mini society within our world.
The roots of these virtual cultures and norms can be traced to the technological hype of the 1990’s, which grew out of the countercultural ideologies of the 60’s and 70’s. Timothy Leary proclaimed the PC as “the LSD of the 1990s.”
Like the temporary communities of shared consciousness of the 1960’s, the virtual field provided a venue to cull crowds and create a self –regulated society that would destabilize or move away from the mainstream. Their goal: building egalitarian societies.
In 1995, Stewart Bard’s in Times magazine emphasized the influence of the 60’s counterculture on the new revolutionaries in cyberspace. In Bard’s article, “We owe it all to the Hippies”, he wrote the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal- computer revolution.
The Internet became an open landscape free from physical constraints and geographical limitations, allowing large numbers of people to congregate. This virtual space became a place of empowerment because it connected people with interests and ideologies that encouraged each other perhaps even, inspiring them to take collection action to provoke global change.
In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti describes the effects of critical mass of people in a space:
ideally, all are equal there: no distinctions count, not even that of sex. That man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly, it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body.
Many members of the cyber societies consider hackers the heroes of the computer revolution. They pioneered the idea of turning the computer into a tool to use to make a difference for humanity—instead of instrument that only a few select groups can wield to achieve their own goals.
Steve Wozniak was a prime figure in developing “unlimited and total access to computers”. Before co-founding Apple computers, he and John Draper started to experiment with the telephone.
He and Draper bypassed the mainstream telephone services by hacking phones with a pocket box attachment that provided free service. As the device grew in popularity, an underground social network called “phone phreaks” developed around its use.
Wozniak and Draper hosted social conferences similar to modern chat rooms, where people with similar interests connected anonymously on the network free of charge. As a sign of their dedication to anonymity, they distributed masks at these events, with slogan such as “wear a mask, nobody ever caught the Lone Ranger”, on poster. The “phone phreaks” are like the Lone Ranger, riding on the speedy Silver lightning of the phone lines. These rangers roamed the channels that were supposed to be closed and, by opening them, they righted injustices evil “System” had created.
The “phone phreaks” acted first to de-stabilize the system by exerting control over the telephone company, which formally had a monopoly on control but others soon followed. Brain Harvey, a former Atari hacker declares that hacking started out as not something technical but a sort of approach to prioritizing life.
The initial agenda of the hacker who is committed to personal liberation changed in sync with new developments in computing. Their “hippie” or rebel image slowly disseminated as their skills and programs became popular and spread into the mainstream.
Their long hair and late-night prowlings were no longer depicted as evidence of deviance, but marks of genius. In popular accounts at least, hackers had become entrepreneurial hippies who wielded computers like LSD and they were transforming America into a turned-on, high-tech New Economy.
With a similar intention of subversive play, sense of exploration, and general fascination as the phone hackers, Steve Russell ‘s invented Spacewars.
The development of the game started when DEC’s new computer, the PDP-1, was set to MIT to be used in hopes of “revolutionizing information processing for the greater glory of corporate America.”
Instead what developed was the first videogame that spread like a virus across campuses and research labs. Since it was an open program, it created a communal program writing experience with newer more improved versions of Spacewars emerging at different locations.
Steve Levy commented on Steve Russell’s developments at the 1984 Hackers Conference:
“When Steve Russell wrote Spacewar as a hack and some people in the room helped improve it, the improvements came because it was an open program….In some more “serious” things like assemblers and compilers and all sorts of utility programs, the same system benefited everyone there. I think things happened that wouldn’t have happened if programs were sequestered away and kept proprietary.”
Although the MIT “hackers” could care less about revolutionizing information processing and sharing it with corporate American or the masses, figures such Steve Russell’s and David Rodman at MIT, initiated the spread of interest in computing outside the “hacker” culture.
For some, Spacewar was their very first glimpse of a computer. “What happened,” says Russell, “was that most of the people who had access to the PDP-1 would show their family and friends what they were doing and they would demonstrate with Spacewar, because it was more interesting than watching someone debug a program with DDT. Actually. I think the thing I take the most pride in about Spacewar is that it got so many people hooked on computer programming.”
They originated a computer-oriented society. What first started as a self-regulated, insular community became a society that later was introduced to the rest of the population. Fostering the life of what we know as the Internet today.
Most of the software we use today is based on hacker developments that they distributed freely. This created a society with an ability to network human beings, further promoting open communication and collaboration. As the virtual world grew, power was subverted from the tradition media of TV to the “people’s” Internet.
This utopian vision of the virtual community and the initial functionality that it promoted became a new venue for capitalist control and interest. The high-speed rate of distribution of information was an allure for marketers. As Douglas Rushkoff, states, The object of the game, for Internet business, was to get people’s hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. Less collaboration, more consumption. The initial role of free information exchange moved greatly away from the cyberculture “revolutionaries”.
Clive Thompson’s article, If you Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That, in New York Time’s magazine reveals how corporations use the open source hacker ideology for profitable interest. Netflix is looking to improve its recommendation engine predictions, Cinemacth, by 10 percent. In following in the Internet’s power of collaboration and culling people together they held an open call competition, the prize $1 million dollars. According to the Thompson, “30,000 hackers worldwide are hard at work on the problem”, in hope of winning the prize and better a recommendation program that will spur more consumerism.
Douglas Rushkoff declares that in 2000 “browsers and search engines were designed to keep users either buying products or consuming commercial content. Most of those helpful hackers were now vested employees of dot-com companies.”
The cyber subcultures did succeed in changing the world although they did not achieve the utopian ideals that they dreamed of. It did not “flatten organizations and decentralize control”; it grew into a society of its own, which often tries to mirror the real world. Once the power of virtual community was given to the masses, it became an avenue to control for market interest.
Although the infrastructure of the Internet does different greatly, as Rushkoff emphasizes, the cause of the decline of e-commerce and the crash of the dot-coms,
The Internet was not born to support the kind of global economic boom that venture capitalists envisioned. The inevitable collapse of the dot-com pyramid was not part of some regular business cycle. And it most certainly was not the collapse of anything having to do with the Internet. No, what we witnessed was the Internet fending off an attack. The Internet never does what it’s supposed to do. It has a mind, and life, of its own. That’s because we’re alive, too.
As in any Wild West or wilderness that needs to be colonized it takes time. As more businesses increase their knowledge of computing and use tactics to humanize consumption, working side by side with programmers and hackers, the market of larger corporation, such as Netflix will continue to improve. Ultimately coexisting along the side of self- structured virtual communities that still thrive on the original structure of the Internet.
One of the newest forms of self –structured social organization are smart mobs. Howard Rheingold first introduced the smart mobs ideas in his book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Smart mobs follow the “emergent behavior” system, which develops out of patterns that arise out of collection of relatively simple interactions. The original smart mobs were teenage “thumb tribes” in Tokyo and Helsinki who punched out short, cheap text messages on primitive cell phones to organize impromptu raves. Smart mobs have developed into collective social political action through the use of computer networks and mobile media. This amplified version of human collaboration through the advent of new technologies can be both advantageous and damaging depending on the mob’s goal but it effect is amazing. According to the New York Times, smart mobs help topple President Joseph Estrada. “Barely an hour after fresh news of corruption arose, a text message forwarded from citizen to citizen,’ Go 2EDSA, Wear blck”, summoned thousands of black-clad protesters to a public plaza.”
Social organizations such as the smart mob are sprouting up across the Internet in higher frequency. They are the idealistic social change that does not comply with the hierarchy of the structure that the corporations instilled on the Internet.
The original belief by hackers that they were able to circumvent capitalism and not participate in it was the same false ideology that hippies also ran into. The commune cultures of the hippy lifestyle saw a dramatic rise in numbers between the years 1967 and 1970. In 1967 there were about 7,000 communed and by 1970, 750,000 people lived in more then 10,000 communes. Their ultimate goal was to drop the chains of oppression forced upon them by the “system”. Hippies viewed the government as system of ladders that structure the population to the bottom rung and ultimately into oppression. Hierarchies that they wanted to move away from much like the hackers who wanted to exert freedom and control over the system. In both cases they all dealt with social action through non-participation and subversion. Hippies believed they could exert control over the applied capitalist structure by not participating in commerce, refusing to pay taxes, and disregarding the draft.
No matter how far into the wild hippies tried to escape by joining communes, they would not be able to retreat from the constraints of a hierarchical structure, and ultimately worked against themselves. Obstacles like the need to purchase hallucinogenic narcotics would have them continue to participate in capitalism. More notably routine campfire life became gender-orientated role-playing. As Fred Turner explains commune life the men went off and talked about important things, while women tended to the children, and food. The kind of hierarchy that they were struggling to get out of was also beset upon themselves in the commune structure.
In the same way the hippies started with good intentions of social action, hackers started with good intentions to exert control through social action over the structure and break down the hierarchy.
The true mode of progression is not non-participation approach of the hippies, nor is it the subversive behavior in exclusive cyber culture communities; the answer lies in turning the ladder of hierarchy on it’s side and view its rungs as interconnecting cultural vines that have no end but with its greatest being significant social actions. As Robert Irwin states, “What I would like to do now is take our familiar structural hierarchy, remove it’s transcendental concepts (with the intent of replacing them with a single infinite subject) and to do in effect turn it on its side and begin to think of all our art world actions as part of our everyday process of social innovation… What were earlier hierarchically characterized as rungs on a ladder, in an upward progression should now be thought of as an interlocking – equal value – art actions that go to make the discipline of art into meaningful social action.”
The nature of the Internet is a dialectical process. What came out of the progress of the Internet is a society like any other society, where capitalist’s ventures, grassroots ideals and rebels good and bad coexist. Two conflicting forces contradicting each other, viewing each point argued as the validation is the determining factor in their continuing interaction. The Internet is not a utopian landscape it was intended to be for cybercultures, it is filled with zealot groups in opposition, a process ever expanding, and coexisting in their roles.
John Markoff, “THING; The Internet,” The New York Times 5 September 1993.
Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove Press, 1997).
Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All To The Hippies,” Time Magazine 01 March 1995.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984).
Stewart Brand and Matt Herron, “1984 Ad,” Whole Earth Review May 1985.
Secret History of Hacking, Discovery Channel Documentary, n.d.
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Stewart Brand and Matt Herron, “1984 Ad,” Whole Earth Review May 1985.
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Douglas Rushkoff, Douglas Rushkoff >> The People’s Net, July 2001, November 2008 <http://rushkoff.com/articles/features/the-peoples-net/>.
Clive Thompson, “If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That,” The New York Times Magazine 23 Nov 2008.
Douglas Rushkoff, Douglas Rushkoff >> The People’s Net, July 2001, November 2008 <http://rushkoff.com/articles/features/the-peoples-net/>.
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
