Placing Space in Cyberspace: Consequences of Drawing
Private Property in Cyberspace
An
Italian Experience
Abstract
Even if the term “cyberspace” is nowadays unquestioned, the
use is not a innocent one. “Cyberspace”, in fact, implies
the notion of “space” where there is not a physical
spatiality. That choice stresses that a battle about
property (in the Romanist sense of the term) was also going
on in the Internet.
My paper will tell the story of a privatization of a public
space, and it is grounded on the assumption that private
property produces more surplus for the owner than public
land, and this feature pushes people to set up private
properties instead of commons. Similarly, the space
metaphor in cyberspace sped up during the late 1980s and
first 1990s, i.e. when it was evident to everyone that the
Internet was becoming the new Promise Land of economy.
At the very same time, and as a legitimization of
privatization of the public Internet, hackers’ phenomenon
increased and media depicted them as dangerous.
While hackers are nowadays various and heterogeneous, the
main argument that drives their claims is the freedom of
the Internet. This argument is often used and abused by
different political parties, with the result of a
paradoxical enclosure instead of an opening of hackers’
groups. This paper will explore this problem through the
participant observation to a Hacker Meeting held in Pisa
(Italy) from September 28th to 30th, 2007.
1. Public space in Cyberspace
1.2 The personal computer, or the democratization of a
powerful tool
During the end of 1970s the computer
market changed its nature, that was focused on big
corporations and Universities, targeting laymen and small
businesses. Differently from the 1950s and 1960s, when
mainframes were so big and expensive that the could be
bought just by Universities and Governments, the foundation
and sharp growth of enterprises such as Apple first, and
Microsoft later shows us in which direction the computer
industry was going: everybody wanted a computer and
actually needed it, to simplify tasks and be more
productive (see adv of Alligator).
In 1983 another important event occurred: Apple LISA (Local
Integrated Software Architecture) was released. It was the
first home (or ‘personal’, as advertisements started
readily to call it) computer (actually, Xerox Star was the
first, in 1981, but it cost $17,000, so we cannot consider
it properly a home computer) with a GUI (Graphical User
Interface). The logic procedure that the machine performed
to run programs was hidden by a graphical interface that
made the interaction with the machine easier and simpler. A
mouse, a device that moves a cursor on the screen, allowed
a perfect interaction between the space in the computer and
the user’s physical space. In 1984 the revolution became
cheap and popular with Apple Macintosh. The use of the
electronic landscape as a space was completed; the metaphor
of cyberspace as a space was accomplished using the
metaphor of the desktop as main workflow for users
(see adv
of Desktop). It was a strong change, and a
conscious one: in a Macintosh manual the easiness of new
computers is revealed and explained:
The secret of
the easiness in which Macintosh works is neither the
bit/map monitor, neither the mouse device: it is the
metaphor. Instead of creating an alien environment in which
the users have to memorize scores of commands in order to
allow the computer to work, Macintosh programmers created a
digital version on the screen of everyday use objects:
desktop, buttons, volume knob, etc. (Norton and Heid 1992,
13) (personal translation from Italian)
Since this
moment, computers was becoming to be perceived more and
more as a domestic appliance. The target for computer
industries shift from programmers to users, and the
easiness and usefulness of computers to manage the everyday
affairs, from the family’s expenses to the office’s
documents, the key that opened the wallet of millions of
Americans during the ‘80s.
1.2 The Internet as new market place
In this scenario, where many computers
were diffused in lot of many offices and houses of USA and
everybody was starting to use a computer also for the most
simple tasks, it began to be clear to everybody that it was
no longer necessary be a programmer in order to use a
computer. And that the newborn Internet could be the new
market place to conquer. An instrument that deliver
directly in the house of the users everything they desire,
and through which they can see, get informed, and
especially buy.
This shift implied that the “community of computing” no
longer consisted only of artisans and experts creating
their own programs and sharing them with people with
similar passions and needs, as hackers used to do since the
very beginning of the computing (Graham 2004, Gunkel 2001,
Mosco 2004, Taylor 1999). Rather, a new class of people was
created: the users. Users were the new target of a growing
market. Normal people and (not more geek) were those to
which the massive ads were addressed to. And in order to
get more people using computers, it was absolutely
necessary to make computers easy to use. The use of the
graphical interface and the spreading of the mouse was a
good strategy, and it was the concept that most of the ads
were pointing at during the all 1990s (see ads on
Mouse
and Manuals).
The new coming users have attitude to consume and to see
the Internet as a huge mall in which go and spend time in.
In those years lot of chatting programs, interactive
e-shops, and credit-card payment systems were strongly
developed.
But the distance from the program language and final users
was increasing slowly, and the metaphor of space was
increasing its power too. Cyberspace was slowly be compared
to other spaces, as a new promised land to visit, colonize,
and conquest. Step by step, the common practice to use the
Net to share applications, information, programs, and files
began to be more difficult and controversial. The private
property – with the related rights – was preparing its
entrance in the Cyberspace.
1.3 Hackers as continuers of first cyberspace
As we know, since the English enclosure
of XV and XVI centuries,
everywhere there is space there is private property, the ,
there is private property. And since the property of
intellectual production used to produce money, the
protection of it became a priority, as the copyright
history teaches us.
But, regarding Cyberspace, at the beginning of the
programming nobody was working on computer programs as
exclusive property, and their characteristic of collective,
team work was a clear statement in the first computer
industries.
During the interview that Mr. Stallman released to me the
past 22nd
December, he was pointing out
that “we had no passwords in our computer at the campus,
because it made no sense to close our programs: the more
that we were, the best the program was developing”. No
passwords, no closures, no encrypted code: the more the
code was shared, the better this was for the development of
computers and of the community related to them. That is the
spirit with which hackers started to work together, and
continued to do also when the GUI created that strong
separation between the laymen and the programmers.
Something was changing, evidently, but hackers’ exploration
of the cyberspace was still going on as in the past “golden
age” of the cyberspace, when to explore and be curious was
an appreciated and skilful characteristic of
programmers (see Mitnick’s
interview).
This attitude of hackers to keep the cyberspace a place in
which freedom could still be a value got a strong supporter
in Richard Stallman, that with the Free Software Foundation
since 1984 is fighting to maintaining the code of
application free, in order to keep the distance between
users and programmers as small as possible or at
least potentially – wherever some users want to begin to
program – reduced to zero. This is extremely important for
Stallman also nowadays: there is no reason to use programs
that tied you and your enterprises to the willing of
another company where you can use an reliable, extremely
powerful, and flexible software instead. The move of
software house is to keep the power of programming out away
from people, according to the analysis of a hacker of Chaos
Computer Club of Berlin (see this piece of
interview)
and Stallman (see this
piece of interview)
that are both keeping the
power of doing things in the hands of the majority of
people.
2. Hackers attitude in Italy: reclaimingetaking skills and
freeing freedom from induced-necessities
In Italy there were hackers since the
very beginning, as almost everywhere in the developed
countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Lot ofMany
communities of programmers were flourishing all around the
Italy and, during the 1990s, the use of the Internet began
to be diffused also there.
The power of the tool was quite soon realized by movements.
There was a strong grassroots tool to easily connect and
share ideals, ideas, strategies, and political views. Quite
soon, since the first half of 1990s, the political
movements started to massively use the Internet to
communicate with each other and to set up their campaigns.
Besides the communities of programmers started to flourish
a high number of communities that used to take the Internet
and the programming as a tool to of free the minds and
ideas of people, as a tool for propaganda.
Of course we can find this type of movements almost
everywhere: “Electronic Civil Disobedience” and
“Hacktivism” are not Italian expressions to define an
Italian phenomenon, so there is no originality in this
expression. But the Italian peculiarity is that those
movements were since the beginning co-opted from by the
political scenario. In a sort of monopoly of dissent, there
was little room for those hackers that wanted to be part of
an hacker community without being also automatically part
of a movement of disagreement and civil disobedience. The
hacker Pier, that I interviewed the past February, told me
that the group of hacking that he and a bounce of him
friend started in Cosenza, were forced to stop their
activity because they refused to take their meeting in the
local committee of a political party, instead of in a
private rented room.
The risk that since the very beginning the hackers
perceived was that in that way the possibility to be
seening as criminal and a threat for the civil society was
already high and growingintensifying. Instead of give
freedom of programming, they were risking of being the
cause of the repression. And in some occasion, that strong
connection with the groups of dissent provoked a failure
and destruction of some local hackers’ clubs, as in
Cosenza, where they were dispersed. Local groups that
transferred all their activity on the Net, saving and
empowering in this way lot of connections, but that were
losing the human experience of meeting together.
By the way, to hack is a term definitively under stress and
pressure everywhere: from the original meaning, it started
to mean to program skilfully and then to do things with
cleverness and humour, and nowadays it could be applied to
so different fields: art, crimes, furniture, literature, bikes (this and this).
Mr. Stallman himself points out how to hack have has to be
intended as “a way to do difficult things playfully” (see this interview),
and so that activity is completely human and natural.
But hacking, and the way in which we hack, could be driven
by lot of reasons and personal motivations, social
contestation, and community based protest. Stallman’s
motivation, for example, is the positive rebellion to a
system that would own also the job of a big group of
researchers and programmers (see this interview ) ;
other hackers has the rebellion towardrebel against an
incomprehensible and repressive authority (see
this interview),
or a strong believe that software is something that could
not be owned by someone because it is intrinsically
free (see this interview).
In Italy the hacking movement is intertwined with lot of
themany movements of re-appropriation of the spaces and the
time that consumerism stole from us. In an economy that
claims for more-production/more consumption, hackers are
part of the movement that asks to their participants if
they really need to consume and produce more, or rather if
the thing that they need is to empower and reconstitute a
web of knowledge, traditions, customs, relationships, and
people. In this way to hack, and not necessarily
computer-aided, became a way to express themselves rather
then a way to infringe laws and copyrights. To hack became
a way to free themselves and to help the neighbour to do
the same, in his/her way.
It is self evident that if conceived in this way, to hack
becomes a political act before than a practical act. It is
not just “a playfully way to do something”, according to
Stallman, rather it became a playfully way to
change
something. Or, at least, to
try to change the reality. To hack becomes a practice that
could be apply to different situations and activities, and
a tool to fight against a society that would lead people to
be just passive, and for a society of responsible,
autonomous, collective citizens.
3.
Hackers in Pisa: ethnographic data
3.1
The physical location
Pisa is a small town in Tuscany, in the
very centre of Italy. Close to the sea, a few miles away
from Florence, with a small airport that provides lot
ofmany low-cost flights towardthroughout the all Europe,
Pisa is a town that both historically – in perennial fight
with Florence and Livorno especially during the Medieval
Age – and nowadays is a city where people are keen on
freedom and independence. Historical Its convenience, and
its symbolic (and historical) role as a bastion of leftist
politics, made it a particularly appropriate location for
the 2007’s edition of the HackMeeting. The meeting was
preceded by huge TV and radio news, and newspaper campaign
that gave to the event a big exposure. I myself learnt by a
radio transmission about the meeting.
To reach the meeting was particularly simple. Situated in a
old, abandoned, and squatted industrial building straight
close to the train station of Pisa Centrale, the building
is a old factory that the municipality bought some years
ago, and that which is still awaiting for renovations. It
seems that the municipality wants to destine the building
to some social services, as a public gym, but nowadays the
building is still partially damaged and no works were
provided by the municipality in the past years. So some
groups of young people, in between the anarchist movement
and the extreme-left political area, squatted in it, named
the place Rebeldia (rebel + dia, that in Latin means day),
and started to organize social and cultural events. The
location is pretty perfect: close to the train station (the
train is, in Italy, the cheapest way to travel), to the bus
station, and with a huge parking lot just turned the
corner, Rebeldia has lots of rooms, of different size,
that can host at least four different events
simultaneously. It has also a couple of rooms dedicated to
a kitchen, and a couple to host whose that who want to
sleep there. Basic toilets are provided, but lots of people
prefer to go out and use the toilets of the bars and
restaurants around the zone. The population is partially
hostile to Rebeldia, but it is also clear to the people that
lot of culturally good and important events are provided by
the centre.
It is the first time that HackMeeting come to Pisa. Every
year, it is hosted by different hackers’ groups around
Italy, since the 1998. The first HackMeeting was kept in
Florence (1998), than in Milan (1999), in Rome (2000), in
Catania (2001), in Bologna (2002), in Turin (2003), in
Genova (2004), in Naples (2005), and in Parma (2006). All
the meeting were kept in Centri Sociali as
Rebeldia.
The very first meeting caused
some problems to the organizing committee, that which was
sued by the municipality. Some of promoters are still under
process because of the supposed danger of the event that
they organized.
3.2 The cyber location
The cyber location was multiple. It is
first of all a website (www.hackmeeting.org) that was set
up at the end of July and invited all the hack communities
around the Italy (and Europe) to join the organization of
the HackMeeting in the next following September. The all
whole organization of the meeting was conducted through the
web, and there were no organization meetings with all the
components organizing the meeting since until the day
before the meeting occurred. People were in charge of bites
various pieces of the organization, and they were directly
responsible of for those things, and completely autonomous
in the organization as well. The discussion about the
opportunity to include or exclude some activities from the
meeting was conduced strictly online and using a wiki, so
every participant could say their opinion and leave their
message open to criticismss and suggestions.
Then there was a particular cyber-location there, during
the meeting. A huge (the biggest disposableavailable,
actually) room was filled of with cables, switches,
servers, and lan-cables. Every one could join the network,
share their disks, go to the Internet, and set up a
strongly encrypted connection to the server. Lots of people
arrived with the flags of their hacking group and set up a
small fortress, both physical and virtual, inviting the
other hackers to try to break the protections. Someone put
a Jolly Roger, the pirates’ flag, on the bottom of the
hall, where there are some tables and sofas, to relax and
sleep, or to get a beer chatting about the just shared
movie, song, or book. At the entrance of the hall, a
promotional area welcome all those groups (and private
sponsors) that would exhibit products (as like t-shirts,
books, promotional flyers) to support their groups. There
are the “Turin Hack Group” that sells funny t-shirts and
cool hyper-technological-bijoux; the editor “Eleuthera”,
specialized in anarchist and libertarian books; an
interesting hack group from Padua that is trying to provide
to the city a free and gratis wireless Internet connection
(www.copy-riot.org) and that provides all the technical
features to export the project also in other cities; a
couple of private sellers of what I call
“che-guevara-and-other-riots” t-shirts.
Even if strictly physical, this is a virtual space. It is
the place of ideas, ideals, propaganda of course, but also
the place where things are shared: books, movies, music,
programs. And a huge presence of GNU/Linux operatingve
system users that push other OS users to join the community
and free the knowledge.
Besides these, lot ofmany super-computers were exposed as
trophies. A climate of curiosity and admiration, willing of
learning and teaching was clearly noticeable.
By the other hand, it was difficult to take photos and to
video-interview some hackers, as I planned to do. The
perception of being outsider in a close and highly
technical community is pretty strong.
3.3 The contested place: the Centro Sociale
Rebeldia
Arriving to Pisa I parked not so far
from Rebeldia but, even if the place is pretty simple
to find, I got lost. I finally find a police station that
give me directions: the Rebeldia is almost 50 mt. far from the Police
Station, and this is the first thing that it deserves to be
underlined: a squatted and illegal structure cohabit with
the police, that which is pretty kind and were ready to
tell me where the hackmeeting is and how I can reach it.
Nobody asked me why I want to go there, neither and
certaintly did not ask if I am if I am a cybercriminal, of
course.
Now, it is necessary to say what a “Centro Sociale” is, in
order to understand why the location is so important. A
“Centro Sociale” is, according to the definition of Peter
Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey)(1991), a Temporary
Autonomous Zone (or T.A.Z.), a place in which, temporarily,
people can meet each other and share information, political
believes, culture. It could be both private or public, but
the most extreme “Centri Sociali” are squatted, and so
quite temporary. In a “Centro Sociale” exhibitions focused
on genocides, wars, social problems, and other often banned
information, that which rarely could take place in other
public or private spaces, find their natural location. The
place hosts them and the people are seriously interested in
to watch, get informed, get involved. A “Centro Sociale” is
a place of activism, and of strong involvement of people.
There are also concerts, groups of discussion, reading
groups, and controversial protests and meetings are hosted.
For all those reason, “Centri Sociali” are traditionally
quite extreme politically. Of course exist boththere are
“Centri Sociali” of the left and the right political views,
, even if the number of left party’s one are the majority.
Arriving to a the Rebeldia I was pretty astonished: a decadent
structure was waiting for a three-days-long meeting, and it
seemed totally unsafe. I got walked in. Some guys watch
over the entrance, the more to ask for a small contribution
(expressly voluntary) than to control who is getting in. In
fact they are eating a sandwich and drinking red wine (it
is midday). The climate is totally relaxed and with no
pressure. Someone narrates when he was put down to the
police records because he was going around in the past
HackMeeting location; someone else asks for advices about
his Linux setting; someone points out that another
newspaper just published the press release that the
organizing committee released the day before. Once in I am
in the parking lot, where lots of cars and some campers
gives to the location a really post-urban setting.
The Rebeldia is an awesome excellent structure for
this type of events. In the small hall close to the kitchen
was placed a small fair trade bar, in which you could find beer
produced by a small local producer that resists the big
corporation of beverages; just brewed fair trade coffee,
from some cultivation in Colombia and Peru; organic juices
and organic cold tea in glass bottles; home-made cakes that
participants bring from their homes. Everything there oozed
“conscious” political choices.
The bar shares the room with five workshops a day. Those
are some arguments: an introduction to Linux; a meeting to
set up a questionnaire against the prohibitionist
propaganda; some considerations about the rule of hackers
in the fight against the System; an introduction to an
algorithm called AKS; an introductive course on preparing
and baking the bread (with practical exercitations); a
speech about the necessity of “hack the science” and put it
under question.
Close to the bar there is the common kitchen. There are
three meals: in the morning, around the two in the
afternoon, and around the nine in the evening. Time
schedule is highly flexible, and when the meals are ready a
small bell is played in all rooms. All meals are made with
local fresh organic products. There are multiple menus for
vegetarians, vegans, and the others. The dishes are,
unfortunately, made by plastic, but someone some people
haves their own dishes and glasses.
The main structure of the Rebeldia has two big rooms. One of those these is
the one that I described before, and it is full of groups,
computers, and a small bar. Both Friday night and Saturday
night the room became a cyber-disco where free and open
source music is played until the four or the five in the
morning, or at least until people dance. The big room, the
one with the computers, never closes and there are no
official meetings in there. Just computers, and nerds.
The other room is a rock-climb gym, in which lot of people
set up their sleeping bag. In there almost 80 people could
take seat and, counting the standing, there would be room
for at least 120 people. The main events are there:
Emmanuel Goldstein – one of the historical hacker and
hacktivist, founder of the New York based “2600” magazine –
speaks here, and other presentations of security issues,
counter-information, and free and open source program take
place during the days. At the Goldstein’s speech the room
was so full that it was impossible to move: lot of people
went to the cybermeeting just for him, and just that
evening.
A couple of common rooms for sleeping and bathrooms take
place upstairs, and the organization’s room where all
servers and telephone connections are in a small room over
there. That one is the only room that is locked, while all
the others are always open and accessible.
The big parking lot is alternatively a place in which to
eat, a place in which smokto smokee, and to camp, and also
aa place where there are a couple of seminars, as how to
pick locks and how to made a home-made wi-fi antenna, and a
place where camp. The climate is actually fitting the camp
sensation: people going around, getting going in and out at
all the time, chatting, meeting, smoking, taking showers,
eating, going around with their laptop, reading.
The style of the meetings is as like a chat between
friends, seminars in which everybody can participate to
learn but also to teach, to report their experience and
problems that they face and successful solve. Generally the
seminars exceed the time that they were planned for: people
stay there talking and chatting and sharing experience
since the one, two in the morning.
Because of the characteristic of pretentious illegality of
the meeting, I was discouraged to take photos. I found
something on the Net, but it is not enough to describe the
structure and the buildings. I sketch up a 3D model that
could help to figure out how the Rebeldia looks like. Here
(first,second,third,fourth, fifth)
some draws of it.
The list of the seminars did not
exclude nobody anybody and nothing. The seminars were set
up through the website in the months before the meeting, so
there is always someone that is in charge of calling and
collecting the people that want to participate, someone
that speech, and all the need for the execution of the
speech, as computers, boards, projectors, or flour and
yeast, in case of the bread’s seminar. All seminars were
proposed and discussed through the forum in the website
before being approved, so they always have at least a
bounce of people that participate and interact with the
speaker.
A small garage close to the main hall is used as
experimental office of a well known group of hackers
(Freaknet lab, the first free and open European laboratory
to hack and learn programming) and there old computers are
re-assembled, mixed, fixed, and brought to new life with
light versions of GNU/Linux. Here there an there some
passionate hackers are collecting material for their
computer museum, and trying to take back to work computers
that the evolution of GUI and operative systems have left
in the cellar of some offices or houses, and that which are
totally fun to program, interact, modify (some photos of
their old computer here and here the list to the computer open
to everybody want hack and play with them).
Then there old electronic devices of different nature kinds
are dise-assembled and mixed together to have new
(sometimes useful, often useless) gadgets: a small tone
generator token from a toy guitar became part of a complex
music machine; a group of led lights from an old
spectroscope became a fun displayer; pieces of computer
became external devices; old radio came back to life and
diffused light music on the air. A sort of laboratory, or
an enormous dump depending on the point of view, in which
nothing is wasted, and everything could be an essential
part of a new project, a different, new, and creative
object.
4. The rhetoric of freedom
All the Hackmeeting was invested of a
strong rhetoric of freedom. As I underline above describing
the location, more than a meeting of passionate ofpeople
passionate about computers, the meeting was a reunion of
people that who haves strong political views, and are
hardly trying to apply these believes eliefs in everyday
tasks. Paradoxically, computer hacking is
one of the
ways in which the
belief in a “world more fair and just” could be generated
by using better and more conscientiously the resources. So,
for example, just after the workshop about an algorithm and
in the same room the workshop about “how to bake our own
bread” was taking place.
The Manifesto of the meeting – in Italian,
English, and Spanish – pointed out this attitude: to hack
is a new way to express an old and eradicate dissension
more than a new verb that identify a precise and clear
activity. I think that this is a result of a long process
of appropriation of the term actuated by the movements of
dissension, and this is not a process that was exclusively
actuated in Italy.
I would will demonstrate this through the analysis of two
interviews that I took during the HackMeeting. The first is
to with Caparossa, one of the organizers and a hacker, “but
not computer hacker” as he told me. The second is an
interview to with a representative of the group
“Copy-Riot”, of Padua, that who speaks about the freedom of
share internet connections (through wi-fi signal), but also
books, music, and movies.
4.1 Caparossa
Caparossa is an old Italian hacker. Tall,
with little beard and a smart glance he definitively is a
young 40 years old man. He accepted with pleasure to be
interviewed, and hism broad preparation about the history
of social movements in Italy is incredibly accurate.
He started to use the computer in 1998, and he is working
as a computer assistant in a private corporation. I asked
him what means the word “hacker” for him. He said, “if you
intend hacker as someone that is a genius setting up a
computer, so I am not an hacker; but if you intend hacker
as someone that is a person with curiosity, and use the
computer for social means, so I am an hacker, and I am
hacker since the 1998. I am someone that uses the computer
for social meanings”. For this reason, he said, “in Italy
since the very beginning – as in the rest of the world,
actually – the world of hackers was associated to the world
of the people politically engaged. Of course there is are a
big number of hackers – the informatics hackers, the ones
that hack a computer I mean – that say that they are not
engaged politically, but actually the HackMeeting, that is
a real important Italian meeting, took place since the 1998
in Centri Sociali”.
There are three aspects to underline in these is sentences.
The first is the declared disconnection of the term “hack”
to from the computer environment. Caparossa is using the
term out of its context consciously, and he is claiming
this use of the term for a new and broader meaning. This
broader use of the term – and this is the second thing to
underline – date back for him since the very beginning of
the hacking, and everywhere, not just in Italy. Then there
is the demand ofhis assertation regarding the obviousness
of this claim, when he said that there are some hackers,
“the computer hackers”, that they could say that their
activity is not political but, as counterbalance, there is
the fact that the HackMeeting is hosted in Centri
Sociali since the very beginning.
In the next part of the interview, Caparossa explain better
how the politic of hacking is just a tool to improve the
freedom, rather than a clear political action against the
System.
“Ours is not, strictly speaking, a political view. To hack
is free flow of information. Or better, is free flow of
knowledge. If you look inside the world in which we are
living, the mainstream system is exactly the opposite. For
example, yesterday we made a joke. The newspaper “La
Nazione” ask us what we think about the Burma, but from the
technical point of view. And the journalist asked us to
write down what is happening, from our point of view. And
so we write down a fake press release in which we were
telling a story about the regime that was taking control
over the Internet through a virus called OAF. And today it
is published in the newspaper. Now, it means that the
journalist published a news item? without verifying the
source. So, to hack the information it means to create
another way to stay together, another way to spread
knowledge and information. A way that is not more from the
top to the bottom, but dialogical, in perennial discussion.
And to do that, the tools to verify the information and the
knowledge are the key to be free. Indymedia, for example,
was conceived with this reasoning. That are of course a mix
of politically action and technics, but there is especially
an attempt to use fruitfully technologies in order to put
the people in condition to use them, and in this way to be
free. [...] I spent days and weeks and months inside the
Centri Sociali trying to convince people there that to
crack Windows is not at anti-imperialistic move, because
you are still using Windows, and you get accustom to it;
and now inside the Centri Sociali there are only GNU/Linux,
that is a free and open system that teach you how to
program, and so you have the freedom of programming by
yourself, and so to not be dependent from proprietary and
closed software of big corporations.”
To hack is conceived as a way to free people, to invite
people to think broadly and deeply about our society, and
the strong connection that we have with the object as
given, conceived and produced expressly for one and only
one use. Otherwise to hack opens our mind to a world of
opportunities and misuse of objects, that free people from
the slavery of advertising and stimulate their creativity.
In the conclusion of the interview, Caparossa pointed out
how the relations in the hack-groups are based on
horizontality, and so are open to the discussion and the
participation in the community’s life.
“In these type of movement, in the past years since
nowadays, the keyword is horizontality, that is the
Peer-to-Peer brought in the social life. So, those movement
are totally not anarchist, but they are based on affinity.
And that is the most beautiful thing.[...] Parliament is a
part of politics, for me the degenerated one. With this I
can live the politics in the Greek sense of the term, and
so live actively in a community”.
3.2 Ciro, Copy-Riot Representative
Ciro, a graduate student, is a
representative of a group of students who, that in Padua –
in which there is one of the oldest and biggest
universitiesy in Italy – are setting up a free wi-fi
connection all over the city and a centre in which people
can share their movies, music, and books. The office in
which the group organize their meetings is also a bar for
students, open twice or three times a week, in which it is
possible to consume drink a coffee and download a book or a
movie in the same time.
I asked him which motivations pushed them to set up an
officially? pretty illegal group like that, that which
expressly goes against an Italian law that forces everyonne
who has an Internet connection to trace every single user
that connects to the Internet through hism or her contract
(the so called Legge Urbani, promulgated with
anti-terrorist proposals after the 9/11 and the London’s
attacks).
“We are setting up this Net because we think that the so
called anti-terrorist law (Legge Urbani) that forces you to
block all wi-fi connection and have a list of all people
that connect to the Internet through your connection is a
violation of the privacy and the right of everybody to
share their own contract, as an Internet connection is. And
this limitation is possible just because they are
instilling unjustified fear and terror in the mind of
people. But there is no reason in this. It is a system set
up in order to force people to submit their freedom to
them. And so all the people will tend to buy security
devices, padlocks and heavy steel doors, and so everybody
becomes more close and suspicious toward the
neighbourhood.”
The sense of a
disappearing and missing community, the closure toward the
extraneous that people demonstrate is generally generated
by the ignorance of technical issues, for the Copy-Riot
group. But there is no reason in not sharing, for example,
and that is a volunteer submission to the power of law,
that which expresses itself without reason and
justification, according to the group.
The slogan of
Copy-Riot is “Let’s pirate, let’s spread, let’s share”. I
asked to Ciro why they chose this slogan. He answered me:
“we do not believe in the copyright. The copyright has a
sense and it deserves to be protected but just if it is not
depriving people to know. If a student has no way to accede
to a text, and s/he needs it to study, s/he has the right
to download it. Of course we are pushing the alternative,
as Creative Commons, but until the creative commons are not
a valid and effective alternative, we have the right to do
that. When someone write a book, s/he is drawing knowledge
and information from the common knowledge, and s/he is
putting his or her piece of information, his or her
perspective. So, sharing books we are giving to the people
the opportunity to be part of this process and take
advantage from of a knowledge that belongs to the mankind.”
“What we are trying to do is introduce the sharing of the
internet connections as a mind setting, as a path toward
the sharing of also other things. We are graduate students,
and we have not enough money to buy all the books that are
suggested. So we scan all the expensive books that the
University of Padova suggests as reading for the students
and those are free on-line in our internal Net.”
Copy-Riot symbol is a Jolly Roger, the black flag of
pirates. I asked him why did they choose that symbol,
and not something else, as a Robin Hood for example. “It
was an aesthetic choice. And there was a huge discussion
among us about the opportunity using that symbol. We think
that pirates are people that are fighting for their
knowledge, also with actions that are not fully legal, but
that are trying to free for everybody. Copyright is a way
to close the knowledge. Pirates are opening that knowledge,
freeing it toward the use of everybody.”
5. Conclusion
In this paper I reported some
ethnographic data about the Italian HackMeeting, that took
place in September 2007. I tried to demonstrate how the
fight against a privatization of cyberspace took place both
through the hackers’ computer programming, and through the
use of the verb “to hack” in a broader sense of the term.
The fact that the meeting took place in a Centro Sociale;
the fact that people there were considering and using
hacking as a counter-hegemonic act supported with political
motivation; the evidence of a shared and horizontal
organization of the tasks both preparing and during the
event shown us how the term spread out from its original
meaning to a new and extensive meaning, that implies being
curious, open, and questioning about the market and the
society.
But even if there is good faith to do that, a question
remained unanswered during the all event: “What happens
with those that do not agree? How do you answer to those
that do not accept your point of view? With violence?”
While in fact to give a concrete answer to the market –
through the free software, or the open source, or the
creative commons – is a concrete way to put on the table an
idea that self-sustain itself, that could successfully face
those that do not like free and open knowledge and
information, the position of who that justify piracy and
cracking as a sort of people’s expropriation suffers of the
paradox of the tolerance: with those that do not accept
this point of view the only possible alternative is a
violent one, as the cracking and the illicit copying
demonstrate us.
But in Pisa the climate was definitively not this one. Of
course there were also the angry pirates, as I tried to
shown, but the majority was of people enthusiastic for a
project, rather than people angry, with the anger that the
victims of thefts demonstrate. A community that is building
a new world; a group of people for something, instead of a bounce group of
people against something. With the happiness that every
beginning implies. And with the consciousness that they
have to defend this freedom with all their forces because,
as the history shown us, all the commons territories are
fragile zones to protect, to conserve, to love, and to
share.
Bibliography
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The Digital Sublime.
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Boulder: Westview Press.
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sublime, London:
Routledge
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