STDIN

Anonymous being that they are Anonymous is hard to pin down. One might ask whether the folks behind the recent Palin email exposure are the same people behind the recent attacks against Scientology? We can never know and that is not really the most interesting question about Anonymous. They are interesting because of how they marry an audacious aesthetics to their politics (and how they mastered the art of video warfare) and how they have become a free floating form to be adopted by whoever wants to claim them.

Whatever the case, and however silly and childish their antics are or may seem, they are always entertaining and in this case, they also helped bring to the table the problems of relying on third party business for your work email.

And finally, if nothing else, we should appreciate them for they provided great fodder for what I think is a pretty genius onion article.

One cannot address hacker culture and politics without thinking seriously about journalism and journalistic representation. Whether it was Steven Levy for the university hackers or Bruce Sterling for the so-called hacker underground, these journalists gave substance and form and eventually widespread circulation to what existed far below public view.

Another key player in this story of hacker representations in the media was Stewart Brand, the first editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and one of the founders of the WELL. Last week in class, we read one of his early pieces on hackers, a Rolling Stone article, Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. If you have not read it, I recommend it. Like many journalists writing about hackers and computers, the tone and style is a little over the top and dramatic (which is why it is fun to read) and one is transported back to the past when computers were a scarce resource.

His representation of hackers is slightly different than the other authors mentioned above. He did not quite capture the full meat and pulse of hacking in any depth but instead used them as important tokens and examples for reshaping the broader meaning of computing. He turned to hacking as a way to disassociate computers from their close association with military/bureaucratic institutions and endeavors and represent them anew, in a fresh, exciting light: as a tool for individual empowerment (though, as Fred Turner's wonderful book on the topic argues, Brand's vision still incorporated some elements of military thinking, such as cybernetics).

A number of students picked up on the fact that Brand's representation of computing, however influential in terms of building mainstream representations of personal computing, did not completely map onto the hacker experience, especially at the Homebrew Club where there was still a very collective sentiment brewing in the air though of course idioms of personal empowerment and individuality were also visible and strong. This was a time also not only when computer technologies became more accessible, leading to a considerable expansion in the hacker population, but when we start to see some of the first fault lines among hackers (notably over the role of intellectual property law). Growth always entails diversity in other words.

There are two parts of the article that really caught my attention. First, was Brand's very apt characterization of hacker projects into two categories: the low rent and high rent, which he put in the following terms:

A distinction exists between low rent and high rent computer research, between preoccupations of support group-(hackers) and of research group. The distinction blurs often. Les Earnest: "Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between recreation and work, happily. We try to judge people not on how much time they waste but on what they accomplish over fairly long periods of time, like a half year to a year." He adds that Spacewar players "are more from the support groups than the research groups. The research groups tend to get their kicks out of research." Spacewar is low-rent.

And perhaps mos surprising was part the way he foreshadows all sorts of uses for personal computing before the PC was even invented (like file sharing):

Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form).

Indeed, so much for the record form...

Bill O’Reilly’s web site hacked, attackers release personal details of users

In what is slowly turning into a endless loop of hacktivism activities, Bill O’Reilly’s BillOreilly.com has been compromised during the weekend, with personal details including passwords in plain text for 205 of the site’s members already leaking across Internet forums, as a response to his remarks regarding Wikileaks as a “one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites” which recently published private information of Sarah Palin’s private email.

Wednesday's class began with a brief discussion regarding Monday's guest speaker John Perry Barlow. I was unable to attend, but it seemed his reviews were for the most part favorable. For other free NYU events check out: http://www.freeculturenyu.org/

To open the main discussion on virtual games and the first half of the Jullian Dibbell's book Play Money, Gabriella played Leroy Jenkins, a video of a virtual raid in the game Worlds of Warcraft by the internet star himself, Leroy Jenkins. Additionally, we watched the infamous Serenity Now bombs a World of Warcraft funeral in which a group of raiders raids a representational funeral held on behalf of a real life player in a PVP (player vs. player) allowed area of the virtual game world.

The second video sparked discussion on whether the raid of the funeral was justified. While the experienced gamers of the class insisted that in a game about fighting, funerals had no place and a raid in a PVP area was well within game rules. Others, conversely, found the raid to be in poor taste, noting that the reward for killing other players are honor points, not points for experience and were therefore of little value.

Both videos helped to open up the discussion further on virtual gaming, particularly the differences between virtual gaming and those which are tangible and the real world effects on the virtual world.

As Chelsea noted in class, all characteristics that apply to games also apply to virtual games, however the same is not true vise versa. The differences, therefore, are very telling. Gabriella and much of the rest of the class agreed with Chelsea, however John disagreed, arguing that distinctions should not be made because such discussion allows ethical and legal issues to get in the way. Despite his insightful perspective, we carried on discussing the distinctions.

A major distinction between for instance a card game and a virtual game is the aspect of world building that goes into playing a virtual game. Players engage in a sociality they don't engage in while playing chess or badminton, they help to create cultures and even economies, and they cultivate relationships. Richard claimed that interpersonal relationships effected virtual play and gave us an adorable example of how his desire to kill his real-life girlfriend in D and D distracted him from other virtual tasks. Radny, Dibbell's virtual roommate and business partner (a 17 year old smart-ass), was mentioned briefly in this discussion.

Charlotte then brought up the distinction of time. While games in the real world end, usually with a clear winner and loser, virtual games are on-going and never result in a real winner. Anique then made the point this made virtual world more like the real world. Other distinctions included the unregulated nature (for now, noted Gabriella) of virtual games and the intricate games within virtual games. Finally, Max brought up how virtual games encourage the imaginative reinvention of yourself. This virtual self sometimes pulls from reality but is not a literal representation.

As Dibbell writes:

It is this endlessly repeatable collusion of freedom and determinism--the warp and the woof of fixed rules and free play, of running code and variable input--that sets both gamers and computers apart, together, from the larger universe of information technologies they inhabit...And only games, therefore, come close to capturing the precise mix of unpredictability and inevitability that makes the computer such a powerful simulation of our lived experience of the world. (104)

We had already scratched the surface on the subject of the fluidity of the boundaries which separate virtual from real space in discussing Dibbell's perspective that a line can be drawn between the two, however it is not rigid. But, we dug deeper following the the conversation of imaginative identity. Where else does the virtual world seep into the real world? Well, for Julian Dibbell and other entrepreneurs like him who sold virtual loot for "real" cash, the virtual world became his real world livelihood. Max drove the point home declaring that as far as the economy goes there was no line between the virtual and real.

Real world, too, seeps into the virtual world. Status and money would not exist in the virtual world if the real world didn't similarly rear its head. Status and wealth are coveted just as they are in the real world, and while this may seem absurd, it is merely a magnification of the real world process and the real world absurdity. Though it has been normalized and naturalized, our real world economy is just as intangible as the virtual economy. Is there even a distinction at all when virtual money can be sold for real currency? Or, as Charlotte posits: is economic life masquerading itself as play?

We ended on similarly evaluative note that infused hacking back into our discussion, and I feel inclined to do the same. Before we were dismissed from Wednesday's class Richard and Anique posed questions we hadn't yet gotten to. Food for thought, you might say:

Richard: Do gold farmers make the game less fun?

Anique: Which group of virtual gamers stands closer to the hackers?

Happy Halloween!