Information Technology Reference
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parasitic dependence on ritual.
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Benjamin's polemical essay in
which these ideas were expressed was written as a response to the
dangers of Fascism and Nazism, and indeed capitalism, and to their
subjugation of the masses by the ritual and spectacular use of mass
media. To some extent those dangers remain with us, despite the
defeat of Fascism and other forms of overt totalitarianism. The
hacker, in turn, invokes another idea of Benjamin's. In his 'Theses on
the Philosophy of History' he tells a story of how, during the French
Revolution, on the first evening of fighting, clocks in towers were
simultaneously fired upon, so as to stop the day, and symbolize the
revolutionary exploding of the continuum of history.
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In this he
differentiates between two different kinds of time, clock time, which
for him is also the empty homogenous time of catastrophic progress,
with revolutionary time, 'charged with the time of the now'.
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It is
through the optic of Benjamin's thought that the work of those
resisting the apparently inevitable progress of wired capitalism can
be understood. Clocks, such as those in Benjamin's story, are not just
symbols of the concept of progressive time he abhorred, but the
means by which the organization of time necessary to the operations
of capitalism has been realized. In place of such clocks, we have
computers organising not just working time, but every aspect of
life under late capitalism. The hacker who, for whatever reason,
disrupts the operation of a computer system or network is a modern
counterpart to Benjamin's sniper. What may at first seem to be a
pointless act of sabotage is in fact a profoundly utopian gesture.
It proposes the possibility of alternative ways of organizing time
and space and other kinds of community than that relentlessly
imposed upon the world by technologized capital.
