Shopdropping is also a crafty, advanced and technical path as it starts to address
the rituals of shopping. Activists reverse engineer commodities and reinsert them
into the commodity system; updated, twisted, or mutated. These activities can
comment a range of topics, from commodity critique of economic regimes to pro-
posing alternative systems of retail and social change (Jahn 2005).
A famous example are the actions of BLO, the Barbie Liberation Organization,
where activists were given 8000 USD from a military veteran group which they
used to buy talking toys, modify them, and then reinsert back to the shelves at Toys
R’ Us just before Christmas shopping (rtmark). The modification was simple, no
more than switching the voice chips in talking Barbie and GI Joe toys. Each modi-
fied doll was equipped with a sticker urging recipients to “Call your local TV news”
(Harold 2007: 81). The Barbie dolls, who once spoke sentences like “Math is hard!”,
“I love shopping!”, and “Will we ever have enough clothes?”, were after the replace-
ment with G.I. Joe chips reciting his words: “Dead men tell no lies!”, “Eat lead,
Cobra!”, or “Vengeance is mine!”
The action, which also reached the headlines of TV news, reversed gender-stereo-
typed messages and highlighted their unrealistic and perhaps dangerous gender
clichés, and in this way “revealing and correcting” the dolls (Hardold 2007: 80). Yet,
the action was not aimed at consumerism itself, but at the messages passing through
its system. It was actually good for business, as a BLO member jokingly told ra-
dio:
Nobody wants to return [the dolls] ... We think that our program of putting them
back on the shelves [benefits] everyone: The storekeepers make money twice, we stim-
ulate the economy, the consumer gets a better product and our message gets heard.
(Harold 2007: 80)Later the toy-surgery instructions were also published on the Internet to facilitate
for others to create future interventions concerning reverse-toy-surgery.
So far the examples have been very practical and often underscored with a prank
that by many can be easily dismissed as trivial in their political ambition. However,
hacking as a practice engages action spaces that are indeed very political and deep-
ly contended, not only from property managers, global brands, or toy-producers.
These action spaces form the basic modes of production within the creation of
immaterial property. A growing group of workers in today’s society have as their
main occupation the production and processing of information. It can be said that
a new class of intellectual property creators is arising, both similar and different to
the former ones: a class of hackers. Their contemporary class struggle is what we
see expressed through the abstract machine of hacktivism.
hacking politics
As mentioned in the introduction the neologism of hackitivism was usually con-
nected to computer-related activities of political protest, but as argued we can see
very similar practices and tactics in other fields. We can also see how the activity of
hacking also has come to represent another form of radical antagonism between
class interests and a scene for political struggle, as discussed by media theorist Mc-
Kenzie Wark (2004).
Wark suggests that hacking is a new class struggle, succeeding the industrial one
described by Marx. In his book, A Hacker Manifesto (2004), he investigates this
Marc Jacob’s Härjedalen scarf
was a pure rip off, but one made by the
big auteur and fashion designer. The
original scarf was created by Gösta
Olofsson, a local petrol station owner
in Swedish Härjedalen region in the
1950s. After the fraud was revealed
Marc Jacobs paid compensation.
However, perhaps Olofsson should react
as Coco Chanel when she saw her de-
signs copied; she found that “piracy was
the flattering result of success” (Madsen
1991: 186)Balenciaga vs Steve Madden.
Many times copies are not only made by a
cheap no-name brand or hidden pirate fac-
tories, but by established brands, however
operating in another customer segment. The
borders are hard to draw between inspira-
tion and imitation. But neither inspiration
or imitation is a hack. Here the code is not
mapped or shared; the copy is just a copy.