Yet in this sense lock-picking also reveals a central limitation of hacking. Hacking
is the ingenious mastering of a system, the curiosity as to borders and obstacles,
and the training of skills of how to override them. But it sometimes also reveals a
certain disinterest for what is behind the lock or border. It is challenging the con-
trol and power system of the closed system, but it often lacks the interest to pur-
posefully build an alternative.
This is where I mean we meet the hacktivist approach, when the act of hacking
meets an activist curiosity and will for social change. Of course this distinction is
hard to draw, but I will try to give a first example where I mean hacking, curiosity
and activism meets to form a basic form of the abstract machine of hacktivism.
This is in the practice of urban exploration.
Urban Exploration, or Urbex, is the practice of spatial hacking and of curious ex-
ploration of the hidden everyday. The community’s motto, “Leave nothing but
footprints, take nothing but pictures” comes from the American environmentalist
“Sierra Club”, but is applied to urban conditions. Their explorations are the urban
contemporary answer to Livingstone’s journeys into the empty spots on the Afri-
can map, but instead of going to foreign continents it is about exploring the cata-
combs, sewer systems and deserted subway tunnels, hidden in our everyday urban
environment. Urbex is about seeking out, accessing and documenting built struc-
tures and spaces normally hidden from sight, such as drains, utility tunnels, con-
struction sites, and abandoned buildings. It is not about getting access to closed
entertainment events or playing in forbidden areas, but purposefully and system-
atically tour the unseen everyplace where curiosity is triggered by unknown hu-
man-built structures. It is a form of spatial hacking, accessing passages and places
not intended by the administrators but where hackers boldly go. As Ninjalicious
(2005), founder or urbex zine Infiltration mentions, it is also about breaking pat-
terns of behaviour:
For too many people, urban living consists of mindless travel between work, shopping
and home, obvious to the countless wonders a city offers. Most people think the only
worth looking at in our cities and towns are those safe and sanitized attractions that
require an admission fee. ... Rather than passively consuming entertainment, urban
explorers strive to actively create authentic experiences, by making discoveries that
allow them to participate in the secret workings of cities and structures, and to appre-
ciate fantastic, obscure spaces that might otherwise go completely neglected. (3)Urbex practitioners remake the maps to tell us more accurately what exists in our
proximity. It is a practice often connected to danger, as most of the areas are rarely
visited without administrator access or knowledge. Disbanded dark areas are not
full of traps but require cautious visitors. Ninjalicious stresses the need for precau-
tion as well as preparedness, but still means that urbex is not a harmful adventure
even if it often involves danger:
While it’s true that danger isn’t the ultimate evil, this hobby isn’t about the quest for
danger so much as a willingness to accept certain levels of danger in the course of the
quest to discover and document forgotten or neglected realms. You know, like Indiana
Jones or Lara Croft, but without the stealing. (7)This might sound like the explorers are the paradoxical heroes of our time, even
though they break into forbidden areas, but they are indeed guided by a certain
ethic. This ethic of urbex go beyond the “do not enter” sign and thus the breaking
of the law, but that does not mean explorers are the kind of people who as soon as
Lock picking is the act of unlocking a
lock by analysing and manipulating the inner
components of the lock device, without the
original key and without afflicting violence on
the lock mechanism. It is a practice that re-
quires refined craftsmanship while simultane-
ously questions the right of accessibility. It has
lately become a popular interest with specially
arranged championships.