The Sony Effect: Information War and Class Struggle 3.0
In his dense but incredibly good “Hacker Manifesto“, McKenzie Wark posited a new class struggle between the class of vectoral capitalists, vs. the hacker class. (this is different from my own theory of netarchical capital vs. peer producers, but nevertheless related). I’ve been following such conflicts closely via a specialized tag in Delicious.
But there is a good recent example, i.e. how Sony’s attack on sharing and information rights provoked a backlash from the hacker community:
Excerpted from an article by Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance :
“There’s an Internet phenomenon called the Streisand Effect. It happens when a person or company tries to suppress a piece of information and, in so doing, unintentionally popularizes it. It bears the name of Barbra Streisand because of her unsuccessful 2003 lawsuit attempting to remove photographs of her Malibu home from the Web—which of course had people flocking to the site that hosted the pictures.
In the future, a blowback in the realm of cybersecurity might be known as the Sony Effect. The Japanese conglomerate is still dealing with the fallout from an April hacking incident that targeted its PlayStation and Sony Online Entertainment networks, which some 100 million people use to play video games, watch movies, and listen to music online. The attack resulted in the second-largest data breach in U.S. history, exposing records including credit-card numbers and forcing Sony (SNE) to pull the plug on the networks indefinitely. (Sony hopes to have them back online by the end of May.) A full accounting of the disaster, both in dollar terms and in damage to the PlayStation brand, will take months, if not years.
Sony may have unintentionally brought the crisis on itself. While other tech companies have worked to establish an uneasy truce with hackers, Sony has antagonized them with lawsuits and prosecutions. At the same time, security experts say Sony essentially left the keys in the car, failing to adequately protect or even monitor crucial parts of its server infrastructure. “They appeared to be operating in an environment where no one had really assessed the risks,” says Eugene H. Spafford, a computer science professor at Purdue University who testified during a congressional hearing on the Sony hack on May 4. “
More details here.
