- Describe the difference between political design and hacktivist art. Use an example of each and describe how that work fits the category of design or art.
– Political design is used to wield power. Hacktivist artists don’t want the power that politicians do, they want to change or create for the better, not for the power. They hack hoping to create awareness of what’s going on in that nation-state, and let the political structures know that something is wrong, and someone doesn’t like it.
- What does execution mean? How does it relate to computers (i.e. .exe files)? What are some examples of executable art? How is execution different from representation? In other words, how does each relate to the media paradigms of one-to-many vs. many-to-many?
-Execution means going through with a process. A .exe file tells the computer to open the file and go through the process that is listed inside it. Execution art is different because you could interact with it, change what is going on with the piece. I think a good example would be the hard drive filled with illegal files. It was just a hard drive, but if you plugged it in, you could install those files, run the .exe scripts, and it would be completely different than if it were just sitting there.
- Why do you think hacktivist artists find themselves hacking capitalist and political structures that most other people revere? What problem or dangers do they see in these forms of power? Use sample projects to answer this question.
-The structures that hacktivists hack are the ones that are potentially world-changing, because they have so much power. Governments and other large political structures have the authority to do almost anything they want with their country (and the world), and hacktivists are trying to make sure that they don’t go crazy. A good example of this is the net.flag website. A country’s flag is a symbol, representative of their nation and the power it holds. If you take that flag and merge it with hundreds of others, suddenly it doesn’t have meaning anymore.
- How do hacktivists confirm McLuhan’s prediction that the ‘nation-state’ would not survive the advent of electronic media? Do hacktivists challenge or question any critical policies of nation-states? Does their practice suggest any alternatives to the nation-state? Or why are they not really concerned about anarchy?
– Hacktivists are able to break into, or hack, these political structures’ websites and change the information on them, ridicule them, make secret information public and free. You couldn’t do that when there wasn’t the internet. Hacktivists do this so that the nation-state will take notice and hopefully make some changes for the better. I don’t think people would let themselves become an anarchistic state after such a long period of being led. It might not be the society that we have now, but I think if something happened it would have some kind of leadership.
It was interesting the way “hacktivist” was defined as compared to “hacker”. A hacker is without cause, hacking simply to create a “crypto-anarchy”. On the other hand, a “hacktivist” is a hacker activist; someone who hacks with a cause, who wants attention. Hacktivists were compared to terrorists because they want attention “more than votes”, and they want it from the whole world. That paragraph kind of stood out to me.
There was also a paragraph that talked about certain “political designs”, Napster in particular. The book said that 70% of Americans said they couldn’t see paying for online content. I see where they’re coming from, because chances are the content is somewhere on the internet for free if you look hard enough or are willing to download an illegal file. At the same time, if nobody paid any money for that online content, there wouldn’t be any online content, because the people making it wouldn’t get paid. I think 70% is a reasonable number because if that other 30% pays, it’s enough to keep the makers of the content happy enough to keep making more.
Leave a Reply