into restricting technology and business models, im-
posed by what Wark would call the vectorialists. To
control these technologies, vectors and codes, is to
control how users behave.hacktivism and the lines of control
I have mentioned before that hacking is breaking
control – liberating imagination, skills and action
spaces through action, colouring outside the lines
and escaping the paved routes of top-down limita-
tions of manoeuvre. To use a terminology by De-
leuze, opposition and dialectic struggle was the
counterculture of a society of discipline, now hack-
ing is modification in a society of control (Deleuze
1995). Deluze elaborates more on this in his book
Two Regimes of Madness (2006a), where he means
thatControl is not discipline. You do not confine people
with a highway. But by making highways, you multi-
ply the means of control. I am not saying this is the
only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely
and ‘freely’ without being confined while being per-
fectly controlled. That is our future. (Deleuze 2006a:
322)The hack is breaking into the flows passing through
the channels. Not blocking the flow, nor choking the
power, but instead drawing new lines, reconnecting
the highways, redirecting inherent energies, liberat-
ing and intensifying flows.
Very similar to this type of hack are also the inter-
ventionist tactics encouraged by the art and activist
group Center for Tactical Magic. Their projects are
multilayered and very diverse, but in an article, “Tac-
tics without Tears”, they offer a framework for crea-
tive engagement. Their formula is very close to the
ideas we have spotted throughout this chapter, yet
their practice is very physical. They mean an engage-
ment is characterized by:
1) a thorough analysis of existing forces
2) an attachment to one existing force
3) an active engagement within the dominant
sphere of activity
4) specific, material effects (Gach & Paglen
2003)
What they propose is very similar to the tuning,
bending and “riding” on lines and on existing forces
to break control. This aspect of breaking control
might seem naïve but also has an emancipatory bear-It is possible to see these tendencies manifested as
the production cycles for products become shorter
and copies appear on the market at the same time as
the originals. To protect a brand more and more
time is spent in the courts, but in the rhetoric of big
lobby organizations pushing the politicians to take
action, this is done in the name of the “small crea-
tors”, namely the hackers themselves. The control of
immaterial rights and intellectual property is in-
creasing the time span for copyrights for protecting
vectorial investments, market shares and territories.
The patents and copyrights all end up, not in the
hands of their creators, but of the owners of the
means to realizing the value of the abstraction – the
vectorialists.
To further the arguments of Wark, I propose a read-
ing of hacking as an act not only producing abstrac-
tion and processing information, but as the simulta-
neous practice of “liberating” this information. This
is done not only by hacking into a locked system or
intellectual property, but insisting on sharing their
hacking work as a common property for everyone to
explore and build further on – as in the hacker ethic,
the culture of the hacking class in the process of be-
ing taken from them. As this approach intersects
with activism it becomes what I call hacktivism.
Hacktivism is in this sense more than a deconstruc-
tion-recreation process, a modification of copies, or
an act of opposition. Hacktivism is a conscious
opening of a system, revealing its inner energies un-
der new light to modulate or amplify them and make
them accessible to the public for further develop-
ment and improvement – a hacking culture in itself.
Hacktivism is in this way also the renegotiation and
reprogramming of communication and production
protocols, as usually these sub-systems, micro-for-
mats, platforms and translation tools are controlled
by the vectorialists. Often these formats severely lim-
its the possibility for modification by the users, as in
the example of YouTube and MySpace where a sim-
ple format provides simple handling in the attention
economy, but when sold the economic reward built
by the community goes only to the protocol admin-
istrators.
As also argued by the technology critic Howard
Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs (2002), what we
see today is a battle over the broadcast regime, of
who will control future production of communica-
tion and its codes. Users try to avoid being locked