CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Sydney eScholarship THE HACKING MONOPOLISM servers. With the money we got we porting all the 250,000 profiles. Users TRILOGY automatically bought Google shares, so trying to contact them ended up at their Alessandro Ludovico, Neural, Bari, we were able to potentially buy Google respective Facebook public profiles. Italy, E-mail: <[email protected]>. via its own advertisements. By Paolo Cirio, Brooklyn, USA, E-mail: establishing this auto-cannibalistic The trilogy <[email protected]>. model, we deconstructed the new We found a significant conceptual hole advertisement mechanisms by rendering in all of these corporate systems and we Abstract them into a surreal click-based economic used it to expose the fragility of their The three artworks of the Hacking Monopolism model. omnipotent commercial and marketing Trilogy are Face to Facebook [1], Amazon Noir [2] In Amazon Noir, Amazon.com's web- strategies. In fact, all these corporations and GWEI-Google Will Eat Itself [3]. These works have much in common in terms of both site was the vulnerable target. We eluded established a monopoly in their methodologies and strategies. They all use custom their copyright protection with a sophis- respective sectors (Google, search programmed software to exploit three of the biggest ticated hack of the ‘Search Inside the online corporations, deploying conceptual hacks engine; Amazon, book selling; that generate unexpected holes in their well-oiled book’ service: by searching the first sen- Facebook, social media), but despite marketing and economic system. All three projects tence of a book we obtained the begin- that, their self-protective strategies are were ‘Media Hack Performances’ that exploited ning of the second sentence, and then by security vulnerabilities of the internet giants' not infallible. And we have been platforms to raise media attention about their abuse reiterating a few thousands searches, we successful in demonstrating this. of power. These performances were staged through obtained the whole text, redistributing it There are other common themes in the the global mass media for millions of spectators worldwide. The processes of the projects are always as pdf file through peer-to-peer net- projects. In all of them we stole data that illustrated diagrams that show the main directions works. is very sensitive for the respective corpo- and processes under which the software has been In Face to Facebook, through special developed to execute the performances. Finally, all rations. With Google it was the "clicks" the installations we exhibited did not use computers custom software, we collected “public on their AdSense Program; with Amazon or networks, focusing more on the display of the profile” data from more than 1,000,000 we started to steal the content of entire processes than on the technologies. Facebook users. Then we studied and books, and with Facebook we stole a customized a face recognition algorithm. Keywords: Face to facebook, Amazon Noir, huge amount of public data profiles. In Google will eat itself, hacking, revelatory diagrams, The algorithm was programmed to all the three projects, the theft is not used big online corporations. ‘group’ the huge amount of faces we to generate money at all, or for personal collected (and their attached data) in a economic advantage, but only to twist Face to Facebook is the third work in a few simple categories (‘climber’, ‘easy the stolen data or knowledge against the series that began with GWEI-Google going’, ‘funny’, ‘mild’, ‘sly’ and ‘smug’ interests of the respective corporations. Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir (the last - working definitions), with some intui- In GWEI it was the shares obtained two co-authored with Ubermorgen). tive differences, for both male and fe- through the money created by the Ad- In GWEI we wanted to buy Google using male subjects. The software effectively Sense program; in Amazon Noir it was its own money, generated by serving extracted 250,000 faces that were con- the pdf books distributed for free; and in Google AdSense text advertisements nected to the relevant public data in our Face To Facebook it was the collection first on a fake marketing website, and database. We established a dating web- of profiles moved with no prior notice to then on a network of hidden web- site called www.Lovely-Faces.com, im- a dating website. Indeed all the projects, independently Fig. 1. Face to facebook installation at Transmediale festival, Berlin, 2011 claim that some of the corporation’s "crown jewels", including their brand image and marketing approaches, can be hacked, by focusing only on their estab- lished strategies and thinking in a "what if?" fashion. Furthermore, all of the pro- jects were based on a "hacking" idea that, although pursued on a sophisticated level and with custom software, could have been applied by anybody with simi- lar results. This is one of the fundamen- tal values of these projects. Finally, all the installations we exhibited did not use computers or networks. We were trying to be coherent with the projects, but fo- cused more on the display of the pro- cesses than on the technologies. Face-to Facebook, smiling in the eternal party Social networking is naturally addictive. It's about exploring something very familiar that has never been available before: staying in touch with past and present friends and acquaintances in a Please reference as: [Author(s)-of-paper] (2013) [Title-of-paper] in Cleland, K., Fisher, L. & Harley, R. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium of Electronic Art, ISEA2013, Sydney. http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/9475 Page numbering begins at 1 at the start of the paper. single, potentially infinite, virtual space. connect to the several hundred people In fact, Facebook’s subliminal mantra The phenomenon challenges us who await them online. seems then to be "be personal, be psychologically, creating situations that The market value of these companies popular, never stop." It has even gone so previously were not possible. Before the is proportional to the number of users far as to make it difficult to notice when rise of social networking, former friends they have. Facebook is valued at around a friend closes their account (you need to and acquaintances would tend to drift 50 billion dollars [5]: it has one billion check the friend’s list to have any idea) away from us and potentially become users [6]. The game can often translate [7]. consigned to our personal histories. into a form of social binging in which The more successful (and crowded) Having a virtual space with (re)active the number of friends a user has is never the party, the more the private funders people constantly updating their enough to satisfy. But what kind of space are happy to put money into it. The price activities is the basic, powerful is Facebook? Facebook is not home - it the guests are unconsciously paying is fascination of the social network. But is way larger and more crowded. And it's that they are giving away their there's another attraction, based on the not the street, because you're supposed to (constantly updating) virtual identity. elusive sport (or perhaps urge) to know everybody in your space. Guests, in fact, organize their own space, position ourselves. The answer to the Facebook is an eternal, illusory party, and therefore their own ‘party’, offering fundamental identity question, "who am under surveillance and recorded for all the party owner (Facebook) a connected, I?" can be given only in relation to the time. Its structure invites you to first heterogeneous group of people who others that we interact with (friends, replicate and then enhance your real share interests. As such they offer what family, work colleagues, and so on). And social structures, replicating your can be termed as “crowd-sourced the answer to this question seems clearer experiences on your own personal targeting” – the indirect identification of after we take a look at our list of social "screen space". people’s targets and desires by the users network friends. In this unending party, you meet and themselves. In fact the spontaneously So an intimate involvement and join old and new friends, acquaintances posted data provides an endless (almost (endless) questioning of our online and relatives. As with most parties, automatic) mutual profiling, enriching identity (often literally juxtaposing with everything is private, or restricted to the and updating the single virtual identities, our physical one) is perpetrated in the invited guests, but has the potential to in a collective self-positioning. But can social network game. But social network become public if accidentally shared. profile data be liberated from platforms are not public organizations Here the guests' activity and interests are Facebook’s inexorable logic? The designed to help support social also recorded through their posts in answer is yes, but it's important to focus problems, rather they support private different formats and media (pictures, on the core of the Facebook profiles and corporations. Their mission is not to help movies, trips, preferences, comments). see how they are recognized as virtual people create better social relationships It's an induced immaterial labour with identities. First, the profiles sublimate or to help them improve their self- instant gratification. Guests produce the owners' (real) social actions and positioning. Their mission is to make content by indirectly answering the references through their virtual money [4]. Economic success for these question "who am I?" and they get new presences. Second, they synthesize their corporations rests on persuading users to friends and feedback in the process. effectiveness in representing real people through a specific element: the profile Fig. 2.