Gunkel, David J. “Hacking Cyberspace. “

Gunkel, David J.  “Hacking Cyberspace. ”  JAC  20.4 (2000): 797-823.  07 Feb. 2009.   <http://www.jacweb.org/Archived_volumes/Volume20.htm#Issue4>.

Summary:“Hacking Cyberspace” proposes a method of investigation that infiltrates, reevaluates, and reprograms the systems that have shaped and delimited cyberspace. Despite this apparently simple description, these two words and their juxtaposition necessarily resonate with noisy complexities that complicate this preliminary formulation. First, neither “hacking” nor “cyberspace” designate activities, entities, or concepts that are univocal, easily defined, or immediately understood. In fact, both terms are riddled with apparently contradictory denotations that challenge, if not defy, conventional logic. Hacking, for example, designates an activity that is simultaneously applauded for its creativity and reviled for its criminal transgressions, while cyberspace constitutes a neologism that is pulled in every conceivable direction by every conceivable interest… “Hacking Cyberspace,” however, suggests that hacking is to be expropriated from and turned against its proper and indigenous situation as some form of critical intervention. (798 )

Area Cluster: 106–Information Technologies: The Internet and the World Wide Web.

Methodology: Genre Analysis

Most Valuable Citations: JDerrida DHaraway MHeidegger WGibson FNietzche SLevy

Money Quotes:

“There is,” as Acid Phreak points out, “no one hacker ethic. Everyone has his own” (“Is Computer” 76). Hacking, therefore, comprises performances that not only resist univocal signification but are also highly situated and radically empirical. It is this fundamental and irreducible differentiation that is constitutive of the practice of hacking and responsible for the term’s seemingly unrestrained lexical drift and unfortunate history. (800)

Donna Haraway terms this curious form of exploration and manipulation “blasphemy,” which she distinguishes from “apostasy” (149). Whereas apostasy designates a mere renunciation and abandonment by which one comes to occupy a position that literally stands apart or separated from something, blasphemy comprises a calculated response that understands, acknowledges, and continually works within an established system. Like a parasite, the blasphemer is not an alien proceeding from and working on the outside. The blasphemer is an insider, who not only understands the intricacies of the system but does so to such an extent that she or he is capable of fixating on its necessary but problematic lacunae, exhibiting and employing them in such a way that disrupts the system to which the blasphemer initially and must continually belong. Although these operations can be reduced to and written off as mere adolescent pranks, they comprise more often than not a form of serious play. (801)

Despite the fact that the word has been routinely employed to name recent advancements in computer technology, telecommunications networking, and immersion user-interface systems, cyberspace is neither the product of technological research and development nor a conglomeration of hardware and software. (804)

Deconstruction always takes place as a parasitic operation that works within a specific system and by employing tools and strategies derived from that system. It cannot, therefore, simply remove itself from this milieu and stand outside what defines and delimits its very possibility. For this reason, deconstruction is never simply finished with that in which and on which it operates but takes place as a kind of never-ending engagement with the systems in which it takes place and is necessarily situated. (811-812)

Hacking cyberspace as a method of analysis, therefore, does not take sides in the conventional debates and arguments that compose cyberspace. It does not, for example, either advocate or dispute the various positions espoused by technoutopians, techno-dystopians, or the various hybrids that attempt synthetic coalitions between these dialectical opposites. Instead, it endeavors to understand and to manipulate the cultural programs and social values that dictate and direct this and every other dialectic by which cyberspace is constructed, debated, and evaluated. In doing so, hacking exposes cyberspace to alternative configurations and eccentric possibilities that do not conform to usual expectations, behave according to accepted criteria, or register on conventional scales of value. Consequently, the outcome of hacking cyberspace is neither good nor bad, positive nor negative, constructive nor destructive; it comprises a general strategy by which to explore and manipulate the systems of rationality by which these modes of assessment become possible, function, and make sense. (816)