In
the 2012 book, Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy
Jan Holmevik aims to rewrite the narrative of dark hacking that journalists like John Markoff
created in order to exploit the fear some people felt about the Internet.
What is fascinating is how this narrative fed the fear of so many while it energized an entire generation.
The cult classic
Hackers that came out
1995, brought hacking to life in ways that inform our contemporary moment.
Widening our scope of hacking reveals the potentialities of play and possibilities for invention,
but it's important that we understand the ethos of the hacker.
Because not only do they play with code they play with all kinds of conventional norms.
Holmevik points this out: "Seeing the computer as a ludic space in this way
affords us a better opportunity to understand how it came to hold
such a fascination for hackers and how they ended up making it their own unique bricolage."
Hackers are the ultimate bricoleurs.
They destroy structures in order to rebuild each creation and each structure becomes an object of play.
So what exactly do they play with? Systems.
What post structural theories teach us is how every system is
vulnerable for the sole reason that it is a system.
In other words, every system is a man-made assemblage of signifiers
In The Ecstasy of Communication, Jean Baudrillard writes,
"Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network.
There is no longer any transcendence or depth but only the imminent surface of operations unfolding
the smooth and functional surface of communication."
He goes on to write,
"We no longer invest our objects with the same emotions, the same dreams of possession, loss,
mourning, jealousy. The psychological dimension has been blurred,
even if one can still retrieve it in particular."
Baudrillard gets some of this right: the curtain closes at the theatre, the mirror shatters, and none of the objects
we desire could contain our emotions.
But where Baudrillard fails and thinkers like Greg Ulmer and Jan Holmevik triumph is in their willingness to play the game.
The free play that Derrida speaks of in his famous essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play" is only possible when you realize the relationship
Between signifier and signified is constructed.
We make meaning through this construction.
We fashion together code to create websites just like we assemble our clothes to communicate everything from wealth to age.
I suspect that even though we recognize our systems are constructed, our impulse for totality
and longing for truth never disappears.
But what we do with that longing is up to us.
Just like Simone de Beauvoir advances Jean-Paul Sartre's work in Being and Nothingness.
Jan Holmevik advances Greg Ulmer's work in Avatar Emergency.
What Holmevik does here is focus on tension within the ambiguity.
Heidegger said anxiety makes manifest the nothing and Holmevik would counter this with the idea that anxiety
ought to manifest in something.
Holmevik's charge to his readers is to harness this energy that previous generations called existential
angst in order to focus on creation and invention.
If we do this,
especially in the realm of play, we will meet the consequences of our choices
again and again, in ways that allow for our real-world decisions to matter.
The abundance of signifiers demands that we play. Play like hackers,
Play like children,
Play like Sophists, and play like our world depends on it.
