Review of: Gabriella Coleman (2014) Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. New York and London: Verso, 464 pages.

From the Canadian secret services to social scientists to the participants themselves, everybody knows that if you want to understand Anonymous, you have to turn to Gabriella Coleman. Widely hailed as an exceptionally thorough ethnography, her new book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous appeals to something hackers hold dear, and academics not enough. The former call it correctness, the latter rigour. ‘Accurately portrayed’, as Anonymous activist Commander X puts it (2014).

The explicit goals of the book are found in the concluding chapter – to dispel myths about Anonymous, and to submit to its enchantment in the form of a popular yet analytical treatise – it is an important milestone in hacker studies and therefore I concentrate on its usefulness as a work of social science. Hacker studies as an emergingfield suffers from the beginning of what I call a ‘social movement syndrome’: the trying, often desperately, to understand, or if necessary misunderstand, hackers as a social movement – or failing that, at least as a socially relevant movement. On the one hand, this is understandable since social movement studies provides a stable framework for studying the rise and fall of disruptive groups; on the other hand, such a perspective results in a tension between academia and the hacker scene because most hackers are not interested in being a social movement. Finding their techno-activist allies in the scene, scholars correctly identify an ongoing tension between activists and engineers amongst hackers themselves.

While Levy’s 1984 summary of ‘hacker ethics’ made profound impact on both the scene and the scholarship by thematising a tension, it has not solved these problems in the long run. The ‘play struggle’ concept put forward in Söderberg’s Hacking Capitalism has probably been the most successful and lucid attempt to unify the political contradictions of hackerdom. The concept theorized hackers as disgruntled workers yearning for the joys of unalienated labour which capitalism is unable to provide (2008). In Hacker, Hoaxer… the transition from computer- and media savvy users looking for adventure to accidental revolutionaries is explained through the ‘trickster thesis’.

Coleman builds on Lewis Hyde’s work in cultural criticism, which goes back to Bakhtin’s literary criticism of Rabelais, arguing that ‘It is not difficult to imagine the troll and Anonymous as contemporary trickster figures. They are provocateurs and saboteurs who dismantle convention while occupying a liminal zone.’ (34) Where others reference the hacker ethics as a centerpiece of hacker culture, she builds her analysis on the idea of ‘lulz’: laughing at someone else’s expense. The argument is compelling for resolving the above outlined paradox because it can explain how fun loving hooligan hackers can turn into electrified revolutionary militants.

After playing out the trickster thesis about free software developers in her previous book (Coding Freedom), written ‘back to back’ (407) with this one, she found in Anonymous the empirical material with which to demonstrate the operation of tricksterism on a more concrete hence more persuasive level (2012). If conceptually the previous title spells out hacking as an elegant solution that is essentially a joke, here the subversive tendency of tricksterism is developed a step further as ‘LOLs’ (laughter) become ‘lulz’. The subversive potential of the ‘practical joke’ at the heart of hacking was convincing in the previous book, but it rested on a more subtle, more fragile analysis of hacker sociality: with Anonymous explicitly thematising the lulz in their own discourse, arguing for it to have a central piece in the theoretical understanding of the hacker phenomena makes a more solid argument.

Speaking of external rather than internal causes, the role of repression by the state and capital in the politicisation of the hacker scene is central in both stories as a device which moves the plot further. The key insight here is that institutionalisation and politicisation are processes mainly driven by external pressures, so that it is not possible to theorise the hacker scene without theorising its interactions with wider social structures. This is an important observation which builds on her earlier work with Alex Golub (Coleman and Golub: 2008), but has taken on more substance since then, accumulated into the telling term nerd scare.

In the final analysis, tricksterism offers a way to theorise subversion as an anthropological universal that is an indispensable part of human sociality even if it is in perpetual conflict with the established order, rather than something which emerges spontaneously from outside capitalism (which would be ridiculous).

Commander X notes that the book is ‘both epic and encyclopedic’ (2014). A triptych of four chapters each depict the rise, heyday and fall of Anonymous and its satellites, spanning a total of 464 pages. As Coleman was researching Anonymous before it was cool, the narrative is spread evenly and gravitates with the creeping force of destiny towards its tragic end. Her decision to present the trajectory of Anonymous through drawing parallels with the rise and fall of US radicalism is a claim, a hypothesis and evaluation in itself. Therefore, my recapitulation follows that lead.

Such radicalism – just like hacking – emerged in conjunction with the cultural shock of the early 1960s which brought youth cultures into circulation (Wallerstein: 2004); while in the book the ‘shock culture’ of trolling solidified in the first decade of the 21st century from the explorations of free speech on the Internet. The Walpurgis night of taboo breaking counter-culture turned into the daybreak of political resistance as the new formation came into contact with mainstream society – hippies turned yippies then, trolls turned hacktivists now.

Activists of Students for a Democratic Society worked in tandem with militants of the Black Panther Party, joined by Vietnam veterans and young folk singers like Bob Dylan. Coleman vehemently denies the ‘creepy basement dweller’ stereotype of hackers, bringing together Irish kids with a Puerto Rican gangster, an Iraqi veteran with an alterglobalisationist black block protester, amongst a host of minor characters who could all work together behind the mask. These motley crews organised direct action against the state and capital in public assemblies as well as affinity groups. The boiling points are remembered as the Days of Rage in 1969 and Operation Payback is a Bitch in 2010. As Anons like to say: ‘And Now You Have Got Our Attention’.

The Vietnam war of the sixties features as the Arab Revolutions of the 2010s where Anon’s fight from afar with ‘any memes necessary’ (Taylor 2015). Here, the author does a good job of presenting the alternating dynamics between conspiracy in affinity groups and mass organisation on open channels, demonstrating her thesis that Anonymous is not simply a ‘hive mind’ of mass collaboration nor just a shadowy hacker group, but a labyrinthine territory of resistance. In the last period, plurality gives way to underground cabals caught in a spiral of armed struggle: the splinter groups of Anonymous – Lulzsec and Antisec – go on a ‘hacking spree’ against major state and capital actors like the FBI or Sony, as well as military contractors like Stratfor.

The exploits and desperation of Weather Underground^[2] style, clandestine guerilla warfare resonates here well. State repression arrives through paranoia and infiltration modelled on COINTELPRO^[3] tactics. One of the central characters in both Anonymous and its splinter groups –called Sabu – is flipped, continuing to participate as a spy and a provocateur, while the agencies slowly track down and encircle the other participants. All receive grotesquely disproportionate sentences especially on US soil, but the worst – a decade long sentence including periods of solitary confinements – is reserved for Jeremy Hammond, a long time anarchist hacker who was ‘hands down the most insurgent of the bunch’ – a telling tale for any militants, in electronic disturbance or not. What could have amended the value of the book as part of the historical record is a timeline of operations, hacks and arrests that served as a scaffold for the narrative and a reference for historians of hacking.

In summary, the moral of Anonymous’ parallel with New Left resistance in the 1960s and 1970s is that the strategy and tactics of crashing opposition groups did not change. They did not have to change, since illegal infiltration and provocation is still the most effective method. Thus Coleman manages to situate Anonymous in the most illustrious line of political resistance in the United States, showing that electronic disturbance or not, their antics should be counted as activism.

Methodologically speaking, there is much to address in terms of hacker studies in particular and anthropology in general. The innovation of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is to use IRC^[4] logs as its primary source material. The anthropologist can meet hackers on their own ground: the telegraph of the Internet. This enables her to capture an essential site and aspect of hacker sociality that have been seriously under discussed in the literature so far. As a community-managed social media or federated social network operating continuously since 1988, or an Internet protocol for real time conversations, IRC has survived generations of chat technologies and social media platforms, emerging in the new millennium as the primary field of social interactions for new generations of geeks like hackerspace participants, and of course Anonymous themselves (maxigas 2014). Coleman manages to utilise this medium thoughtfully for her ethnographic work, with the advantage that chat logs provide automatic transcripts of interactions. Since the channel is a plain text medium, there are no other aspects of the communication (like tone of voice) that are lost in the ethnographic record. This research practice can be recognised as a contribution to the widening toolbox of digital ethnography. Digital methods are not fetishised either, since traditional methods and ‘Away From the Keyboard’ meetings also provide important insights and complement online interactions.

However, Coleman does not spell out the way in which making use of IRC as a communication channel is itself a political choice made by hackers and hoaxers which structures social interactions and subjectivation processes. For instance, the use of topical channels and pseudonymous identities that are the staple of IRC technology and its usage probably encourages the emergence of a common voice. Their choice of media arguably helps Anons develop the impersonal, peer produced politics that made them famous, as well as opening the possibility for the conspirative group dynamics that the author describes as complementary.^[5] Even though the paranoia instilled by text-only interactions comes across clearly in the book, in general a digital ethnography should be more explicitly reflexive about media use. This in turn leads to a wider discussion problematising the very definition of ethnography.

Theoretically, there is much debate about what ethnography – the method that defines the identity of anthropology as a discipline – should be and we seem to differ on the topic with the author. Ethnography is more than gaining rapport and spending time hanging out with the natives – although that is an essential part and Coleman spends much time recounting the process. It is also about generating data from observations and relating emic knowledge (the subjects’ own understanding of themselves) to etic knowledge (social scientific conceptualisations). The idea of anthropology, as it applies ethnography, is that an inside view of a particular culture can expand our theoretical understanding of societies and these previous two can tell us more about what it means to be human. Notwithstanding its contributions recounted above, the book is noticeably lacking in this area. The analysis rests on a wide range of scholarship from a number of disciplines, yet few of these ideas are developed further based on the empirical material. Coleman does a good job at picking relevant concepts and observations which apply to the phenomena – like Nietzsche’s Dionysian critique of modernity or the !Kung people’s shaming of the meat to check on authority, or even Hyde’s trickster figure – but does little to contribute upstream to these theories. For instance it would have been interesting to spell out in detail how the role – and the powers – of tricksters change in the midst of electronic networks, growing mediatisation and the cognitive capitalism going rampant in the new millennium. Altogether, the book suffers somewhat from a lack of a cumulative effect and a consistent theoretical argument, which is perhaps fair since it says ‘story’ on the tin.^[6]

The story of Anonymous could be told in as many ways, as any other story; and in many ways my own review is probably as unfaithful to the book as the book is to the movement. Yet, Coleman’s account has a beginning, a middle and an end with a moral, and that is what counts: it makes for a good story. Another angle will be told by my friend Pedro Jacobetty on the peer production of politics, on the foot soldiers of mayhem, how they used the media and how it used them: another tale of solidarity, deception and betrayal. As Coleman’s work shows brilliantly, an anthropologist works with her whole personality; it was the only story she could tell. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy will be remembered as a contribution to the social history of the trickster, militant activism and hacker studies, a gritty chronicle of the search for adventure in a 21st century dystopia.

 

 

 

Review of: Martin Frederiksson and James Arvanitakis (eds.) (2014) Piracy: Leakages from Modernity. Sacramento, Litwin Books, 370 pages.

From Jack Sparrow to Somali hijackers, from torrents to fake Gucci bags, pirates and their loot are prominently present in contemporary culture. The eighteen essays collected in Piracy: Leakages from Modernity attempt to analyze a variety of piracy practices, and relate them to broader social transformations. As the authors have diverse vocational backgrounds, ranging from economy and sociology to political theory and law, the collection shows a wide variety in methodological approaches. Altogether, they provide a rich overview of different piratic practices as well as a balanced description of their political potential.

Despite the diversity in these essays, many of them seem to share certain fundamental assumptions. This applies, first of all, to the modernity referred to in the title. Out of the various essays, a picture emerges of a late-capitalist, neo-liberal society, in which an important role is played by the circulation of information and the commodification of culture. As Lucas Logan concludes in his essay on intellectual property rights (IPR), ‘communication technologies are the fuel for the 21^st century global economy and are regulated by capitalist market forces and states that further entrench established power relations’ (141). The main target of many essays consists of the ‘capitalist market forces’ that are mostly identified as US-based media and entertainment industries. Various essays sketch these industries as old, slow, centralized organizations that are out of touch with the reality of digital file-sharing. Rather than seizing upon the possibilities of this new reality, so it seems, they are ‘protecting their pre-digital distribution infrastructure’ as well as their ‘[long established] profit-making pattern’ (201). As aptly pointed out by You Jie, the so-called defense by the entertainment industries against the threat of file-sharing is exactly what motivates their use of the term piracy, as well as their recourse to legal force. As Sean John Andrews argues, ‘US lobbyists for the content industries have been (…) demanding legislative efforts to protect their dying business model’ (98). Arguably the lobbyists have so far been quite successful, as state agencies appear to willingly assist in enforcing the property rights of the entertainment industries. Telling in this regard is the influence that the US has exercised upon Spain in order to have its IPR regulation reformed and upheld, as revealed by Wikileaks documents and discussed by Logan (137). Although much attention is paid to the US, the EU did not remain free from a similar intertwinement of market interests and legislative reform. As a result ‘powerful states are able to assert authority over, and force legal, regulatory and economic regimes, on weaker states’ (140). The corollary is that the discourse on piracy falls apart in, on the one hand, a strongly legalistic language, varnishing over the power- relations by using terminology of ‘compliance’ and ‘harmonizing’ regulative frameworks; on the other hand, the protection of IPR is phrased in moralistic terms, such that file-sharing is branded as theft and robbery.

Efforts to globalize IPR date back to the nineteenth century (79), but as Logan paraphrases Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, the process of global IPR protection speeded up in the post-World War II period (144). However, this process clashes particularly fiercely with the rise of the Internet, and its initial conception as a free and open web. This clash seems to be well-illustrated by the public outrage at the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in 2011, as well as at the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA, 2012). Interestingly, James Meese observes that protests largely attacked the reforms because their enforcement entailed a threat to free speech, not because they implied a further privatization of intellectual property (23-24). The essay by Andrews does allow for a critique of privatization, as he draws the familiar analogy between the closing of the commons in eighteenth-century England and the closure of the web as a space to freely share and distribute knowledge. In both cases, the ‘social bandits’ who violate the new privatized order belong to the margins of society: then, the peasants whose decrease in resources forced them to seek employment in the newly developing industries, now, locals in the Global South who cannot afford, or have no legitimate access to, text books, TV shows or music.

The essay by Sonja Schillings covers a wider historical period, and also succeeds in laying bare the century-old distinction between white pirates and ‘black’ Muslim ones. The non-white pirate, she argues, is ‘associated with collective and inherently hostile Otherness that seeks to overcome the West’ (77). The white pirate, however, was conceived as pursuing his material self-interest by joining the Muslim pirates and relinquishing his Christian, European identity. As a result, he was held individually responsible, whereas the non-white pirate constituted an anonymous threat that had to be eradicated. Out of the highly individualistic white pirate evolved eventually, Schilling contends, the image of the pirate as a social rebel. The dichotomy between non-white piracy and white piracy echoes in a number of essays, and especially so in those few that refrain from defining contemporary piracy primordially as a digital practice. The article by Hatzapoulis and Kambouri describes street vending of counterfeit goods by migrants on the squares of Athens, including the square that the Occupy movement took possession of. Although Occupy activists explicitly rejected the racist violence faced by the migrant vendors, they did ask the vendors to leave the square as the commercial activity of selling goods conflicts with the activists’ intention to collectivize public space. Engaging in a commercial activity, the vendors were not considered as political actors (278ff). The essay by Robison, Drodzweski and Kiddell on ‘biopiracy’ in a way reverts the dichotomy between the white, rebellious pirate and the anonymous non-white pirate. They describe the – partly successful – fight against the patenting by companies of plants, animals, and processes that were historically cultivated by marginalized indigenous communities. Interestingly, these communities and their support groups deploy the discourse of ‘biopiracy’ and ‘anti-piracy’ as a rhetorical tool to affirm their collective right vis-à-vis the property right of (for instance pharmaceutical and agricultural) companies. Hence, the companies using IPR are framed as the pirates, rather than the communities who deem their knowledge a common asset.

The above essays are insightful as to the variety of piracy. However, the cover of the book indicates the central core of this collection: with a recurrent pattern of the copyright-logo, occasionally interrupted by a skull-and-crossbones sign, the focus is on the digital sharing of copyrighted content. Out of the very different essays and approaches, a many-sided picture emerges of who this ‘pirate’ is. Three types, already sketched by Meese in the first essay, and partly also by Virginia Crisp in the second chapter, recur throughout the book. The first type is the pirate who we know from the anti-piracy discourse of the entertainment industry: the one who makes money out of file-sharing, and is thus considered ‘parasitic’ on the creative work of individual artists. Meese cites Kim ‘Dotcom’ Schmitz of Megaupload as a prime example: Megaupload, at some point ‘one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites’ (25), was extremely profitable, until the moment the servers were taken down and Schmitz faced trial. Pictures of Kim’s tokens of excessive wealth – his fleet of cars, his villa – played a major role in the subsequent slur campaign. Interestingly, a number of essays show that file-sharers justify their practices by distancing themselves from those ‘pirates’ who are in it for the money. As a result, they resemble the rhetoric of the entertainment industries – of which they are the main target. As Crisp puts it: ‘[file-sharers] have adopted parts of the anti-piracy rhetoric to pour scorn on those that they perceive to be the real pirates: that is, both those who engage in the unauthorized circulation of physical goods for economic reward as well as some of the major owners of copyright’ (50).

The second type is the pirate as constructed by advocacy groups and political organizations such as the ‘Pirate Party’: the pirate as a social rebel. This pirate is conceived as ‘a “subversive radical” engaged in a power struggle with the cultural industries’ (43). As shown by Jonas Andersson and Stefan Larsson in their extensive study of users of The Pirate Bay and their motivation, this conception is especially prevalent among active uploaders. ‘Seeding’ and uploading torrents are thus highly politicized by the file-sharers themselves. As file-sharing is part of the fight for a free, not-for-profit culture, the pirate deliberately challenges the establishment, and especially the legitimacy of IPR.

The third type shows the pirate as the banal consumer of media products. As Meese argues, piracy is an everyday practice of the ‘mainstream digital citizen, more interested in questions of infrastructure and access than opposition and exclusion’ (30). As this ordinary pirate is mostly interested in obtaining media fast and cheap, (s)he can act quite like a nagging, impatient customer. This is well-illustrated by Vanessa Mendes Moreira De Sa’s essay on ‘fan subtitling’ in Brazil: groups of dedicated fans spending their free time on providing subtitles to foreign TV shows. Despite the quality and the speed with which they deliver their free service to a huge audience, some fan-subtitlers admit that ‘they often felt that impatient viewers did not value their efforts’ (297-298). Piracy, rather than deliberately ideologically opposing the entertainment industries, might be the result of decades of immersion in commodified culture. This does not mean that there is no political potential in ordinary piracy, but Francesca Da Rimini and Jonathan Marshall convincingly argue that ‘[i]f this is a type of radicalism, it is one whose radicalism is unintentional, emerging out of the same forces that try to shut it down’ (341).

Despite the breadth of the essays, one perspective is only marginally present: that of the artists whose work is pirated. Only the essay of Balázs Bodó and of da Rimini and Marshall consider their interests, albeit in an indirect way. It should be granted that these artists make up a very heterogeneous group, ranging from well-established bands that are independent from the big recording companies, down to those who use social media to create, and reach out to, their fan base. Arguably, the claim that piracy is a form of stealing from artists is overblown by the entertainment industries. Nevertheless, if there is a copyright war going on between the big entertainment industries and those fighting for free culture, the artists are likely to end up in the buffer zone.

In general, this collection gives a plausible and rich account of the different forces at work in the construction of the contemporary pirate. Because the book does such a good job in showing the intricacies of this construction, the structure of the book might be a little puzzling. The editors separate the book into three sections that address the ‘ontology’, the ‘politics’, and the ‘practices’ of piracy. However, their motivation for the tripartite structure does not sufficiently distinguish between the ‘ontological basis’, ‘the politics of piracy from a macro perspective, analyzing how piracy relates to structures of power and processes of transformation’, and ‘piratical practices (…) [that] carry different meanings and have shifting implications in various contexts’ (5-6). Exemplifying this is the category of ontology, which the editors, quite convincingly, define in terms of power relations and practices. Once we agree with the editors that ‘piracy is neither homogeneous, not essential’ but rather ‘a label that certain actors slap on others for specific reasons’ (5), the concept of piracy seems to be a social construct that emerges within power relations and social practices. Hence, it is hard to see how one can distinguish between ‘ontology’, ‘politics’ and ‘practices’: indeed, many of the essays show how these are intimately interwoven with one another.

Based on their arguments against copyright as a means of privatizing common goods, a great number of the authors seem to be committed to open access. It is therefore surprising that many of them do not offer (easy) access to their papers, as this would have prevented the privatization of their – mostly publicly-funded – research. Overall, the quality of the essays differ sharply, with an occasional essay that could have benefited from additional language editing. Other chapters, however, such as the ones by Lie, Bodó, da Rimini and Marshall, argue lucidly and convincingly against the simplistic dichotomy of pirates and industry, and do a great job in exposing the ambiguities inherent to contemporary practices of piracy without downplaying their political potential.