Designing Politics
Excerpt from "Designing Politics," in Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006)
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Aware that small bits of code can undermine unwieldy systems, hackers of code and culture have breathed new life into political activism. 'Don't hate the media; become the media!' Jello Biafra advised a gathering of programmers.1 'Well, you may get an angry letter from your adopted organization,' advises the Reamweaver manual, 'but you can just say you were playing a funny surrealist game.'2 These two positions span a range of activity, from creative forms of political expression to new virulent forms of art, from serious politics to irreverent play--from what might be called 'political design' to 'executable art.' The public discourse on Internet activism to date has blurred this distinction by referring to all online political activity with the generic term hacktivism, a portmanteau word suggesting a 'hacker-activist'. Armed with an arsenal of powerful new tools, hacktivists are disrupting World Trade Organization conferences and uploading biotech blueprints for home-grown tissue cultures. Yet while political designers and hacktivist artists work with the same tools and often produce similar results, it's critical to distinguish their long-term social functions. Politics attempts to change the world directly and with force; art seeks to question it, often with humor or irreverence. If politics seeks to destroy its enemies, art seeks to ridicule them. When Patrick Ball, the open-source programmer-cum-human-rights activist, presented database evidence at the war-crimes trial of ex-Yugoslavia's leader Slobodan Milosevic, it was critical that his data be sound rather than surreal.3 On the other hand, when Reamweaver activists used spurious GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) invitations to champion commerce blatantly over democracy, it was equally critical that their masquerade be hyperbolic enough to raise eyebrows.
While this distinction between hacktivist design and hacktivist art is fundamental, it is not always obvious, either to the current generation of hackers or to the institutions and operating systems they hack. If Reamweaver's tactics are only part of a funny surrealist game, then why would the WTO try to shut it down? Apparently, some kinds of playful hacking can have serious, if indirect, consequences. This is because hacktivism wields a kind of power largely unavailable to artists before the advent of digital culture: it can be executed.
While execute is a term often used to describe the workings of computer programs, the same term also describes a biological antecedent in the immune system. When so-called helper T-cells, alerted to the presence of foreign agents, proliferate madly, disperse throughout the bloodstream, trigger the massive reproduction of so-called B-cells, and change the entire body environment in order to defend it against invasion, they are also executing code, albeit of a biological kind. 'To execute', in the world of code, means to turn the potential power of instructions into the actual power of behavior. 'To execute' means to enact the code. But there are many codes at play in both the immunological and social bodies. The immune system executes its code when it recognizes invasion of the body by foreign code (e.g. a virus); digital art executes its code when it recognizes invasion of the social body by codes that appear foreign or harmful, whether they are cultural, legal, or social.
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