Net Text State "Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime",
Paul A. Taylor, 1999, Routledge, London and New York

"Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State",
Jerry Everard, 2000, Routledge, London and New York

"Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature",
Espen J. Aarseth, 1997, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore and London

"Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Special Issue: Machinic Modulations, New Cultural Theory and Technopolitics",
edited by John Armitage, Volume 4, Issue 2, September 1999

Reviewed by Alan Sondheim

All of these books are vital to an understanding of cyberspace in larger contexts. For a moment I want to concentrate on Hackers and Virtual States, both of which represent a major epistemological transformation that began in the last decade or so - from the concept of entity to that of boundary maintenance. There are precursors to this in neural network theory, which constructs entity identifications through contour enhancement; as numerous experiments show, the entities themselves need not exist - we might all be living on a holodeck.

Boundary maintenance occurs within and across contested sites that are permanent only to the extent that sufficient energy wills them as such; the sites exist within potential wells, non-equilibrium thermodynamic situations that create the appearance of permanency. As Irigaray, Deleuze, and Guattari, among others, emphasized, there are other modalities - those of fluid mechanics or the nomad for example - to describe the world.

What of all of this? The epistemology moves from Aristotelian logics to fuzzy psychoanalytics on one level, operating with gestural dynamics instead of fixed categories. This move is occurring everywhere, as genres themselves are being questioned - the contemporary problematic in everything from definitions of life and death to breakaway provinces and the nature of matter itself, is that of the nature of a real which no longer resides in fixed roles, objects, processes, or states.

All this by way of saying that Hackers and Virtual States examine parallel phenomena - the permeability of membranes that are, after all, harbor potential wells maintained by energy (corporation firewalls, national boundaries) - as if there were secure sites, safe addresses, "natural" nationality, and clearly-defined boundaries in the world. Early on, Mike Davis took all of this to task in City of Quartz, describing the high cost of boundary-maintenance among the Los Angeles police force, home-owners' associations, and so forth. In Hackers, Taylor describes - with numerous quotations throughout - the relation of hackers to each other, to gender issues, to the status quo - to everything, in fact, except for the psychoanalytical drives that may fuel hacking in the first place.

This is one of the clearest expositions, after Levy's 1984 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, of hacker ethos and sociology. Emphasis is placed on hackers' relationships in terms of exploits, passed knowledge, and community - the book points out that the hacker-as-loner is way off the mark, given the conventions, IRC channels, etc. that exist. The issue of gender, which is of great interest to me, is discussed in great detail - almost all hacking is male, and there is a real bias against female hacking out there - as are issues of internal boundary formations and maintenance among the hacking groups. The book is also a rhetoric of hacking and security communities - what drives someone from one side to the other - what creates and maintains notions of professionalization. The movements between these communities are of course dialectical, even in the strict sense of the word - and one might argue that the movements themselves create and circulate among boundaries. Even the communities themselves are contested - who is a hacker and who is not? This discussion goes back for decades, and has become exacerbated as hackers become more politicized, are hired, and more numerous - one can hack today just by copying out the programs in, say, 2600 magazine.

I love this book for its clarity, for its own movement from quotation to analysis to sociology to philosophy, and for its kindness and lack of posturing. Hacking continues to fascinate me; it's intimately connected to other creative activity such as net art and MOO building, and it's a kind of burrowing into protocol and software/wetware/hardware that presages a cyborgian future the rest of us only dream about.

And I love as well Jerry Everard's Virtual States, which is both exceedingly detailed and dense, and enormously easy to read; this book is I think a necessity for an understanding of the telecommunications transformation of our contemporary geopolitical landscape. Everard doesn't argue for the ultimate disappearance of the nation-state, but describes it as a "cultural artifact" whose role is moving more towards identity-economies, and somewhat away from economies of goods and services. The latter are becoming embedded in the inter-relationships of transnational corporate trade and trade agreements, while the former are being both challenged and reaffirmed by the Internet and other telecommunications media. In both economies, there are issues of boundary identification and maintenance - and here again, a new epistemology begins to emerge - one in which there is no fixed point of view (i.e. similar to a perspectival landscape), but multiple viewpoints, multiple identities and economies, multiple wars and mafias, multiple nations - multiplicities, in fact, everywhere, challenging the literal status-quo.

If the hacker is cyborg, the individual is citizen; if the hacker and machine lay mutual claims upon each other, the nation-state and individual do so likewise; if there is the threat of real force against the transgression of hacking, there is likewise against the citizen who oppose state regulation for any reason.

Everard's book is organized into four parts: Virtual states: theory and practice; The developing world; The developed world; and Internet and society. Each chapter is accompanied by a summary of the main points, at the end, set off from the rest. The earlier sections stress the porosity of the nation state and history of the Net; they also emphasize the distinction between the haves and have-nots, both in terms of telecommunications, and basic goods and services. These economies are inter-related but not equivalent; the flows are constructed differently. (I would argue, as does Everard between the lines, that the former is bottom-up and the latter top-down in terms of usage.) In other words, the Internet creates an environment of somewhat volatile users who - at least in some sectors - determine the ultimate flow and configuration of online corporate culture, while goods and services flow from transnationals down to individual users. In e-commerce, which is becoming more and more prevalent, the two interpenetrate. In the background, however, there are always issues of information warfare and security, which are of great concern, and to which we all fall victim.

I want to point out here, that as the "Internet" grows, it also tends to disappear - it's the background articulating metaphor, for these books - but at the same time, it is becoming an integral part of the industrial and post-industrial landscape. What is clear, is that there is no longer (if there ever was) an "it" - instead, there is an accumulation of sites, computers and other devices, media, and so forth, which are more or less tied together through both filtering and enabling technologies - again, the classical concept of a "network" breaks down, replaced by mobile data fields, both digital and analog. In this sense, the subject of these books is constantly undergoing transformations, breakdowns, divisions, and obsolescence - and the virtual/real subjectivities that inhabit this landscape are also undergoing the equivalent.

It's clear, in terms of subjectivity, that we are far from the (somewhat mythical) model of the television viewer who passively watches the screen; these situations require a high degree of interactivity. Aarseth's book, Cybertext, stresses the concept of an "ergodic literature", a literature requiring active participation on the part of the reader - participation beyond, say, sequential reading itself. His examples range from the early online game "Adventure" to MOOs and MUDs - but also to such origin texts as the I Ching.

This literature is problematized, much along the lines Foucault sketched out; what is or is not a text is complex within hypertexting or hypercard. A taxonomy of texts is proposed, user functions are described, and a typology is developed with categories such as Access (random, controlled); Linking (Explicit, conditional, none); and User Function (Explorative, configurative, interpretative, textonic). Aarseth also describes a characteristic of ergodic texts, which he calls "intrigue", "to suggest a secret plot in which the user is the innocent, but voluntary, target (`victim' is too strong a term), with an outcome that is not yet decided - or rather with several possible outcomes that depend on various factors such as the cleverness and experience of the player".

A section of one of Aarseth's chapters is entitled "The Aesthetics of Nonlocal Discourse", which applies to MOOs and MUDs, for example - one might argue for a local or situated aesthetics working from Aarseth's (and others') categories applied to the bewildering number of online chat and other applications.

There are interrelationships among the three books, which contrast Net, text, and state - three entities which, at least until recently, have been relatively well-defined. Each of these categories now interpenetrates and is "smeared" across the others, and the division between haves and have-nots excludes the majority of the world's population from participating in any of this. Elsewhere, in other words, the Net is viewed as anything from empowering to threat; text might be the subject for language war; and the state is both oppressive and a problematic solution to self-determination.

What is missed here - and this is my personal bias at best - is a psychoanalytical/phenomenological approach. When I was taking notes for this review, I wrote the following:

"Somewhere in the 1980s I wrote about the production of postmodern theory as, in part, the result of urban apartment cultures, with their emphasis on electronic input/output technology. Now of course everyone has access to these through the Internet and other extensions of home computers.

Theory has moved accordingly. However, what is all too often overlooked is the real-time real-space aspects of being plugged in, and I keep going back to the Chinese restaurant referenced in hacking culture - fast high-protein food to 'keep going', but also a particular social situation. In the earlier culture of existential, the cafe served a similar purpose, and was described as a network of controls and gazes, but also of community. Now, there are issues that need to be discussed - how one approaches genre in general, in order to comprehend texts; what are the psychoanalytics of identity formation, reading, and hacking; what are the natures of compulsion and obsession; and so forth. I don't think hacking, for example, will be understood beyond the sociological models, until we can come to grips, on one hand, with the desire or curiosity of exploration and boundary construction/maintenance, and, on the other with the concrete sites of hacking (restaurants, bedrooms, computer labs, etc.) as environments.

All three books, by the way, give excellent and numerous examples of state, hack, and text - I want more, on another psychoanalytical (or at least recent anthropological) level, since the books touch deeply on what it is to be human in the first and last place. (Similar issues apply to the question of so-called Net addiction; on one hand it appears in the popular press as the product of computer culture itself - on the other, it seems to me to be the result of any conceivable world-creating and maintaining behavior.) "So for me there is a missing text among the three (which I have found indispensable, as I keep emphasizing, for understanding the deeper changes produced in cultures world-wide by the telecommunications "revolution"). That text is an approach modulated by anthropology, cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, phenomenology, and psychoanalytics - it is a text of being-human, a fundamental text in a sense, and perhaps one which problematizes fundamentality itself.

The fourth book is the special issue of Angelaki on "Machinic Modulations" - the term itself harkens back to Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus), and their influence is felt throughout. D & G provide a flux of transitional models (in the sense of transitional objects) and languages that are applicable to the Net and telecommunications in general. There are twenty articles and an introduction by John Armitage; the articles are divided into two sections (which overlap of course) - New Culture Theory and Technopolitics. The authors are some of the best-known writers on cultural-theoretical issues in relation to telecommunications, nationalisms, philosophy, and gender issues, and include McKenzie Wark, John Armitage, Paul Virillio with Friedrich Kittler, Douglas Kellner, Verena Andermatt Conley, Patrick Crogan, Mark Dery, and Nicholas Zurbrugg among others. Armitage writes on Hakim Bey, whose energy and style has always fascinated me (for example his Autonomedia book, T.A.Z.); his text is a deconstruction of Bey's position, arguing "However, the only conclusion that can be drawn from this particular cybernaut's passage through a rather brief period of time is that the utopian moment of the TAZ has passed - both for him and for us - and that the new radical politics of cyberculture will, of necessity, have to recognize that the overwhelming force of presence or solidarity really does arise from the reality of class." Armitage argues, I think correctly, for a "serious theoretical analysis and comprehension of globalitarianism - the extension of the spatial and temporal logic of cybernetic finance capital into all areas of social and culture life - or, in short, an analysis of cybersociety."

The Hakim Bey approach is one that has anarchic resonance with a number of people, an energy which can't be transferred or perhaps even transformed through such an analysis. It was the Manifesto, not Capital, that motivated early Marxism, I think, and such an approach (which Armitage has pointed out, has been somewhat abandoned) can act as a catalyst, just, ironically, as the Zapatistas are catalytic for far more than Mexican politics. I'm thinking of a kind of ragged energy which one might also find in aspects of net.art or hacking culture or the 7-11 email list, as well as cyberfeminism, critiqued by Dery (who starts off with a quote from Levy's Hackers). He focuses on Sadie Plant's Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture, in an argument reminiscent of Armitage, restating the need for grassroots organization in addition to cyberfeminism's "crucial corrective". There is a rough parallel between Bey's and Plant's positions, as described - both are boundary-maintaining and cultural-political, even situationist. And to some extent, perhaps, both Armitage and Dery miss the catalytic-energy point these types of discourse, in contra-distinction to others (or acknowledge them, but see them as an either/or situation).

Oddly enough for an issue entitled Machinic Modulations, there is no work from the hacking or net.art/nettime communities here. The modulations are in the form of discursivities, not interruptions/interventions themselves; given the nature of the subject, I would have liked to have seen a broader range throughout. On the other and far more important hand, there are amazing texts here - Armitages's Dissecting the Data Body: An Interview with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, for example - which emphasizes their post-Baudrill-bardic positioning (see also Roy Boyne's Crash Theory, The Ubiquity of the Fetish at the End of Time, in the same issue) - as well as Paul Virilio's and Friedrich Kittler's The Information Bomb - A Conversation. (The subheadings are: speed, war, and politics; interactivity, information chernobyl, and imperialism; territory, time, and technology; technological fundamentalism, integration, and social cybernetics; information, catastrophe, and violence.) The conversation begins with an introduction by Armitage who states "Back in the 1950s, Einstein claimed that humanity would have to face three kinds of bomb. The first bomb, the atomic bomb, was manufactured by the United States during the Second World War and dropped in Hiroshima in Japan in 1945. The second bomb was the information bomb. The third bomb was the population bomb, set to explode in the twenty-first century." The two authors set their sites on the second, "because it is currently exploding".

This book also is indispensable; it covers a great deal of ground, from Virilio and Latour through Zizek. Its approach or driving force, as Armitage says, is the theoretical humanities, and the broad approach is academic/analytical.

So what is really necessary for comprehending cyberspace and/or our "contemporary situation"? I'd place these four volumes very much at the top - combined with, say, nettime's Readme! Readme! Readme! (Autonomedia), and a number of email lists as well - in particular, some of the Spoons philosophy lists, nettime itself, and perhaps 7-11. I would add some other, more intimate texts, such as Turkle's now old Life on the Screen, and Verena Andermatt Conley's anthology, Rethinking Technologies (1993!), with articles by Guattari, Nancy, Ronell, Virilio, etc. I'd want to look at the post-Cultures of Internet (ed. Shields) and Internet Culture (ed. Porter) books as well. I'd want everything by Kittler, by Ronell, by Lingis, by Trinh Minh-Ha, stressing multi-cultural and distributive aspects of networks and networking, genders, technologies, and desires. I'd want to keep Derrida in mind, and a generally deconstructive approach to the world, coupled with theories of postmodernism and postmodernity (all the way back to Lyotard's seminal book and forward through Mike Davis' deconstructions). And I'd want to ride hard in online communities, watching the flood and dispersion of new technologies, and seeing if they make any `differance' at all.

Finally, I want to perhaps apologize for this review, which hardly does any of these books justice; which meanders too much, quotes too much and focuses too little on specific issues; which stresses my own viewpoint far too often ("interpenetrations", "dispersions", the problematizing of epistemologies), and so forth. I read for my own pleasure, my own use; I try to bend this text into a convoluted form of interstitiality that may be of interest to no one but myself.

Alan Sondheim, NY, 2/2000

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Net Text State "Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime",
Paul A. Taylor, 1999, Routledge, London and New York
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"Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State",
Jerry Everard, Nov 1999, Routledge, London and New York
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"Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature",
Espen J. Aarseth, 1997, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore and London
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