When Technocultures Collide: Innovation from Below and the Struggle for Autonomy

By Gary Genosko

When Technocultures Collide provides rich and diverse studies of collision courses between technologically inspired subcultures and the corporate and governmental entities they seek to undermine. The adventures and exploits of computer hackers, phone phreaks, urban explorers, calculator and computer collectors, “CrackBerry” users, whistle-blowers, Yippies, zinsters, roulette cheats, chess geeks, and a range of losers and tinkerers feature prominently in this volume. Gary Genosko analyzes these practices for their remarkable diversity and their innovation and leaps of imagination. He assesses the results of a number of operations, including the Canadian stories of Mafiaboy, Jeff Chapman of Infiltration, and BlackBerry users.

The author provides critical accounts of highly specialized attributes, such as the prospects of deterritorialized computer mice and big toe computing, the role of electrical grid hacks in urban technopolitics, and whether info-addiction and depression contribute to tactical resistance. Beyond resistance, however, the goal of this work is to find examples of technocultural autonomy in the minor and marginal cultural productions of small cultures, ethico-poetic diversions, and sustainable withdrawals with genuine therapeutic potential to surpass accumulation, debt, and competition. The dangers and joys of these struggles for autonomy are underlined in studies of RIM’s BlackBerry and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781554588992

Gary Genosko

Gary Genosko is currently Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University in Canada. He is the author of several books on Felix Guattari, including Felix Guattari (Pluto, 2009).

Book preview

WHEN TECHNOCULTURES COLLIDE

Cultural Studies Series

Cultural Studies is the multi- and inter-disciplinary study of culture, defined anthropologically as a way of life, performatively as symbolic practice, and ideologically as the collective product of varied media and cultural industries. Although Cultural Studies is a relative newcomer to the humanities and social sciences, in less than half a century it has taken interdisciplinary scholarship to a new level of sophistication, reinvigorating the liberal arts curriculum with new theories, topics, and forms of intellectual partnership.

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WHEN TECHNOCULTURES COLLIDE

Innovation from Below

and the

Struggle for Autonomy

Gary Genosko

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Genosko, Gary, 1959–, author

          When technocultures collide : innovation from below and the struggle for autonomy / Gary Genosko.

(Cultural studies series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55458-897-8 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-55458-899-2

(epub).—ISBN 978-1-55458-898-5 (pdf)

         1. Technology—Social aspects. 2. Technological innovations—Social aspects. 3. Technology and civilization. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural studies series (Waterloo, Ont.)

T14.5.G48 2013        306.4’6               C2013-903854-X         C2013-903855-8

Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front-cover photo: Anonymous, by Declan Roache. Reproduced with permission of the photographer. Text design by James Leahy.

© 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

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For Hannah and Iloe, my crafty daughters

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Beyond Hands Free: Big-Toe Computing

2 Cultures of Calculation: William Gibson Collects

3 Rebel with an IV Pole: Portrait of Ninjalicious as an Urban Explorer

4 Home-Grown Hacker

5 Hacking the Grid: Does Electricity Want to Be Free?

6 Whistle Test: Blindness and Phone Phreaking

7 In Praise of Weak Play: Against the Chess Computers

8 CrackBerry: Addiction and Corporate Discipline

9 WikiLeaks and the Vicissitudes of Transparency

Conclusion

References

Index

Acknowledgements

Over the course of the ten years that I ran the Technoculture Lab, I was fortunate to have a number of very talented graduate students who assisted me in several of the projects that appear as chapters in this book. I am indebted to the work of Scott Thompson (creator of the tables) during the period when I was writing about Mafiaboy, and to Andriko Lozowy, who helped me first define the issues around Crack-Berry abuse and really drill down theoretically into failure.

During his regular visits to the Lab, Paul Hegarty worked with me on redirecting concepts from Bataille and Baudrillard towards info-tech objects and systems, especially the big toe as a way of productive disabling. Our Bletchley Park scavenger hunt was a catalyst (http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=613). I am also grateful to Roberta Buiani with whom I collaborated on a postdoctoral project concerning Italian Yippies (for the journal Cultural Studies). Working on a book, and making a film with Franco Bifo Berardi (After the Future), proved to be transformative for my thinking about the direction in which technoculture is headed, and about the fuzzy destinies of post-autonomist thought and practice. Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, and Alessandra Renzi at the Infoscape Lab at Ryerson University were especially generous with their support during Bifo’s visits to Toronto. I first aired my electrical dreams of utility hacks there. The participants in my WikiLeaks graduate seminar enthusiastically embraced the challenge of trying to make sense of a developing story and to analyze whistle-blowing. I will be revisiting the latest instalments of the WikiLeaks saga in a further seminar as it undertakes some of the tasks the US government once promised it would address. Information, like electricity, wants to be free.

Much of the research for this book was made possible by the Canada Research Chairs and Canada Foundation for Innovation programs. The final stages of the manuscript were prepared and corrected at UOIT.

Introduction

"Technoculture" appears to be a relatively recent coinage dating from the 1960s. In its blandest deployment, it simply makes note of the mutual influences of technology and culture, often drawing on one or more media to establish points of contact. Writing within the sweeping parameters of medium theory, American neologist Henry G. Burger wrote in a letter to the editor of the journal Technology and Culture that it was the availability of cheap Bibles (hence print), not to mention demand for them, that suggested to him the need for a new area of study that names the mutually supportive dimensions of technology and culture: I propose the discipline be named ‘technoculture’ (1961: 261).

Far from constituting a new discipline or even sub-area, technoculture quickly became associated with technocratic ideology in which technology dominates cultural formations, via shifts in social organization, and determines their possibilities. It seems that the descriptive interdependence thesis, which is still in circulation today, and the technocratic hypothesis, also still much in evidence in the critical literature, together continue to influence the approaches available in technoculture studies.

The interdependence thesis is expressed by Debra Benita Shaw (2008: 4) as an enquiry into the relationship between technology and culture and the expression of that relationship in patterns of social life, economic structures, politics, art, literature … It is also a quintessentially post-modern study in that it is a reflexive analysis from within, as it were, the belly of a beast that has grown to monstrous proportions. Word processing and publishing about technoculture within the belly of the technocultural beast requires reflexive awareness in the description of technoculture’s expressive features in social and political life and how this very thesis is generated, relayed, and reproduced. Shaw is very clear on this point. The relative clarity of the grammar of this thesis—that a relationship exists between technology and culture the expressions of which are observable and describable—has also been troubled by critics for whom the postmodern and reflexive do not vouchsafe such ease of access. Sadie Plant (1997: 45–46), in her contribution to the discussion, points out that in both the study of culture and technology the former cannot be determined by a single coherent factor and the latter exerts a power that is riddled at all scales by turbulence and uncertainty; hence, whatever it is that is called technoculture is unstable and its interdependency difficult to access and to assess. Description is not so easy. There is a certain degree of convolution between culture and technology and a lack of givenness in the foliations.

On the other hand, the technocratic articulation of technoculture has become less focused on large-scale determinism and more nuanced over time. A good example is the work of Jodi Dean (2002). Dean does not wish to collapse technocracy and technoculture, despite the identification of the ideology of technoculture with one of the key features of technocracy, namely, publicity. Rather, the point is to expose how and what this ideology obscures, and the implications this holds for processes of subjectification. Dean’s ideology critique acknowledges that technocracy in the age of info-capital relies on secrecy and esoteric knowledge, especially in the realm of information, which may be disturbed by ‘counter-elements’ such as computer hackers and format pirates (2002: 99). It is the ideology of technoculture that interpellates subjects as celebrities (known for being well known) and conspiracy theorists (enthralled by cynicism and paranoia) in support of info-capitalism. However, there are other alterifications and counter-elements that capital cannot entirely absorb into its dominant modalities. For Dean, technoculture is not a nightmarish technocracy ruled by an autocratic Big Brother … It is a new power formation in which the ideals of publicity, of equal access, free information, and non-stop, multichanneled communication support the digital networks of communicative capitalism (2002: 112). Subsumption (formal) flirts with totality, and it is in "the constitution of spaces of self-valorisation that capital cannot entirely absorb," to follow Antonio Negri (2008b: 43) on this point, that technoculture is contested, resignified, counter-produced, and even retreated from. The difficult question is whether or not the kind of subsumption (real) in which capital expands intensively into processes of subjectification is in the long run and in terms of cognitive and affective capture of immaterial labour and production more Orwellian than Big Brother or his many younger siblings.

Dean (2002) picks up from the point to which cultural studies brought the study of technoculture, that is, the domain of resistant countercultures partially defined by their technological practices. This approach was explored by editors Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in an influential collection under the title Technoculture (1991) in which honourable mentions of modern technocultures are many—ham radio operators, hackers, video activists, community radio stations, fanzine producers. Penley and Ross pursue the goal of furthering conditions that can lead to the creation of technological countercultures at home in the US (rather than valorizing foreign examples) that contest the dominant technocultures of Western capitalism from the largest scale of mass corporate ideology to the smallest fantasies of everyday, quasi-private life. Eschewing both the naïveté of viewing nonpassive uses of technology as heroic and Orwellian dystopias about surveillance and control, Penley and Ross admit the odds are stacked against their goal. Burdened with an ossified model of communication in which the West sends technocultural products and their ideological instructions in a one-way flow to receivers in the non-West, who refunction foreign technologies, valorizing piracy despite its ambivalent lessons, the editors resist a tendency which is their own tradition: The critical left often spends more time debating and lamenting the effects of Western technoculture in other countries than it devotes to the conditions for creating technological countercultures in the West (1991: xi). Penley and Ross’s volume is an act of overcoming the fatalism that considers Western technoculture to be thoroughly colonized by corporatism and itself colonizing, and hence devoid of worthwhile signs of resistance. They also want to resist falling prey to the lament for any liberation movement that might arise because of the eventuality of its accommodation by its former enemies. The examples they are willing to accept range widely—from AIDS activism to protopolitical technocultures of independent sense-making—but there are other homegrown examples that are dismissed rather roughly, as I will discuss in chapter 5.

Technoculture may be located in unexceptional everyday thought all the way to the most contemporary forms of capitalist production, and likewise contestation of it in the name of greater democracy may arise anywhere, with the proviso that the emphasis on countercultural activity suggests the scale will be limited, and the effects unpredictable. The project of bringing it all back home to the US as it were makes technoculture activism a laudable goal as long as the figure of the American activist is not troubled. Surely, this is a fault line that requires nothing less than a reconceptualization of the process of resistance itself. As Franco Bifo Berardi (2011: 147) puts it, we have to disentangle autonomy from resistance in terms of refusal, withdrawal, dissociation, and most importantly, newly emergent forces of singularization that subjectivity undertakes to creatively recompose its enunciative sphere (including big markers like nationality). Bifo advises us that today resistance lacks the cultural antibodies that once made it possible: that the activist is a depressive. Given this condition, Bifo turns to poetry, self-respect, and love, a therapeutic re-eroticization of life, and the construction of autonomous zones based on experiments with any medium and method whatsoever: minor television, print, radio. Resistance is dynamically recomposed by innovative experiments with autonomy, or what remains of it. Obviously, this is not the autonomist theory of the 1970s in which the desiring-production of workers took centre stage in political praxis. Yet, it is autonomy nevertheless as it still seeks to understand the composition of political subjectivity— When I say composition, I mean a form of shared respiration: cospiration, conspiracy, growing together, conjoined expectations, coalescing lifestyles (Berardi 2012: 127)—and to valorize technocultural experimentation across media.

A lingering problem with the cultural studies inflection of technoculture is the degree of separation that results between semiotic and material dimensions. A technomaterialist analysis of technoculture wants to keep the semiotic flush with matters, machines, and media, all along the continuum of resignification: from semiotic relocation of meanings and redefinitions of use value—through the poaching, plundering, and reconfiguring of received texts, to the more technological practices of sampling—quotations, digital reconfigurations, elastic misrecognitions—and semiotic disobediences associated with the jamming, rerouting, and turning around of corporate messages; and finally to the manipulated samples, mash-ups, remixes, and digitally dense reworkings that every new advance in software seems to encourage. On the far side of the continuum of resignification is a realm of a-signifiying semiotics in which the semio-matters of automated connectivity have no need of meaning but respond to automated triggers that initiate routines and protocols of recombination that exploit connectivity in the generation of new assemblages through mutational effects. One sees these kinds of effects in computer virsues and in processes that put into play a-signifying fragments—rhythms, colours, noises, machinic traits of all kinds— regardless of meaning. The shift towards a-signification is also perilous when it is captured by connectivity without meaning (for example, in the use of click marks that students can accumulate for simply depositing a trace of their attention in the wired classroom). The a-signifying interchange is a post-critical commonplace in today’s university classroom and is governed by precarious labour, coolness quotients, and non-stop ratings (see Godard 2011). A-signification can be a force of subjection that yokes social communication to the financial algorithmic chain, as Bifo (Berardi 2012: 35) puts it.

Resignification gives way to repurposing, to the production of alternative scenes; this is not to separate the imaginary solution to socio-economic constraints in subcultural practices from the institution of a local, or even trans-local, autonomous network of radio or television, for instance, that assists in changing social relations and thus interactions. Perhaps the repurposing of the soldering iron in the free radio movement is a good example. A neutral tool can be transferred from the field of socio-technical networks in a science-based soldering culture intent on building HeathKits and the like (amateur ham radio, etc.), giving to it a radical political inflection, a new techno-social assemblage in which the semiotic remains flush with the material and thus political in an unfixed form (favouring movement and relation of position between otherwise fixed coordinates—neither social movement nor tactical media practice), like a pirate radio or television station or networked infrastructure that is multi-componential and whose potential for forging transversal relays remains soft and pliable. Félix Guattari’s (1996: 72) example of his son Bruno’s interest in free radio is illustrative of the contrast between meaningful discourse and a-signifying machinic interactivity: My son is into politics. Not so much through discourse, but with his soldering iron: he sets up ‘free radios,’ where technical discourse is hooked right into the political rationale of free-radio broadcasting; he got it right away. A more contemporary example may be found in the artistic practices of media archaeologists who circuit bend and hack discarded technologies, reanimating them by rewiring and reconnecting toys and personal electronics as zombie media (Hertz and Parikka 2011). Here aesthetic and political concerns are closely aligned in the re-animation of e-waste in an ecopolitical project of creative recycling. A-signification can also be invested with a resistant politics of escape at the solder-face of matter and semiosis.

Autonomous sign/matter fluxes provide new opportunitites for subjectification beyond the dominant formations that capital (technocracy) typically provides to consumers: standardized individuals, linked to one another in accordance with hierarchical systems, value systems, systems of submission (Guattari 2008: 22). Today’s autonomy is Guattarian in its emphasis on the desire to find new pathways to autonomous subjectification (Berardi 2012: 151). Against capital’s apprehension of subjectivity as the most basic raw material for any kind of production—as well as the modelization, serialization, and registration of individuals, and the data doubles of persons as ’dividuals—are irreducible, singular aspects of subjectivity that are not susceptible of being totalized or centralized in the individual (Guattari 2008: 43–44). This kind of resistant subjectivity—resistant in the first instance to a semiotic strip-mining of enunciative range and the machinic subjugation of the ’dividual by credit through technologies like ATMs and debit cards (Lazzarato 2012: 148)—does not presuppose the assemblage of heterogeneous components of semiotic and material matters, but, instead, is produced by the assemblage and finds expression in its enunciations. Critical attention to singular deviations and dissident vectors of subjectification in the creative handling of technomaterials is a hallmark of my approach to technoculture. Guattari, Bifo, and others like artists (the aforementioned Hertz) and media theorists (such as Tony Sampson, who analyzes the non-cognitive dimensions of capitalism; see 2012) have taught us to look for the surprising and unclassifiable in self-modelling activities in order to appreciate the subversion of existing values not only through the rejection of capital’s subjective modes (infantile, incessant self-promoter, conspiracy theorist, guilty debtor), but also in the affective aspects as well: a warmth of relations, in certain ways of desiring, in a positive affirmation of creativity, in a willingness to love, in a willingness to live or survive … Desire can only be lived in vectors of singularity (Guattari 2008: 63–64).

The technomaterialist focus of my approach to technoculture arises from a belief, as Guattari and Bifo have maintained, that the singularities of subjectification involve a fundamentally machinic process that takes place in and beyond the use of technical tools. Guattari did not much like tool talk, no matter how much the language of the cybernetics and new information technologies underwriting new communalism in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalogue (access to tools) would have supported his claims (Turner 2006), or even that the tools (either imaginary or real projections) for transversality may be compatibly derived from radical pedagogical theory, either that of Freinet or Illich (Genosko 2009). For Guattari subjectivity is already machinic because humans and machines are component parts that combine together with one another and other parts by means of recurrence and communication on a machinic phylum; machines are more ontologically basic than tools, and all projections (fantasies or tools) presuppose machines. Guattari shows great sensitivity to a telephonic phenomenon enjoyed by phreakers (phone trippers) in explaining how desiring-machines (every break in a flow is itself a connective flow) are carved out within the margins of technical social machines. One dials an unassigned number and is routed to an automated

Reviews for When Technocultures Collide

[davidwineberg · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is confused. It gives the impression – from the title and the Guy Fawkes character on the cover – that it will be about subversive dissent using technology in innovative ways. Leveraging technology the way the mainstream wishes you hadn’t. Or couldn’t.But this is not what the book is about at all.Genosko takes mostly minor players who didn’t accomplish much, and uses them to show a pattern of “weakness and failure”. I don’t know what he expected, but I appreciate any sort of attempt at innovation because you never know where it might lead. I particularly liked phone phreaking in its day, because it put the blind front and center for their 15 minutes of fame and respect (and employment). Allowing mass live chats by everyone phoning the same numbers at the same time was brilliant. I met many people that way. It was the rave invitation of the 70s. Subversive, illegal of course, and great, totally harmless fun.In “Hacking the Grid”, Genosko makes the simple mistake of greed vs good. In internet hacks, there is no immediate gain for the hacker. Same for urban explorers; their wanderings profit no one and are interesting at all only to a tiny subset of readers. Whistleblowers not only don’t profit, theyface persecution. Hacking your electric meter though, is straight theft for immediate personal gain. It doesn’t belong in the same book.But the most confusion comes from the first chapter, lovingly dedicated to the (non existent) toe mouse. That a computer mouse manipulated by a toe would free our two hands is interesting, but hardly the leadoff for a book called“When Technocultures Collide”. It gets plenty of play in the (endless, dense) intro, and the conclusion too. It’s important, I guess.At the other end he goes on at length about whistleblowing, without ever mentioning Edward Snowden. This is like profiling Hitler without ever mentioning World War II. Lots of Manning,Assange, even Ellsberg, but no Snowden. I guess he was just another failure in Genosko’s terms. Or maybe Snowden was a success and would ruin the flow. He never breathes the name, so we’ll never know.I’m not sure why anyone should buy this book. Its conclusions are weak and negative. There’s nothing to take away, no discovery to cite.There are no collisions of technocultures. David Wineberg