Interesting little article by by Karl Palmås of Gothenburg University for Resistance Studies Magazine.
It’s initial premise is that the tools we use affect our vision of the world:
“Serres argues that as new types of machines enter the social world, they may end up changing our ways of seeing the world. The logic of the motor did not only appear in the contraptions studied by engineers and natural scientists: it also shaped the theories of modern social scientists, philosophers and artists. In their introduction to the English edition of Serres’ book Hermes, Josué Harari and David Bell state that Serres charted how the motor emerged as “the universal model of knowledge in the nineteenth century, a construct that always functions in the same way in all cultural domains – from Marx to Freud, from Nietzsche to Bergson, or from Zola to Turner.”
The article then takes the Canadian activist magazine Adbusters as a case study, showing how it evolved from a motor-jamming metaphor to a computer hacking one and how this changed its vision of political strategy for change.
Phase 1: Jamming the motor
“For the countercultural youth, the only way out of this total motor was to throw gravel into the machinery, jamming its modes of operation, thus baring the monstrosity of the machine for all of the world to see. Public demonstrations, sit-ins, subversive art and various ways of “dropping out” mainstream culture were all different approaches to achieve this effect. Here, the obvious reference was the critical strategies – notably detournement – of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. More recently, culture jamming has served the same end:
“The goal of culture jammers is quite literally to ‘jam’ the culture, by subverting the messages used to reproduce this faith and blocking the channels through which it is propagated.”
Through the paramount success of Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a new generation of activists have been introduced to the “culture jamming” strategies of Adbusters magazine. Incidentally, the magazine is also one of the key targets for Heath and Potter’s criticism, as the magazine can be viewed as “the flagship publication of the culture-jamming movement”.
Phase 2: Hacking capitalism’s operating system
“The move towards understanding the economy as a computer was finalised in the September/October issue of Adbusters. Here, the main feature article explicitly depicts capitalism as an operating system:
“Capitalism is the almighty operating system of our lives […] But who is in charge of this operating system? Who wrote it? Who maintains it? Who protects it from viruses? Who reboots it when it crashes? So here’s the big question: can we the people – civil society – take charge? Can we rewrite the capitalist code? […] In other words, can we turn capitalism into an open source design project and make it more sustainable and responsible to our and future generation’s [sic] needs?”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Adbusters’ recent move to promote antipreneurship is its commitment to the hacker ethic. In the quote above (on building “a real economic threat to top-down corporate capitalism”) the long-term strategy of the antipreneurship strategy is to build robust competitors to large corporations – alternative structures that can latch onto the current market settings. Unlike their previous countercultural imperative to de(con)struct the societal machine, Adbusters’ new imperative is to experiment with its possibilities, rewriting its underlying code. Here, Adbusters is joining a growing number of writers who argue that the hacker is the ideal artist/critic of the 21st century. “
If you want to other quotes and cultural references, do read the whole article.