Radars & Fences

Selected audio excerpts from Gabriella Coleman's lecture "Old and New Net Wars over Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$," Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 07/04/2008.

A Culturally Antipodal Relation
"Why have internet enthusiasts, so many of them geeks and hackers, been drawn to denounce Scientology, so vehemently and for over a decade? (Anonymous is just the most current incarnation.) Or to put it more bluntly it strikes us as a little bit odd, and does a need of explanation, that one of the oldest and recurring battles on the internet is between this two kinds of people. Today I hope to make this oddity a little more sensible by examining both the historical reasons behind these battles as well as especially the cultural reasons... What I think we need to look at is how these two groups stand in culturally antipodal relation to one another, and if there is such a thing as a cultural inversion machine..."

Welcome to Mortal Combat between Two Alien Cultures
"I want to tell you about the initial battle between Scientology and the internet that happened in the mid-1990s... Anyone who knows about the history of Usenet might know that in the late 1980s it was a political hothouse... The Usenet battles over free speech in the late 1980s were in fact child's play in comparison with what happened with the Scientology newsgroup..."

Who is Anonymous?
"Who is Anonymous? What is the relationship to their earlier protests and what do we make of the vigor of that? They really are into this and they are using all sorts of tactics and means by which to attack Scientology and their first attacks were classicly hackers' - they were denials of service attacks. They claim that they are not just geeks and hackers... And although not all of them are in fact geeks and hackers, there is enough compelling evidence to say that they emerge from a particularly geeky internet bunker... which differentiates them, although not completely, from some of the earlier folks and battles..."

Meeting at the End
"For geeks and hackers a line has been crossed by Scientology because of their actions... because they are trying to enter the realm of science and technology which is not where religion is supposed to go. And I think that as a society we make a very stark line between these worlds, and geeks and hackers make it even deeper and starker... There is a way in which geek culture and Scientology meet at the end. They go to very different places, they are inverted, but I think if there is a way in which geeks and hackers imagine that much of their world is open and transparent, they are also mired in forms of secrecy and esotericism..."