Is Hacking Art? 1

Eng 102 Final Essay July 16, 2008 Christopher Horne

Is Hacking Art?

Christopher Horne

University of Advancing Technology

Elizabeth Lorang, Professor

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Is Hacking Art?

If it is true, as the old New York urban legend goes, that any secret can be told in

a bar within three drinks, then the hacker equivalent would be learning any secret within

six Red Bulls. And learning secrets is the essence of being a hacker. A hacker, or ‘one who

hacks’, derives from the verb ‘hack’, to chop or cut roughly. There are a variety of connotations,

ranging from the relatively benign to the positively malicious. The modern interpretation has

veered sharply towards the nefarious end of the spectrum of meaning. Hacking is usually meant

to denote a specific type of quasi-criminal computer programmer whose mission it is to illegally

break into other people’s computer systems. The reasons run the gamut from simple curiosity to

criminal intent, such as stealing credit card numbers, passwords, account numbers, extortion for

espionage. There is some consensus that hackers are a disruptive force in society. For hackers,

this disruption is part of their mission in life. A hacker may be defined as someone who enjoys

creative processes involved in computer programming. In corporate America, programmers are

often seen as technicians whose job it is to translate the visions of product managers into code.

In damping the oscillations of creativity in the name of productivity, corporations dump the

highs as well as the lows. For some talented programmers, this regimen lacks sufficient rewards.

America has a great tradition of lionizing people who win by breaking rules. Hackers have this

quality, plus an overriding sense of relentlessness. A great hacker will also possess empathy

(which often also characterizes a great painter). In the closed ethos that defines hacking,

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visualizing the needs of the end user (other hackers in this case) constitutes an aesthetic factor

very close to the idea of beauty. Computer science often extols lack of empathy as a mark of

high intelligence. There are historical reasons for this, going back the Unix mainframe days,

when large central computers at universities, corporations and the military were programmed and

maintained by a ‘priesthood’ who depended on secrecy in order to maintain their status as

programmers.

This paper intends to discuss the question of whether hacking can be considered

art. To make any useful statements at all about this topic, it is necessary to first consider

what constitutes art and then to see how, if at all, hackers can claim a valid sinecure in

this area. The notion of art is often defined in cultural terms, as an aspect of the realm of

civilization. In this regard, a common idea of art might be an object that is beautiful, hangs in a

gallery, is recognizable as the work of an individual, shows evidence of intensive labor in its

production, and is often expensive. A second indicator of art is something which shows superior

taste and refinement in the buyer of art. This might be called ‘art is in the eyes of the beholder’

if it were a chapter in a book. None of these ideas would be incorrect. Anyone who posts a blog

on the Internet would be correct in stating that they have an opinion. The point of demarcation

for a blogger or and artist (or for an art critic) would be whether that opinion is an informed

opinion. This is a very pertinent question early in the third millennium, when the Internet allows

an informational Babel, a true universal democracy, or a Jeffersonian meritocracy (take your

pick). In this spirit, art may be defined as reflecting some vital, illuminating part of current

culture, having a certain frisson that helps us locate ourselves in the context of the complexity of

life. Art should be relevant, make us think, have currency, an edge, hipness, definition, focus.

Victorian hair art may be beautiful in its way, but collecting and displaying it sends a message to

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the viewer: I have no relevance, and therefore no voice in contemporary culture. The ghastly

simulacrums of Thomas Kinkade (“Painter of Light” tm) offer many of the hallmarks of

conventional definitions art (including hand painting by an individual) but only the most naïve

and gullible art buyers would fail to recognize them as commodities. The problem is that the

commoditization of art and culture is by now nearly total. Even once revered icons like Van

Gogh, Picasso, and Dali now pass as high-grade packaged goods for the wealthy.

My contention is that hacker art is a new form of artistic expression. Hacking is

a performance art. Hackers perform technology itself. We grant this status to cinema.

Cinema is a performance by technology. The non-technological forms are plays, musical theater

and the like. For hackers, it is information itself which is the medium of representation. This is

a new concept in some ways, and in other ways, it is exactly the artistic justification behind the

Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, and later Color Field, Minimalism, and Op and Pop art. Art

is pure information, the evidence of the mental activities of the artist as a sensitive interpreter of

culture. Technology is the hacker’s home culture; commenting on and manipulating that culture,

he or she makes a perfectly valid statement of art, provided that it is done with the perception

and vision expected of any skilled artist . A hacker takes culture as his or her object, just as Goya

found war as a cultural subject or Warhol used the phenomenon of celebrity for the same

purpose. Quoting Douglas Thomas (Hacker Culture), “The difference is that the grounding of

style is shifted from the relationship from the relationship of material to cultural production to

one based on the production and consumption of knowledge. Hacker culture is able to invent

itself as an active system of signs rather than as a reactive system of re-articulation and re-

contextualization. Hacker style reverses the hierarchy of production.” (Douglas, 2002)

The demographic for hackers is often young men either in their teens or early

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twenties. They are smart, technologically savvy, and driven by a desire for knowledge.

As a culture, hackers are dedicated to testing boundaries. The goal of a hacker is mastery-

mastery of knowledge, of technology, and mastery of other hackers. They have their own

language, Leet, derived from the word ‘elite’; their own magazines such as Phrack and 2600,

and their own virtual territories on the Internet, such as BBS (online bulletin boards), where

online reputations are built and software offered to the community, and the Darknet, a private

Internet where business is done. Hacking culture is a mirror for mainstream culture. This mirror

is dark and distorted, but a true mirror nonetheless in many ways. The truth which this mirror

reveals is far from beautiful, but it is possible to find alternative answers to many of the half-

truths and myths we allow material culture to use against us to control the scope of our

interactions with other members of society. Mainstream culture overtly and covertly is dedicated

to maintaining a status quo and class structure not conducive to mobility. For example, ordinary

citizens have Facebook, privileged classes have Diamond Lounge (www.diamondlounge.com), a

social networking site which only admits members recommended by other members. Those

members are from the top echelons, and the information exchanged is of great monetary value.

In having an alternative vision of values and lifestyles, we are better able to evade the persistent

obfuscation presented as a model of ordinary life by the omniscient, omnipresent conduit of

mainstream media on behalf of such process owners as the military, political and commercial

interests who currently occupy the alpha predator niches of our social ecology.(Douglas, 2002)

This state is often referred to as the Panopticon, an all-seeing surveillance culture.

For those in opposition to the Panopticon, there are two desirable pieces of knowledge.

The first is who the surveillance culture prioritizes in choosing targets, and the second

Is what kind of information is being gathered. These kinds of knowledge are important to

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all of us, but for the hacker at the margins of legality, they are vital to freedom.

One of the primary confusions in conventional society is the difference between

money and wealth. Wealth is anything that creates surplus value. It need not be a

physical object. It could be data, or services, or knowledge, or anything else that people

want and are willing to pay for. Money is only the token of exchange for goods and

services. Hackers understand this principle very well. This is why their labor and

products (chiefly software) is offered to other hackers for free. They are ‘paid’ by

having their reputation enhanced online. It is a game of honor, like jousting was for

medieval knights. Knights had rules of chivalry which defined their lives, and hackers

have a similar code of honor, called Hacker Ethics.

At the heart of the hacker experience is an intense desire for problem solving.

To gain more and more knowledge is a primary goal. Hacking is a ‘gifting culture’, similar to

that of certain Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, where status and leadership are

gained by giving potlatches. (Sternberg, 1994) The more the would-be leader gives to the tribe,

the higher their social status. In the case of hackers, by giving back knowledge and making

available free software tools that other hackers can use, the common enterprise of hacking and

hacking culture is advanced. One of the main social contracts of this culture is ‘Hacker Ethics’.

In its most articulate form, published in a book by Steven Levy “Heroes of the Computer

Revolution” in 1984. (Levy, 1984)

The principles dictate:

1. Access to computers-and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works- should be unlimited and total.

2. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!

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3. All information should be free

4. Mistrust authority- promote decentralization

5. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position

6. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

7. Computers can change your life for the better.

This simple code yields some surprising insights. Who would have believed that

over-caffenated adolescents with data fixations could be native postmodernists, as in Rule 5. But

what is postmodernism? Sir Isaac Newton, the great 18th century physicist once said, late in his

life, “I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then

finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, wilst the great ocean of truth lay all

undiscovered before me.”[fl] This faith in some great but discoverable truth lay behind much of

the thinking of the Enlightenment, and later the period of culture which has come to be known as

modernism. In contrast, postmodernism is the study of the phenomenon of the perceived trend

towards the atomization of context and the failure of meta-narratives in general to provide for

social cohesion in society. It is the hangover from the grand ball of the Enlightenment, when the

belief in the mind of Humankind and belief in the perpetual and inevitable advance of

Civilization was still possible. The lighthouse of the Rational has fallen in a storm. There are

bricks and stones and rubble, but the great prize, the light itself that saved countless ships, has

been swept away to sea. Some long for the light, but others say that it is better gone. These last

are the coastal pirates, the shipbreakers whose new-found wealth has made them the rulers of the

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coast. But what is really gone forever is the view from the top of the lighthouse. To picture

code-obsessed teenagers taking time from their efforts to break into Strategic Air Command

backbone servers to discuss the finer points of such postmodernists as Derain and Derrida is

farcical.

Any real similarities in philosophy between postmodernism and hacking are an example

of co-evolution. It sometimes happens that in nature two entirely different species come up with

the same form independently, sometimes by dint of evolutionary change, as in the case of the

Viceroy butterfly, which mimics the Monarch. The Monarch butterfly feeds on the bitter tasting

sap of the milkweed plant, and this makes it unpalatable to birds. Through the mechanism of

natural selection, the Viceroy closely resembles the Monarch, and so takes advantage of the

birds’ acquired distaste. An exception to this may be in the origins of postmodernism, which

came about as a result of reaction against modernism. One of modernism’s chief affects is

architecture, exemplified by the International Style created by Mies van der Rohes in the 1950’s.

This is the familiar ‘glass box’ skyscraper, still with us today. The glass box minimized public

space and by its ordered verticality, became the perfect expression of hierarchal corporate power.

It is proper to speak of computer architectures in the same way, because the same power

structures that created the skyscrapers also built the corporate networks, for the same purpose

and with the same philosophy. Therefore, we may think of hacker culture as closely related to the

postmodern movement. They both are reacting in different arenas against the same authoritarian

culture.

Principle 2, the Hands-on Imperative (Levy’s capitalization) is worth discussing.

In some ways, the idea of taking things apart to see how they work in order to produce

something better defines a key aspect of hacker personality and thinking. In Victorian society,

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they would have been called tinkerers. Before the advent of the computer, many adolescents

were into electronics, building radios, repairing TV’s, making homemade strobe lights, guitar

amplifiers, and the like. They were regarded as harmless eccentrics, prototypical nerds, and

usually wound up being ham radio operators or TV repairmen. The computer is a device of

another order altogether. Because it can both send and receive data, and is connected via the

Internet to other sources of data, the harmless tinkerer suddenly has real power. Part of the lure

of becoming a hacker stems from an original state of powerlessness, of being the one who the

jocks in high school beat up and the pretty girls scorned. Powerlessness aligned with intelligence

is a powerful cocktail in any age, but the computer provides the leverage to actuate that power

into a significant force in society. I am reminded of the old Arab saying, “Never turn your back

on a frog.” Just because something seems powerless doesn’t mean that it is. Principle 6

demonstrates that the idea of hackers as artists is already a very integral part of the culture.

Modern art was largely defined by New York critics Clement Greenberg and

Harold Rosenberg beginning in the 1950’s. Their theme was purity. The canvas was

a field of action. What was to go on the canvas, according to Greenberg, was not a picture

but an event- a record of pure activity. The contents, or message of the artwork on the canvas

was to be stripped of all visual and historic referents, and the results were simply visual

information. (Wolfe, 1975) Painting was to be a blueprint for ideas, in exactly the same

way that software code is a blueprint for the computer program itself. Real art happened

in the brain, real art speaks for itself. Given the concept that the Internet may be regarded

as the ‘canvas’ of the work of hackers, we can begin to see some ready parallels between

what has been accepted as the primary theory of modern art since the 1950s, albeit in

modified form, and the possibility that hacking can be considered a valid art form.

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Hacking, like the work of Jackson Pollack or Jasper Johns, is a signifier of the state of

American culture, a ready barometer for the cooling of an advanced culture as it hardens

and solidifies into a late stage of decline. Furthermore, the art of hackers is a direct message

written on the very life of the culture itself, since it affects and modifies the functioning of the

Internet. The Internet, as frame, represents the image of culture in flux. By violating that frame,

hacking’s interaction adheres to the principle that art is a diagram of culture. As comment on

that diagram, hacking represents a diagram of a diagram, and a diagram of a diagram is

metaphysics. (Taylor, 2004)

We can see, then, that not only is hacking art, but in it could be said to signify a sacred

mission to save society from itself. Hacking is the real goods, creatively. Hacking as a culture is

about secrets, and secrets are the root of cool. We live in a world of predigested forms, at the

interface of public history and secret history. As individuals, the signal-to-noise ratio for

empowerment is very high. The official media represents a species of nest invasion, which seeks

to maintain the crisis of self for its own ends. We have internalized the interface, and history, as

internalized space, emerges from the trauma of loss of self. With the barriers to the self broken

down, and the flood of messages from the Id of commercial and political American culture

breaking over the levees of our souls, we seek a rescuer, an agent of change, to restore the

integrity of our submerged psyches. Hackers represent an alternative order, a path to higher

ground, where the individual, the ronin, the trickster, shows the way back toself-containment and

detachment from the corrosive swells of the sea of media. Hackers have voluntarily abandoned

the cherished values of our culture which make life comprehensible and define normality. This

requires real courage. We are immigrants in a windowless passage in steerage, our destination

defined by hope. Only the ‘first class’ passengers have access to sunlight, air, and a semblance

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of a view over the wide ocean of progress. Hackers are those passengers from the lower levels

who steal onto the bridge undetected to gain some notion of our course and heading. We should

celebrate this boldness not to suffer blindly in darkness.

No artist can claim that calling without some sense of beauty or aesthetics. For a hacker,

as a writer of software, the first consideration must be utility. His or her intended audience is

going to take the code off the BBS and use it for its intended purpose. If it doesn’t work, and

work well, the hacker posting the code will find their reputation in a steep, rapid decline.

According to Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters, (Graham, 2004), beauty for a software

designer is good design. Good design encompasses simplicity, solves the right problem, looks

easy but is actually hard to write, has symmetry, and importantly, it is daring. If something is

ugly, it is probably not the best design, according to Graham. The root of technology is

technique. Good technique is always in favor among the cognoscenti, whether it is Jasper

John’s wax-based encaustics, the invisible brushstrokes of Georgia O’Keefe, or DoomCowX’s

level-seven OSI hack on a DOD server. Great work in any creative field tends to grow out of

ideas that have been overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that is unthinkable. A great

hacker does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. An

example as an artist might be Seurat, who broke the integrity of a picture plane made up of

brushstrokes that flow together to make a pictorial representation and instead broke it up into

thousands and thousands of tiny dots of color. It was the right sort of wrongness.

To the extent that hackers are seen to be the enemies of such manifestations of

mainstream culture as the government, commerce, the military and the media, which seek to

consolidate their power on the economic and social lives of citizens by any means, the central

issue is: Who has the center of cool? Apple Computer’s slogan was “Think Different”, even as

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they strove to commodify their customer base into reliable demographics. A company either

grows or it dies, the argument goes, and it grows by feeding off the economic and social nature

of its customers. The military and government, too, need this fuel of coolness to finance a

plethora of schemes. “Be all you can be”, whispers the Army’s advertisement; “Aim high”

counters the Air Force. “Yes, we can!” trumpets a prominent presidential candidate. The media,

having no substance, is all about cool. Why do millions of people tune in nightly to watch a man

in a suit read from a piece of paper? There is nothing inherently interesting in the act, but the

‘news’ is pitched as relevant, ‘with it’, vital- in other words, cool. In this sense, hackers may be

thought less as true enemies of the current hegemony than as a rival subculture, competing for a

share of the limited oxygen that is Attention. Attention- ‘eyeballs’, to use the vernacular, is the

real prize. The sustained attention of individuals is the paydirt of our civilization, the heavy

grains of gold in the media stream that must be panned and sluiced to maintain power. Hackers

are agents of disruption to the physical process of transmitting cultural messages about Weapons

of Mass Destruction or the virtues of whitening strips for a clean, healthy mouth. The message

of manipulation is precisely the same. Only the weight of the message is different. As McLuhan

might have said, a company does not produce cigarettes, or lightbulbs, or cruise missiles, it

produces information. On the surface, the disruption caused by hackers is trivial- a few servers

go down, some account numbers are compromised, a company’s reputation for reliability is

damaged. But the game goes on.

The real hazard from hackers consists of providing an alternative vision of cool.

If money and material goods aren’t hip, if a credit card with a 27 % interest rate no longer

represents ‘freedom’, the commodification of context (meaning the entire communication

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process) is broken. In this sense, the government and industry represent the real hackers, stealing

and manipulating our personal identities for power and gain. Both the hackers and the

corporations are bent on producing art. The art of corporations is concealment, that of hackers is

the revelation that the concealment can be removed. Using the metaphor of the Wizard of Oz, it

is the hackers in the form of Toto who pull back the curtain of power, revealing to the transfixed

public the machinations of the man with the microphone. (Mizrach, 1998) Bogeymen (the

ayatollah, Ghadafy, Bin Laden, radon gas) are part of the standard mechanism of distraction used

by all governments and industry in their campaigns to maintain power. Yet, flaws in the nature

of Power itself prevent hackers from being fully utilized for this purpose. A bank may not wish

to advertise to its competitors and the public that bank accounts and other information are not

safe. A government may not wish to point out that it had secrets to hide, or the nature of those

secrets. Hackers are nothing if not intelligent, and realize that this phenomenon gives them

additional leverage over institutions of all stripes.

The hacker’s crime is that of erasing the boundaries between technology and culture,

and in so doing, creating a space where one can perform technology as a subject of culture rather

than a subject alienated by culture. (Douglas, 2002) They could be called deconstructionists,

artists who find meaning in the margins of technology where machines and relationships

encounter situations they were not designed to handle. As such, they are metaphysical explorers

who seek to understand all that there is to understand about the world. This is the hallmark of

the highest type of humanity. Like that other explorer, Prometheus, who brought the forbidden

technology of fire to civilization, we see them as agents of knowledge who have done their job

too well, and must be punished for their effrontery. Those would reveal secrets must pay the

price.

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References

Douglas, Thomas. (2002). Hacker Culture. Minneapolis.

University of Minnesota Press.

Sternberg, Robert J. (1994). Thinking and Problem Solving. San Diego.

Academic Press.

Levy, Steven. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Garden City.

Anchor Press.

Brewster, Sir David. (1855). Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir

Isaac Newton, Volume II. Edinburgh. Thomas Constable & Co.

Wolfe, Tom. (1975). The Painted Word. New York.

Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Taylor, Paul. (2004). The Digital Sublime. Cambridge. MIT Press.

Graham, Paul . (2004). Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. Cambridge.

O’Reilly.

Mizrach, Steven. (1998).Is There a Hacker Ethic for 90’s Hackers?.

Retrieved July 15, 2008 from http:// www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/hackerethic.html

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