Deleuze and Guattari’s term “machine” should not be understood in the limited
modern sense of being purely a technical device. Even if they use the engineer Franz
Reuleaux’s definition from the nineteenth century that a machine is “a combination
of resistant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human control to
transmit motion and perform work.” (Patton 2000: 2) Deleuze and Guattari’s ma-
chine is not a production of something or created by a person, but is the machine
that has a speciality or a functionality, that produces for the sake of production, and
constructs new wholes in its own way. I use the concept of abstract machine as I am
interested in how certain processes in our world seems to build new systems accord-
ing to certain logics or diagrams. Hacktivism is a special process of becoming and it
interacts, assembles and shares the world according to the workings of its abstract
machine, and this machine runs across the lines drawn through this thesis.
A machine in this sense can be the chemical processes in nature that trigger the
formation of matter or life, but it is also gravitational forces in space that affect the
movement of planets or the explosions of stars. It can be human processes that
resonate with natural processes. A theory of say Nietzsche, is an abstract machine,
it is a specific mode of engagement, of assembling the world. To “take up” his theo-
ries is to start engaging the world through the “Nietzsche machine’s” functions and
structure-generating processes, that is not through Nietzsche himself but through
the machine associated with his name.
However, as the theoretician Gerald Raunig (2008) notes, the term machine could
also be understood from the Classical Hellenic double meaning of the term. In one
sense for the Greeks a machine was a “war machine”, which included catapults and
wagons as well as cunning inventions such as the Trojan Horse. However they also
used the word to define the “theatre machine”, as in the “deus ex machina”, some-
thing or someone such as a God that comes from outside the main plot to solve an
intractable and deadlocked problem. This machine is logic from outside the plot,
yet existing inside the scene, and as such it comes to represent a god-like, non-
physical mode of becoming. This means that the machine is both something that
is virtually mechanical and immaterial, both a form of logic, specialized in func-
tion, and a form of trick. The machine itself guides processes of becoming: the
becoming of cunning inventions or the becoming that solves riddles.
All machines interoperate with other machines and do operate in isolation, but
through each other. Like how many separate sections of the DNA interact to guide
the organic processes of cell reproduction independently without a specific pur-
pose yet with a highly refined end product. Literary theorist Claire Colebrook de-
scribes this connection between abstract machines like thus,Think of a bicycle, which obviously has no ‘end’ or intention. It only works when it is
connected with another ‘machine’ such as the human body; and the production of
these two machines can only be achieved through connection. [...] But we could
imagine different connections producing different machines. The cycle becomes an
art object when placed in a gallery; the human body becomes an ‘artist’ when con-
nected with a paintbrush. (Colebrook 2002: 56)This means that the mode of being produced by an abstract machine changes ac-
cording to the context with the other machines with which it interoperates. In this
thesis we will follow the abstract machine of hacktivism as it engages with various
other different machines, and each chapter will present the machine in a specific
setting. These settings allow us to follow the same “mindset” and the same hacktiv-The Mechanic Alphabet by
Christopher Polhem consisted
of one model or “letter” for every
mechanical function, to visualize how
mechanical motion can be transferred
between parts in a machine. The
mechanical alphabet was part of his
Laboratorium Mechanicum, estab-
lished 1697.