Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

  What was less expected was a query that I received about Anonymous’s potential contribution to the corporate world. TTI/Vanguard approached me to assess whether I could give a talk along these lines to its clients, such as Royal Dutch Shell, Northrop Grumman, Toyota, FedEx, and Expedia. I discovered that TTI/Vanguard was primarily involved in “futurescanning.” Apparently, “TTI/Vanguard heightens thinking about technological possibilities. We futurescan. We focus on unanticipated sources of change and evaluate their transformative promise. In dynamic, highly interactive sessions, debate is stimulated and breakthrough ideas flourish.”21

  This is the culture that adopts “disruptive” strategies for the attention economy, for capital gain. Anonymous and LulzSec disrupted in the classical way—without clarification. Sometimes they even fucked shit up. They also demonstrated the importance of art, expression, autonomy, and creation through unalienated labor. Most multinational companies are not compatible with these ideals; they cannot implement these lessons, at least not in a fulfilling and honest way.

  TTI/Vanguard’s mission statement marked my first exposure to “futurescanning,” but then it started popping up everywhere. The most surprising of the bunch came during a phone call with Chris Anderson, the head of TED, prior to the summer event in Edinburgh. He asked whether my talk could include some practical insight for corporate management. Though his request was subtle, it was clear he wanted me to relay a (hyper-inspirational, astonishing, disruptive) lesson from the trenches of Anonymous that could upend conventional wisdom and embolden corporate thinking. Until then, I had worked mostly with TED’s other curator, Bruno Giussani. TED vets everything down to the word—he asked me to nix the word “homeland” since it was too politically charged. That said, Giussani was otherwise hands off, offering helpful suggestions that I could adopt or reject. Frankly, I was surprised by Anderson’s query. It was clear that if I adopted the corporate lingo, and came up with some whiz-bang way of packaging Anonymous using shallow, amazing-sounding, paradigm-shifting phrases combined with confusing technobabble, all delivered with breathless enthusiasm, I would have the perfect formula to inspire in these corporate drones the feeling of being in on some mind-blowing insights. And then I could make a lot of money running around bullshitting people until the next paradigm rolled over.

  These exchanges gave me a fresh perspective on a contemporary vector of co-optation. Academics who write about the subject have often approached it from the angles of advertising, entertainment, and consumerism—the classic example being Dick Hebdige’s seminal analysis of the commodification of punk rock.22 Countercultural forces of critique, of which punk rock was emblematic, are devitalized when channeled through the corporate advertising apparatus, or turned into commodities through the processing mechanisms of Hollywood or the fashion industry. What I always found interesting about Anonymous was how it had, at least until recently,23 resisted these forces for one primary reason: most corporations are wary of commodifying Anonymous because they know how direct the repercussions might be. In fact, the case of Anonymous is a curious one in which the opposite process more often occurs; though it is true that Time Warner makes a buck whenever someone buys an official Guy Fawkes mask (Time Warner holds the copyright to the V for Vendetta movie), Anonymous has taken a symbol popularized by Hollywood and made it revolutionary. It is a prime example of counter-commodification, a rare occurance.

  But if there’s one lesson from the corporate execs, it’s this: even if they aren’t about to claim Anonymous’s imagery for their next advertising campaign, it doesn’t mean they can’t, or won’t, find some way to appropriate something about Anonymous. If someone can find an uncapitalized, exploitable, futurescanned, innovative, disruptive idea that can flourish in corporate boardrooms, they will. This move, while distinct from more familiar forms of co-optation—since the knowledge transfer may not (necessarily) alter the phenomenon being scrutinized—is still worth understanding a little better. There is a pervasive cottage industry (in the form of think tanks, organizations, and motivational speakers, many from academia, especially pundits who love to inflate the promise of technology) that exists to capture wisdom from every corner of the globe (from gang culture to the Arab Spring) and convert it into a formula for corporate success. This is done so that corporate executives can keep abreast of global challenges, feel great about what they do, strengthen corporate cultural machinery, and make a lot of money off of culture that they don’t have to invest in. I suspect in some instances, when corporate executives hone in on a phenomenon like open source, they not only harvest insights for their corporations, but have the power to recalibrate public opinion on the topic. We know very little about the reach of these networks and the possible effects that “futurescanning” might aggregate. It is a subject that would certainly be worth understanding better. Maybe we need to “futurescan” futurescanning ourselves.

  “I tell you: one must still have chaos within

  oneself, to give birth to a dancing star”

  LulzSec was not only embraced and celebrated by hackers. It was also widely popular among Internet geeks, political activists, and academics, along with a host of other unmarked spectators. To understand why, it helps to look to the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose investments in questioning truth and morality, elevating pleasure over reason, and embracing cunning and hyperbole can be used (playfully and experimentally) to form the intellectual scaffolding for the work LulzSec and Anonymous did 150 years later. (Indeed, had Nietzsche been teleported into the future and developed a knack for hacking, I suspect he just might have joined LulzSec.)

  Nietzsche took the Enlightenment project of critique so much to heart that he turned out to be one of its unremitting critics—helping to inaugurate a more general project of radical philosophy, which would be expanded upon in the twentieth century by a cohort of writers, most famously Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. We might even think of Nietzsche as the Enlightenment’s trickster. The objects of his critique were rationality, progress, God, science, and the way that ideas or systems based on absolutist tropes—whether proclaiming truth in science or God—become, in earning wide adoption, more resistant to critique and more capable of binding humans in their grips. For Nietzsche, nothing should be de facto granted or a priori assumed: neither good and evil, nor true and false. Every piece of knowledge that humans conceive of, make, or even discover by looking at the world is, according to Nietzsche, provisional, rooted in judgment, and, though often seeming timeless or natural, understandable only within a specific historical moment.

  Nietzsche sought to dismantle the ideological stronghold of truth, rationality, and conventional moral systems for complex reasons. Suffice to say, for our purposes, that he wanted to highlight how the mantle of truth exerts a monopolistic force. Truth implies right, better, and good. Anything sanctioned as truth then works to devalue other domains of creation and experience, like art and myth, which lie outside the orbit of “truth” and are thus slotted in the category of “falsehood.” In this ideological binary, art becomes a second-class citizen in the public life of ideas, while fantasy and myth are hardly even allowed to join the party.

  Nietzsche was attuned to the vitality of sensuality, myth, and art. Music, poetry, and even the mad laughter of the trickster Dionysus, who he championed, offer an aesthetic life of pleasure.24 They are pursuits through which humans can overcome their limits and the tragic condition of life: “Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!”25

  More than any other political movement in recent times, Anonymous, and especially its LulzSec offshoot, gives forceful social shape to a number of these Nietzschean philosophical themes. If Nietzsche argued that nothing is sacred, and advocated for a life of enchantment, then LulzSec and Anonymous lived these maxims out. They dared to subvert and break formal law, etiquette, and mores, and experimented with the art of transgression. They reminded us: to make life
into art, and art into life, you sometimes need to break rules.

  And breaking rules is a difficult task. Back when I taught a course in Communication and Culture, I used to have my undergraduate students violate a norm in public and report back on their experiences. With the exception of one or two eccentrics, who rather enjoyed the assignment (one of them recounted gleefully that her mother walked her by leash and collar, like a dog, on the streets of New York City—and barely anyone batted an eye), it was an extraordinarily hard, even painful, exercise. In fact, a good quarter of the class broke rules in ways that hardly constituted “daring” at all, like asking someone at a cafe whether they could sit at their table.

  The pressure to conform to conventions and accept given wisdom is enormous—and often for good reason. Much of Nietzsche’s corpus laid bare this tendency and warned of its pernicious effects, which is what the trickster myths address, time and again, albeit in different form. Indeed, one of Nietzsche’s most famous characters, Zarathustra, is a tricksterlike figure. Living as a hermit for a decade in the mountains, he comes to the realization that one can overcome social mores in favor of self-defined desires and ideas. He descends to share this insight, advocating a process he calls “self-overcoming.” Anonymous and LulzSec have existed as instantiations of Zarathustra. LulzSec went a step further than Anonymous, breaking even the rules that had inadvertently taken root in Anonymous itself, thus posing a challenge to even this emergent order.

  It is rare for something actually resembling the trickster myth to come into being in the midst of our contemporary reality, much less with such panache and public presence. These hackers, in their sacrifice (and sacrifice of others), served to remind many of the necessity, pleasure, and danger of subversion.

  The awe many felt toward Anonymous and LulzSec can be illuminated by Walter Benjamin’s insight regarding the great criminal who, “however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public.”26 This admiration stems from the fact that criminality reveals the limits of the state’s monopoly on violence and the force of the law. But LulzSec and Anonymous fundamentally exceeded the frame of criminality—even if they were unable to entirely escape its orbit. LulzSec and Anonymous, in contrast to criminal outfits, were not out for private gain, and in the case of Anonymous, there has been significant social pressure to mute self-interest, personal fame, and recognition. Anonymous performed the broader, Nietzschean lesson embodied in Zarathustra: to act out the secret desire to cast off—at least momentarily—the shackles of normativity and attain greatness—the will to power set to collectivist and altruistic goals rather then self-interested and individualistic desires. Anonymous and LulzSec’s artistic chaos, to paraphrase Nietzsche, gave birth to a dancing star. If you think I am overtly romantic about LulzSec and this era of Anonymous, you may be right. But the events that followed ensured this honeymoon phase was shortlived. We can now turn to the death of LulzSec and the rise of AntiSec, and see how this stunning mythos went awry when Anonymous was partially eclipsed by a cult of personality.

  CHAPTER 9

  AntiSec

  One day in February 2011, a twenty-six-year-old Chicago hacker logged onto the AnonOps IRC server and said to himself, “Now here is a productive conversation.” Anonymous was in the midst of targeting the notorious Koch brothers, major donors to Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker. That frigid winter, activists all over the state had marched from the farms and factories into the state’s capitol in protest of Governor Walker, who was pushing for a bill that would strip away state employees’ rights to collective bargaining. This hacker watched as Anonymous DDoSed the Koch-funded free-market advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.

  It was also frigid in Chicago. Whirling around corners and howling down corridors, the powerful winter wind gripped the city. This hacker, Jeremy Hammond, had barely been logged on for twenty minutes before losing his Internet connection. He sighed and pulled his six-foot, lanky body from his chair and shuffled outside. He stood on the back stoop, his fingers numb from the cold, as he desperately tried to adjust the Wi-Fi antenna. His laptop sat connected to the antenna, running “aircrack-ng,” which was busy doing its best to break into his neighbor’s wireless network. Hammond stood still. He knew that even the most minor movement could affect the wireless signal. It was 3 am, and he was freezing. Going inside wouldn’t help; there hadn’t been heat in the house for months. With the Internet connection finally reestablished, he returned to IRC, and was bathed in the blue light from his laptop for hours.

  As Hammond read everything he could about Anonymous’s latest activist jaunts, something tugged at his soul. He identified with Anonymous and he wanted to be a part of it. Hammond was a fiery political activist; without a doubt he was—and remains—one of the most prolific, adamant, unwavering American hacktivists to have ever typed on a keyboard. By his early twenties, direct action had already become a way of life; between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, he was arrested eight times during political protests. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, held in New York City, he was scooped up during a drum-banging protest; the following year, he rallied against a neo-Nazi group in Toledo, Ohio, and was arrested for violating an injunction preventing street protests. More recently, in 2010, after burning an Olympic banner to protest Chicago’s bid for the 2016 games, he was sentenced to eighteen months’ probation and 130 hours of community service. Hammond proudly calls himself an anarchist because he believes passionately in “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency, and harmony with the environment.”1

  By summer 2011, with the snow long gone, he was actively compromising servers and websites for political purposes. It was fateful for him, for a little more than a year later he would be under arrest and headed toward a decade-long sentence in federal prison. Hammond told me about both his previous hacktivism and involvement with Anonymous in September 2013, during our first, and only, face-to-face meeting, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City where he was locked up awaiting sentencing. After his arrest in March 2012, we had communicated through old-fashioned paper and stamped envelopes (Hammond placed his stamps upside down). When I met him, he was wearing an oversized brown canvas jumpsuit draped over a body that no longer bore the lanky traces of his programming past. His bulging forearms—the most visible indication of the sixty pounds of muscle he had acquired in prison—rested on a brown table in the barren detainee meeting room. A soundtrack was provided by the buzzing and clicking of the fluorescent lights, their glare bouncing off the white cinder blocks. Having already sucked all aesthetic warmth from the room, the administrators found a way to make it even worse—by making it freezing.

  In this delightful ambiance, as Hammond told me more and more about his past, it became increasingly clear that his technical skills had been sharpened specifically for their political capabilities.

  Growing up with his twin brother and father in the immediate outskirts of Chicago, he was barely out of the crib when he began toying with computer games. By age ten, he graduated to programming his own games in QBasic on a black-and-white 10MHz laptop with MS-DOS6 and Windows 3.1. He got online soon after, setting up an IRC channel for game development. He also discovered and devoured hacker literary genres, like textfiles (also known as philes) and zines. Typically, these texts, “which teach the techniques and ethos of the underground,” as Bruce Sterling notes, “are prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge.”2

  Most exhibit strong anti-authoritarian or edgy overtones, which are patently evident in their titles:

  Hacking Bank America CHHACK.ZIP

  Chilton Hacking CITIBANK.ZIP

  Hackers Digest HACK.ZIP

  Phortune 500 Guide to Unix RADHACK.ZIP

  Radio Hacking TAOTRASH.DOC

  Anarchist Book ANARCHY.ZIP

  Barbiturate Formula BLCKPWDR.ZIP

  Electronic Terror EXPLOS1.ZIP

  Briefcase Locks NAPAL
M.ZIP

  More Pranks to Pull on Idiots! REVENGE.ZIP3

  Hammond ate this material up and (incorrectly) assumed that most other hackers shared his political sensibilities. It wasn’t until high school, when he started to attend the local 2600 meetings, that he experienced a bit of a rude awakening. He remembers most of the participants as “super white hats” whose politics lay nowhere near his nascent anticapitalist sensibilities. But, because he also self-identified as a hacker, he enjoyed attending these meetings. He saw the utility of learning from these people.

  And then, as he explained, he was further politicized a little later, when “Bush stole the election, 9/11 happened, and the Patriot Act was passed.” At the age of twenty, he cofounded a radical website called Hack This Site with a corollary zine called Hack This Zine. This titles riff off Steal This Book, the 1960s counterculture manual-manifesto written by Abbie Hoffman. (The Yippies published the first hacker/phreak zine, The Youth International Party Line, which advocated ripping off AT&T, aka “Ma Bell,” as a revolutionary act. Its successor publication, Technical Assistance Program (TAP), would shed the overtly leftist political rhetoric.) Hack This Site covered computer security but also delved into radical political trends and events from around the globe, like the movement against the war in Afghanistan and the potential threats to democracy posed by computer-based voting machines.

  Even if Hammond was an anomaly in the American hacker scene, there were enough kindred souls around the globe to constitute a small, but feisty, band of radical tech warriors. His zine helped breed a cohort of left-leaning hackers. In fact, one of LulzSec’s most politically minded hackers, Donncha O’Cearbhaill, aka Palladium, had been a reader before he and Hammond met online. And when Hammond wasn’t writing for the zine, he was channeling his technical skills more directly toward his political goals.