NETWORKED DISRUPTION NETWORKED fter the emergence of Web 2.0, the critical framework of art and hacktivism has shifted from developing strategies of opposition to embarking on the art of disruption. By identifying the present Acontradictions within the economical and political framework of Web 2.0, hacker and artistic practices are analysed through business instead of in opposition to it. Connecting together disruptive practices of networked art and hacking in California and Europe, the author proposes a constellation of social networking projects that challenge the notion of power and hegemony, such as mail art, Neoism, e Church of the SubGenius, Luther Blissett, BAZZICHELLI TATIANA TATIANA BAZZICHELLI Anonymous, Anna Adamolo, Les Liens Invisibles, the Telekommunisten collective, e San Francisco Suicide Club, e Cacophony Society, the early Burning Man Festival, the NoiseBridge hackerspace, and many others. Tatiana Bazzichelli is a Postdoc Researcher at Leuphana University of NETWORKED Lüneburg and programme curator at the transmediale festival in Berlin. She received a PhD degree at Aarhus University in 2011, and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2009). She has previously written the book Networking: e Net as Artwork (2006). Active in the Italian hacker DISRUPTION community since the end of the ’90s, her project AHA:Activism-Hacking- Artivism won the honorary RETHINKING OPPOSITIONS IN ART, HACKTIVISM mention for digital communities AND THE BUSINESS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING at Ars Electronica in 2007. www.networkingart.eu www.disruptiv.biz <barcode space> DARC NETWORKED DISRUPTION Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking Tatiana Bazzichelli PhD Dissertation Department of Aesthetics and Communication Faculty of Arts Aarhus University DARC — Digital Aesthetics Research Center www.digital-aestetik.dk www.disruptiv.biz Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking First published in 2013 by Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, Helsingforsgade 14, DK-8200 Aarhus N, Denmark. www.digital-aestetik.dk PhD Dissertation: Tatiana Bazzichelli – Aarhus University, 2011. Supervisor: Søren Pold, Aarhus University, Denmark. Co-supervisor: Fred Turner, Stanford University, California. Examining committee: Franco Berardi, Geoff Cox, Olga Goriunova. Layout, design and cover: Jonas Frankki Proofreading: Alex Lay The research behind this book has been funded by Aarhus University with the support of the AU Ideas Research Project Disruptive Innovation in Digital Art/ Activism and Business. ISBN: 87-91810-24-8 EAN: 9788791810244 Copyright © 2013 Tatiana Bazzichelli License: This publication is licensed under the Peer Production License (2013) Commercial use encouraged for Independent and Collective/Common-based users. To view a full copy of this license, see page 44 of The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner (2010): http://telekommunisten.net/the- telekommunist-manifesto/ Exceptions include photographs, trademarks, logos and other identifying marks. Photographs, trademarks, logos and other identifying marks may not be reused or redistributed without prior licensing and written consent from the authors. Cover image inspired by a scene in the film Strike (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein, described as Holey Space by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari in their book: Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia(1986, pp. 413-414, also depicted in this book on p. 136). This remake of the original image features (from the left): Luther Blissett, Burning Man’s wooden sculpture, the Mechanical Turk, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, Trollface, Ray Johnson’s Bunny, Anna Adamolo, theThimbl logo by Telekommunisten, Neoist flaming steam iron by Pete Horobin, the Anonymous “suit without a head”, Les Liens Invisibles’ Captain Fake, and Facebook’s default profile picture. To Jonas and the prosperity of Bazzinkki INDEX Acknowledgements, 6 Introduction, 8 1 Disrupting Business in Networkscapes, 25 1.1 Networking Art and Business as Research Practice, 25 1.2 The Dilemma of the “Non-Political”, 30 1.3 Ethnography of Networks, 36 1.4 The Dialectical Paradox and The Paradox of Dialectics, 43 1.5 Montage as Method, 50 1.6 Disruption and Morphogenesis, 55 2 Social Networking Out of the Box, 67 2.1 Social Networks Before Social Networks, 67 2.2 The Gift-Exchange Grassroots Economy, 71 2.3 Collaborative Art Practices and Media Criticism, 74 2.4 Deconstructing Identities in Conspiracy Networks, 78 2.5 Mythologies of Demystification, 86 2.6 Disrupting the Bureaucracy, 101 3 When Art Goes Disruptive, 111 3.1 Towards a Critique of Hegemony in Participatory Networks, 111 3.2 The A/Moral Dis/Order of Recursive Publics, 116 3.3 The Anna Adamolo Multiple Singularity, 124 3.4 The Holey Spaces of Anonymous, 135 4 Common Participation and Networking Enterprises, 149 4.1 The Rhetoric of Web 2.0 & the Politics of Open Source, 149 4.2 The Business of Cybernetics, 157 4.3 The Art of Crowdsourcing, 167 4.4 Burning Man, A Social Network, 173 4.5 Hackers, Activists, Fetishists and Entrepreneurs, 184 5 The Art of Disruptive Business, 197 5.1 Rethinking Criticism, 197 5.2 The Hack of Performing Inactivity, 205 5.3 Activist Enterprises & Venture Communism, 218 5.4 Future Directions, 229 Appendix: Interviews, 236 Bibliography, 238 Webliography, 255 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Projects often come to life after sharing ideas with other people. This is certainly the case with the present manuscript, a networking journey that began in 2008 when I enrolled as a PhD scholar at Aarhus University in Denmark, if not before then, when I was involved in the hacker and art scene in Italy and Berlin. It is therefore difficult to list all the names of those who contributed to the genesis of this work, because they are too many, but I wish to mention those who have followed this undertaking more closely and who have contributed most actively to its development. First of all, I would like to thank Søren Pold for having supervised my PhD, for advising on each stage of the writing process with comments and suggestions and for helping me to become aware of my theoretical methodology and practice; Fred Turner for his inspiring research and our exciting conversations in the sunny halls of Stanford University; my colleagues at DARC, the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, and DUL, the Digital Urban Living Centre of Aarhus University, for their exchanges and interest expressed about the topics explored here; my colleagues in the Department of Information and Media Studies at Aarhus University (now Department of Aesthetics and Communication) for creating an interesting and positive research environment; Alex Lay for his precise and professional work in editing my interviews and proofreading my manuscript; Anne Sophie Witzke for translating my abstract into Danish; all the members of Autart, Jacob Appelbaum, Vittore Baroni, Scott Beale, Olivier Bonin, Loretta Borrelli, Paolo Cirio, Lee Felsenstein, Les Liens Invisibles and Guy McMuske, Lynn Hershman Leeson, John Law, Karen Marcelo, Hal Robins and V. Vale, for sharing their thoughts with me and answering my questions; the staff of H-STAR, the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University and the Stanford Humanities Lab – Henrik Bennetsen, in particular – for having facilitated my stay at Stanford University and providing many interesting contacts; Massimo Canevacci for his advice on my methodology and because 6 his theoretical polyphonic approach has been an inspiration to me ever since I studied at La Sapienza University in Rome in the 1990s; Chris and Peter Mock, without whose friendship, hospitality and warmth my journey in and around San Francisco would not have been so special, nor my research in the Bay Area so passionate; Kristoffer Gansing for providing me with a new job opportunity in Berlin, thereby pushing me to complete this research; Marco Deseriis, Gabriella Coleman and Franco Berardi for sending me their inspiring manuscripts even before they had been published; Helge Hiram Jensen for a great anti- copyright exchange; Heejung Chung for her initial research advice; Gaia Novati, Franca Formenti, Eleonora Oreggia aka xname, Luisa Valeriani, Simonetta Fadda, Simona Lodi and all the friends and members of the AHA:Activism-Hacking-Artivism mailing-list for the exchange and stimulating discussion, and because the Italian hacker and activist scene will always be my route to freedom. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Roberto and Marilena for always being there for me and my sister Tamara and her family for making me reflect on myself. But the most important thanks go to my husband Jonas, to whom I dedicate this manuscript. Without his constant love, support and inspiration – and without Bazzinkki! – it would have been impossible to put such passion and commitment into this research, nor for it to have taken on its final form. 7 INTRODUCTION This research reflects on the status of activist, hacker and artistic practices in the new generation of social media (or so-called Web 2.0 technologies) analysing the interferences between networking participation and disruptive business innovation. The main objective is to rethink the meaning of critical practices in art, hacktivism and social networking, analysing them through business instead of in opposition to it. The increasing commercialisation of sharing and networking contexts and the key innovatory role of the open source community in the development of centrally controlled