RHIZOME DIGEST: 6.28.02

discussion

Posted June 27 2002 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 6.28.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: June 28, 2002 Content: +editor's note+ 1. Rachel Greene: new <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org">http://rhizome.org</a> +opportunity+ 2. Ann Le Pore: Open Call for Eyebeam MID Production Artists Applications 3. you: Now open to Entries; Art on the Net 2002 – "9.11" +work+ 4. marty@1010.co.uk: ap0202.01 release +feature+ 5. RSG: How We Made Our Own Carnivore + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 6.27.02 From: Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org) Subject: new <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org">http://rhizome.org</a> We all know a rhizome is not fixed or constant, and so we happily announce Rhizome.org's facelift and informational and technical realignment! Please check out <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.rhizome.org">http://www.rhizome.org</a>, and try posting to the Raw list via the web site, or reading Raw in real time in the Art + Text section (go to Fresh Texts). New features include a calendar of new media art events, an opportunities list, and a community directory. Rhizomers can now have more input to rhizome.org, like designating what should be archived (and how), and deciding which texts merit placement on the homepage. If interested in playing an active role with Rhizome's archive of texts about new media art (which is to say helping to create a history of new media art), email me at rachel@rhizome.org with Superuser in the subject line. Post your thoughts about the revamped site (via the web site or email to list@rhizome.org). And thank you Alex Galloway for building it! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 6.25.02 From: Ann Le Pore (aelepore@yahoo.com) Subject: Open Call for Eyebeam MID Production Artists Applications Open Call for Eyebeam MID Production Artists Applications Eyebeam's Moving Image Division announces an open call for applications to its annual 2002 - 2003 Production Artists Workshop. PAW provides vital production experience to recent graduates from film, video and computer art programs. Production Artists are provided with a salary, health benefits and unlimited access to the MID Studio during their one-year term. During their stay, these artists benefit from instruction from technical experts, critiques, and interaction with graphic specialists from MID's Advisory Council. They split their time between developing their own moving image work, and interacting with senior artists on larger projects, creating work for commissions and for the MID Studio Co-op. Production Artist work is presented publicly at the end of their one-year term. The division hires four artists each year for the program, concentrating in four different areas: technical direction, compositing/texture/lighting, modeling, and animation. To apply, please send a completed application form (link address), your resume, and a copy of your VHS or DVD portfolio reel by July 5th to: Melanie Crean Director of Moving Image 45 Main St. 12th floor Brooklyn, NY 11201 Prospective hires will interviewed in July for a late August or early September start date. Pease address any questions to information@mid.eyebeam.org. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ Limited-time offer! Subscribe to Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA),the leading electronic newsletter in its field, for $35 for 2002 and receive as a bonus free electronic access to the on-line versions of Leonardo and the Leonardo Music Journal. Subscribe now at: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html</a>. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 6.26.02 From: you (automony@ss.iij4u.or.jp) Subject: Now open to Entries; Art on the Net 2002 – "9.11" Art on the Net 2002 "9.11" Now Open to Entries Since 1995, Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo (MCMOGATK), has been sponsoring the world's first Internet art and web contents open competition, "Art on the Net," exploring the potentials of the Internet as a medium of art. Twenty countries were represented in the "Art on the Net 2001 – Post-Cagian Interactive Sounds," and the prizes went to Estonian and Netherlandish artists. In the past seven years since its first show, "Art on the Net 1995," over 600 entries have been submitted and artists from 40 countries have participated. Net art entries in each show reflected the cutting-edge technology of that time. We believe it has been presenting a completely new status of art created at the the crossroads of art history, technology and the society. The theme of the 8th "Art on the Net 2002" is "9.11." We again are open to any entries that are experimental, that have power to turn around the conventional concepts of art. This year, we'll take the system of election by mutual vote — for further details, please read our "introductions" on our website. Acceptance of the entries, jurying, and exibition are all done on the Internet. The deadline for the entry is September 20, 2002. For further information and application procedure, please visit our website: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://art.by.arena.ne.jp/">http://art.by.arena.ne.jp/</a> We look forward to your entries. you minowa Curator, MCMOGATK + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ **MUTE MAGAZINE NO. 24 OUT NOW** 'Knocking Holes in Fortress Europe', Florian Schneider on no-border activism in the EU; Brian Holmes on resistance to networked individualism; Alvaro de los Angeles on e-Valencia.org and Andrew Goffey on the politics of immunology. More @ <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com">http://www.metamute.com</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 6.21.02 From: marty@1010.co.uk (marty@1010.co.uk) Subject: ap0202.01 release ap0202.01 release longest day marks the release of glorious ap0202.01 beta . networked virtual machine application for self-enacting code [artificial paradise project ap01-02-03] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.1010.co.uk/app.html">http://www.1010.co.uk/app.html</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://1010.v2.nl">http://1010.v2.nl</a> server:: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://62.137.138.95/new.html">http://62.137.138.95/new.html</a> ap0202.01 presents environment/code options for specialised access to filesystems, local and global network data, midi data, video and audio device input, as well as the range of unix devices. both vector and pixel output are provided under SDL [using aalib, svga, fb or x] + full range of available devices (eg. /dev/speech). ap0202.01 compiles and runs under gnu/linux and is available under a GPL license. both a core cellular vm app and cellspace viewer can be downloaded. ap0202.01 is involved in the evolution of the ap performance system and ap.os. ap is concerned with the liberation of data encoding and generation from any given model or architecture (any fixed operating system in its widest sense) ap02 presents a promiscuous model of data generation and self-display, making use of a virtual machine architecture to develop and execute self modifying instruction sets across networked nodes. Reconfigurable code is interwoven with and determined by network and environmental data. Nodes expand virally through diverse machine environments as they actively seek for data across any network. The body of the work is code (material) and in work this code is made evident, visible. The only functionality of ap02 is in self display; showing its own changing, performative code as it runs. ap02 is expressed within two interwoven projects; as physical self display devices and as a freely available, distributed networked application. ap0202 makes use of current de-centralized p2p (peer to peer) inter-networking technologies to implement multiple self display devices virtually on any networked machine. The environment for the changing code is both the network and the machine on which the software is running. Cells of code promiscuously modify and are modified by data available to the machine; audio input and output, video, stored information and visual display. Code cells communicate, split and join with other code cells both locally and across the global network, working through a vast memory environment composed of both data and code. ap0202 explores new models of cellular coding of great use for future work, implementing flexible new instruction sets and questioning the separation of data and environment from code. ap0202 was developed as part of emare residency at v2_lab rotterdam with the assistance of artem baguinski, stock and anne nigten. details of ap0202 physical self-display devices can also be found at: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.1010.co.uk/devices.html">http://www.1010.co.uk/devices.html</a> [please note ap0202.01 is a highly beta release. comments/ feedback and bugs –> here pls] + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 6.20.02 From: RSG (rsg@rhizome.org) Subject: How We Made Our Own Carnivore "Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts." -Empire, Hardt & Negri Ethernet was invented at the University of Hawaii. Scientists there in the early 1970s faced a unique problem: How to network different campuses, each on different islands separated by water.[1] The solution was to use the free airwaves, to transmit data through the air, or "ether," using radio. There were no wires. Like a radio station, each node sent messages broadly over the sea to other islands. A protocol was developed to avoid collision between simultaneous communications. Ever since, Ethernet has been based on an open transmission model. The protocol translated well to wire-based networks too, and is now the most widely used local networking protocol in the world. Since Ethernet is based on an open broadcast model, it is trivial for listeners to make themselves "promiscuous" and eavesdrop on all communications, not simply those specifically addressed to them. This technique is called packet-sniffing and has been used by systems administrators and hackers alike for decades. Ethernet, sniffers, and hacking are at the heart of a public domain surveillance suite called Carnivore (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/carnivore">http://rhizome.org/carnivore</a>) developed by RSG and now used in a civilian context by many artists and scientists around the world. Hacking Today there are generally two things said about hackers. They are either terrorists or libertarians. Historically the word meant an amateur tinkerer, an autodictat who might try a dozen solutions to a problem before eking out success.[2] Aptitude and perseverance have always eclipsed rote knowledge in the hacking community. Hackers are the type of technophiles you like to have around in a pinch, for given enough time they generally can crack any problem (or at least find a suitable kludge). Thus, as Bruce Sterling writes, the term hacker "can signify the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest and deepest potential of computer systems."[3] Or as the glowing Steven Levy reminisces of the original MIT hackers of the early sixties, "they were such fascinating people. […] Beneath their often unimposing exteriors, they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists…and the ones who most clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool."[4] These types of hackers are freedom fighters, living by the dictum that data wants to be free.[5] Information should not be owned, and even if it is, non-invasive browsing of such information hurts no one. After all, hackers merely exploit preexisting holes made by clumsily constructed code.[6] And wouldn't the revelation of such holes actually improve data security for everyone involved? Yet after a combination of public technophobia and aggressive government legislation, the identity of the hacker changed in the US in the mid to late eighties from do-it-yourself hobbyist to digital outlaw.[7] Such legislation includes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 which made it a felony to break into federal computers. "On March 5, 1986," reported Knight Lightning of Phrack magazine, "the following seven phreaks were arrested in what has come to be known as the first computer crime `sting' operation. Captain Hacker \ Doctor Bob \ Lasertech \ The Adventurer [\] The Highwayman \ The Punisher \ The Warden."[8] "[O]n Tuesday, July 21, 1987," Knight Lightning continued, "[a]mong 30-40 others, Bill From RNOC, Eric NYC, Solid State, Oryan QUEST, Mark Gerardo, The Rebel, and Delta-Master have been busted by the United States Secret Service."[9] Many of these hackers were targeted due to their "elite" reputations, a status granted only to top hackers. Hackers were deeply discouraged by their newfound identity as outlaws, as exemplified in the famous 1986 hacker manifesto written by someone calling himself[10] The Mentor: "We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals."[11] Because of this semantic transformation, hackers today are commonly referred to as terrorists, nary-do-wells who break into computers for personal gain. So by the turn of the millennium, the term hacker had lost all of its original meaning. Now when people say hacker, they mean terrorist. Thus, the current debate on hackers is helplessly throttled by the discourse on contemporary liberalism: should we respect data as private property, or should we cultivate individual freedom and leave computer users well enough alone? Hacking is more sophisticated than that. It suggests a future type of cultural production, one that RSG seeks to embody in Carnivore. Collaboration Bruce Sterling writes that the late Twentieth Century is a moment of transformation from a modern control paradigm based on centralization and hierarchy to a postmodern one based on flexibility and horizontalization: "For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-down and centrally controlled. Highly trained "employees" would take on greater autonomy, being self-starting and self- motivating, moving from place to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity. "Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of people spontaneously knitting together across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying intense computer- aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they came."[12] >From Manuel Castells to Hakim Bey to Tom Peters this rhetoric has become commonplace. Sterling continues by claiming that both hacker groups and the law enforcement officials that track hackers follow this new paradigm: "they all look and act like `tiger teams' or `users' groups.' They are all electronic ad-hocracies leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need."[13] By "tiger teams" Sterling refers to the employee groups assembled by computer companies trying to test the security of their computer systems. Tiger teams, in essence, simulate potential hacker attacks, hoping to find and repair security holes. RSG is a type of tiger team. The term also alludes to the management style known as Toyotism originating in Japanese automotive production facilities. Within Toyotism, small pods of workers mass together to solve a specific problem. The pods are not linear and fixed like the more traditional assembly line, but rather are flexible and reconfigurable depending on whatever problem might be posed to them. Management expert Tom Peters notes that the most successful contemporary corporations use these types of tiger teams, eliminating traditional hierarchy within the organizational structure. Documenting the management consulting agency McKinsey & Company, Peters writes: "McKinsey is a huge company. Customers respect it. […] But there is no traditional hierarchy. There are no organizational charts. No job descriptions. No policy manuals. No rules about managing client engagements. […] And yet all these things are well understood-make no mistake, McKinsey is not out of control! […] McKinsey works. It's worked for over half a century."[14] As Sterling suggests, the hacker community also follows this organizational style. Hackers are autonomous agents that can mass together in small groups to attack specific problems. As the influential hacker magazine Phrack was keen to point out, "ANYONE can write for Phrack Inc. […] we do not discriminate against anyone for any reason."[15] Flexible and versatile, the hacker pod will often dissolve itself as quickly as it formed and disappear into the network. Thus, what Sterling and others are arguing is that whereby older resistive forces were engaged with "rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies," hackers embody a different organizational management style (one that might be called "protocological"). In this sense, while resistance during the modern age forms around rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic power structures, resistance during the postmodern age forms around the protocological control forces existent in networks. Coding In 1967 the artist Sol LeWitt outlined his definition of conceptual art: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."[16] LeWitt's perspective on conceptual art has important implications for code, for in his estimation conceptual art is nothing but a type of code for artmaking. LeWitt's art is an algorithmic process. The algorithm is prepared in advance, and then later executed by the artist (or another artist, for that matter). Code thus purports to be multidimensional. Code draws a line between what is material and what is active, in essence saying that writing (hardware) cannot do anything, but must be transformed into code (software) to be affective. Northrop Frye says a very similar thing about language when he writes that the process of literary critique essentially creates a meta text, outside of the original source material, that contains the critic's interpretations of that text.[17] In fact Kittler defines software itself as precisely that "logical abstraction" that exists in the negative space between people and the hardware they use.[18] How can code be so different than mere writing? The answer to this lies in the unique nature of computer code. It lies not in the fact that code is sub-linguistic, but rather that it is hyper-linguistic. Code is a language, but a very special kind of language. Code is the only language that is executable. As Kittler has pointed out, "[t]here exists no word in any ordinary language which does what it says. No description of a machine sets the machine into motion."[19] So code is the first language that actually does what it says-it is a machine for converting meaning into action.[20] Code has a semantic meaning, but it also has an enactment of meaning. Thus, while natural languages such as English or Latin only have a legible state, code has both a legible state and an executable state. In this way, code is the summation of language plus an executable meta-layer that encapsulates that language. Dreaming Fredric Jameson said somewhere that one of the most difficult things to do under contemporary capitalism is to envision utopia. This is precisely why dreaming is important. Deciding (and often struggling) for what is possible is the first step for a utopian vision based in our desires, based in what we want. Pierre Lévy is one writer who has been able to articulate eloquently the possibility of utopia in the cyberspace of digital computers.[21] "Cyberspace," he writes, "brings with it methods of perception, feeling, remembering, working, of playing and being together. […] The development of cyberspace […] is one of the principle aesthetic and political challenges of the coming century."[22] Lévy's visionary tone is exactly what Jameson warns is lacking in much contemporary discourse. The relationship between utopia and possibility is a close one. It is necessary to know what one wants, to know what is possible to want, before a true utopia may be envisioned. Once of the most important signs of this utopian instinct is the hacking community's anti-commercial bent. Software products have long been developed and released into the public domain, with seemingly no profit motive on the side of the authors, simply for the higher glory of the code itself. "Spacewar was not sold," Steven Levy writes, referring to the early video game developed by several early computer enthusiasts at MIT. "Like any other program, it was placed in the drawer for anyone to access, look at, and rewrite as they saw fit."[23] The limits of personal behavior become the limits of possibility to the hacker. Thus, it is obvious to the hacker that one's personal investment in a specific piece of code can do nothing but hinder that code's overall development. "Sharing of software […] is as old as computers," writes free software guru Richard Stallman, "just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking."[24] Code does not reach its apotheosis for people, but exists within its own dimension of perfection. The hacker feels obligated to remove all impediments, all inefficiencies that might stunt this quasi- aesthetic growth. "In its basic assembly structure," writes Andrew Ross, "information technology involves processing, copying, replication, and simulation, and therefore does not recognize the concept of private information property."[25] Commercial ownership of software is the primary impediment hated by all hackers because it means that code is limited-limited by intellectual property laws, limited by the profit motive, limited by corporate "lamers." However, greater than this anti-commercialism is a pro-protocolism. Protocol, by definition, is "open source," the term given to a technology that makes public the source code used in its creation. That is to say, protocol is nothing but an elaborate instruction list of how a given technology should work, from the inside out, from the top to the bottom, as exemplified in the RFCs, or "Request For Comments" documents. While many closed source technologies may appear to be protocological due to their often monopolistic position in the market place, a true protocol cannot be closed or proprietary. It must be paraded into full view before all, and agreed to by all. It benefits over time through its own technological development in the public sphere. It must exist as pure, transparent code (or a pure description of how to fashion code). If technology is proprietary it ceases to be protocological. This brings us back to Carnivore, and the desire to release a public domain version of a notorious surveillance tool thus far only available to government operatives. The RSG Carnivore levels the playing field, recasting art and culture as a scene of multilateral conflict rather than unilateral domination. It opens the system up for collaboration within and between client artists. It uses code to engulf and modify the original FBI apparatus. Carnivore Personal Edition On October 1, 2001, three weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the Radical Software Group (RSG) announced the release of Carnivore, a public domain riff on the notorious FBI software called DCS1000 (which is commonly referred to by its nickname "Carnivore"). While the FBI software had already been in existence for some time, and likewise RSG had been developing it's version of the software since January 2001, 9/11 brought on a crush of new surveillance activity. Rumors surfaced that the FBI was installing Carnivore willy-nilly on broad civilian networks like Hotmail and AOL with the expressed purpose of intercepting terror-related communication. As Wired News reported on September 12, 2001, "An administrator at one major network service provider said that FBI agents showed up at his workplace on [September 11] `with a couple of Carnivores, requesting permission to place them in our core.'" Officials at Hotmail were reported to have been "cooperating" with FBI monitoring requests. Inspired by this activity, the RSG's Carnivore sought to pick up where the FBI left off, to bring this technology into the hands of the general public for greater surveillance saturation within culture. The first RSG Carnivore ran on Linux. An open source schematic was posted on the net for others to build their own boxes. New functionality was added to improve on the FBI-developed technology (which in reality was a dumbed-down version of tools systems administrators had been using for years). An initial core (Alex Galloway, Mark Napier, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, and others) began to build interpretive interfaces. A testing venue was selected: the private offices of Rhizome.org at 115 Mercer Street in New York City, only 30 blocks from Ground Zero. This space was out-of-bounds to the FBI, but open to RSG. The initial testing proved successful and led to more field-testing at the Princeton Art Museum (where Carnivore was quarantined like a virus into its own subnet) and the New Museum in New York. During the weekend of February 1st 2002, Carnivore was used at Eyebeam to supervise the hacktivists protesting the gathering of the World Economic Forum. Sensing the market limitations of a Linux-only software product, RSG released Carnivore Personal Edition (PE) for Windows on April 6, 2002. CarnivorePE brought a new distributed architecture to the Carnivore initiative by giving any PC user the ability to analyze and diagnose the traffic from his or her own network. Any artist or scientist could now use CarnivorePE as a surveillance engine to power his or her own interpretive "Client." Soon Carnivore Clients were converting network traffic to sound, animation, and even 3D worlds, distributing the technology across the network. The prospect of reverse-engineering the original FBI software was uninteresting to RSG. Crippled by legal and ethical limitations, the FBI software needed improvement not emulation. Thus CarnivorePE features exciting new functionality including artist-made diagnosic clients, remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software license. Reverse-engineering is not necessarily a simple mimetic process, but a mental upgrade as well. RSG has no desire to copy the FBI software and its many shortcomings. Instead, RSG longs to inject progressive politics back into a fundamentally destabilizing and transformative technology, packet sniffing. Our goal is to invent a new use for data surveillance that breaks out of the hero/terrorist dilemma and instead dreams about a future use for networked data. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/carnivore">http://rhizome.org/carnivore</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/RSG">http://rhizome.org/RSG</a> ———————————————————– [1] The system at the University of Hawaii was called ALOHAnet and was created by Norman Abramson. Later the technology was further developed by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC and dubbed "Ethernet." [2] Robert Graham traces the etymology of the term to the sport of golf: "The word `hacker' started out in the 14th century to mean somebody who was inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity (such as a golf hacker). In the 1970s, the word `hacker' was used by computer enthusiasts to refer to themselves. This reflected the way enthusiasts approach computers: they eschew formal education and play around with the computer until they can get it to work. (In much the same way, a golf hacker keeps hacking at the golf ball until they get it in the hole)" (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/hacking-dict.html">http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/hacking-dict.html</a>). [3] Bruce Sterling The Hacker Crackdown (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 51. See also Hugo Cornwall's Hacker's Handbook (London: Century, 1988), which characterizes the hacker as a benign explorer. Cornwall's position highlights the differing attitudes between the US and Europe, where hacking is much less criminalized and in many cases prima facie legal. [4] Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), p. ix. [5] This slogan is attributed to Stewart Brand, who wrote that "[o]n the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." See Whole Earth Review, May 1985, p. 49. [6] Many hackers believe that commercial software products are less carefully crafted and therefore more prone to exploits. Perhaps the most infamous example of such an exploit, one which critiques software's growing commercialization, is the "BackOrifice" software application created by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow. A satire of Microsoft's "Back Office" software suite, BackOrifice acts as a Trojan Horse to allow remote access to personal computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system. [7] For an excellent historical analysis of this transformation see Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. Andrew Ross explains this transformation by citing, as do Sterling and others, the increase of computer viruses in the late eighties, especially "the viral attack engineered in November 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris on the national network system Internet. [.] While it caused little in the way of data damage [.], the ramifications of the Internet virus have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday `computer culture.'" See Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 75. [8] Knight Lightning, "Shadows Of A Future Past," Phrack, vol. 2, no. 21, file 3. [9] Knight Lightning, "The Judas Contract," Phrack, vol. 2, no. 22, file 3. [10] While many hackers use gender neutral pseudonyms, the online magazine Phrack, with which The Mentor was associated, was characterized by its distinctly male staff and readership. For a sociological explanation of the gender imbalance within the hacking community, see Paul Taylor, Hackers: Crime in the digital sublime (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 32-42. [11] The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker," Phrack, vol. 1, no. 7, file 3. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/manifesto.html">http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/manifesto.html</a> [12] Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, p. 184. [13] Ibid. [14] Tom Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (New York: Knopf, 1992), pp. 143-144. An older, more decentralized (rather than distributed) style of organizational management is epitomized by Peter Drucker's classic analysis of General Motors in the thirties and forties. He writes that "General Motors considers decentralization a basic and universally valid concept of order." See Peter Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993), p. 47. [15] "Introduction," Phrack, v. 1, no. 9, phile [sic] 1. [16] Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," in Alberro, et al., eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 12. Thanks to Mark Tribe for bring this passage to my attention. [17] See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957). See also Fredric Jameson's engagement with this same subject in "From Metaphor to Allegory" in Cynthia Davidson, Ed., Anything (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). [18] Friedrich Kittler, "On the Implementation of Knowledge-Toward a Theory of Hardware," nettime (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199902/msg00038.html">http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199902/msg00038.html</a>). [19] Kittler, "On the Implementation of Knowledge." [20] For an interesting commentary on the aesthetic dimensions of this fact see Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward's "The Aesthetics of Generative Code" (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://sidestream.org/papers/aesthetics/">http://sidestream.org/papers/aesthetics/</a>). [21] Another is the delightfully schizophrenic Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext. See Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Redmond, WA: Tempus/Microsoft, 1987). [22] Pierre Lévy, L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1994), p. 120, translation mine. [23] Levy, Hackers, p. 53. In his 1972 Rolling Stone article on the game, Steward Brand went so far as to publish Alan Kay's source code for Spacewar right along side his own article, a practice rarely seen in popular publications. See Brand, "SPACEWAR," p. 58. [24] Richard Stallman, "The GNU Project," available online at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html">http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html</a> and in Chris Dibona (Editor), et al, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1999). [25] Ross, Strange Weather, p. 80. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means. We accept online credit card contributions at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support">http://rhizome.org/support</a>. Checks may be sent to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012. Or call us at +1.212.625.3191. Contributors are gratefully acknowledged on our web site at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3">http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3</a>. 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