Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
hacker has entered, through means such as Cyberpunk and Techno
music, the cultural mainstream as a model of more general engage-
ment with a world dominated by computing technology. Artists
engage in 'reality hacking', critics of 'hacking culture' or even of
'hacking texts'. Different kinds of hacker culture have emerged
across the globe, from Northern and Eastern Europe to Japan. The
hacker has become a recognizable, and self-explanatory staple figure
in film, TV and other mass media. Hacking and the models of
practice it offers connects with theories such as those of Derrida,
described above, as well as with other theoretical viewpoints on life
in post-industrial technologized capitalism, which offer alternative
possibilities for thought and action.
Hacking as a form of resistance reflected the autonomous nature
of other activist phenomena of the '
s. These included the
nomadic rave culture that emerged in Britain in the '
80
s and '
90
s, involving
groups of DJs such as Spiral Tribe, which operated alongside
ecological and other activism, often involving action against road
building and other environmentally problematic activities or resis-
tance to unpopular Government measures, such as the Poll Tax.
Such popular forms of resistance were largely repressed through
legal means - accompanied by heavy-handed police involvement -
by the Thatcher government. Nomadism as a response to the repres-
sive context of late capitalism was articulated in the United States
by Hakim Bey, whose notion of 'Temporary Autonomous Zones'
is both a highly influential, and widely criticised articulation of
resistance to contemporary technoculture. Hakim Bey is the pseu-
donym of Peter Lamborn Wilson, who spent a decade travelling
around the Islamic world, in particular Iran, studying the mystical
side of Islam, in particular Sufism. He published a number of works
about Sufi mysticism, translations of Persian poetry, and an account
of eighteenth century pirates' utopias. He is also on the board of
Autonomedia, a small alternative publishing company responsible
for cheap editions of alternative theory and literature. In
80
1985
, as
