Splatter

by Alan Sondheim

I've been a reader of 2600 for a long time now.  I'm not a hacker, but I write about being online (the title of an anthology I edited).  The Trump election took many people by surprise; I saw it coming, and I want to talk about this in terms of hacking and freedom of information.  Most of this will probably be familiar.

Semiotics, the study of signs and sign systems, depends on stability - the signifier and signified, for example, are relatively coherent for a "reasonable" period of time.  The elaboration of signs and their relationships is complex; semiosis describes the ongoing elucidation and transformation of signs over time.  What is important to understand is that semiosis is presumed to be a rationalized process, one that's traceable, accountable.  But when we're dealing with high-speed net acrobatics, the situation is qualitatively and fundamentally different.

Two things I want to point out - that hacking, particularly release of documents (WikiLeaks etc.) isn't neutral; it's highly political by its very nature.  The release of documents related to HRC, and not to DT for a lengthy period of time, ensured that the attacks would be continuous; her campaign was derailed as a result.  Comey, unethical from the start, rushed into Congress with vague allegations that had no basis in fact; the maxim that one's innocent until proven guilty was derailed by innuendo.

The second point is that any sort of continuous attack forms a kind of bullying to which there's no response; it's impossible to fight back when semiosis is derailed or transformed into a form of "splatter."  Instead of the slow and absorbable evolution of sign systems, one's faced with a high-speed and random dynamics, much like DoS - you reply to one allegation, and a number of others have already appeared.  It's a form of torture; the victim is worn down trying to keep up, the splattering appears random, there's no way to stop it, to prepare against it.  The traditional news media were caught off-guard by this; their responses were those of organizations who previously had all the time in the world for analysis (or so it appeared) on their hands.  Now with fast-forward net speeds and tweets, HRC was raped by innuendo.  ("Rape" may seem too strong a word here, but so many of the attacks were based on her body, her age, her "faltering," her gender.  It was debilitating and horrifying to watch.)

Hackers have enormous power today - not only to potentially shut down power plants, but to change the political direction of entire countries.  Continuous release of emails, Trump's continuous tweets deeply transform the media landscape - in this case for the worse, of course, and with the attack on net neutrality (and the beginnings of censorship on the horizon); we might find hacking itself limited and dangerous outside of anonymous and brutal security agencies.

The splatter - what I call splatter semiotics - is based on speed, something that has been analyzed in postmodern studies for a long time.  The world is speeding up in its call-and-response time, but the speedup isn't coherent from one site or institution to another; there are fractures, breakdowns, misrecognitions.  When old media slide against new media, when economies of attention themselves are disrupted, the potential for absolutism and proto-fascism arises.

(For what it's worth, I use the term "defuge" to indicate a kind of abject pastiness that arises when a book, for example, is dropped halfway through and then picked up much later - it's difficult to return to it, it seems worn out.  The same holds true with erotic texts and images, and with the targets of bullying; texts, images, and even people can feel "worn out" to others.  The target of repeated bullying is often disparaged for example.  The wearing out is displaced from the reader or onlooker to the victim him- or herself.  HRC appeared more and more worn out, used up, as the campaign wore on; the attacks, which increasingly seemed continuous, left the campaign in shambles.  I think defuge is a major component of politics today; it's tied to bullying, to reducing the fullness of a person to a discarded "thing."  At the end, given gerrymandering, it was clear that HRC would lose, her campaign's measured response defeated by the tweet and email onslaught.)

This is where hacking of course can make an enormous difference for good.  It seems as if all the fake news and tweets comes from the left (I may be mistaken in this); it seems also that it's necessary to fight back accordingly - not in terms of fake news, but in terms of sped-up responses, responses which are no longer replies, but are in themselves actions of resistance, attacks on policies, etc.  The dialog at the moment is mastered and controlled by the left (who are themselves a loose coalition).  It has to be seized and subverted.  It's not important whether or not one likes HRC or would rather have had Bernie.  What's coming down the pike is incredibly frightening and brutal, erasing and even annihilating divisions on the left.  I think that hackers can be in the forefront of a response which is absolutely necessary today if democracy (in whatever form, and with all its current miseries) is to continue and grow.  I would never underestimate the current regime; it takes just a few years at most for a country to abandon a democratic agenda and turn towards an absolutism that becomes increasingly difficult to eradicate.

Resist from /dev/null!

Alan Sondheim is a new media artist/writer based in New England.