The Labyrinth, the Hacker, the Sprawl
Lost in the Maze, I Started to Think That Everything Is Important
Before Paranoia, there was a Labyrinth. All possible timelines, constructed within its paths, together fulfilled the so-craved-for idea of wholeness. The intangible quantity of knowledge produced after the Second World War required a new branching structure to memorize it. The one proposed by the writer Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” was a fictitious text enclosed in another text. The chaotic story presented a vision of the world with multitudes of possible answers, from time to time crossing each other in the architecture of the maze. In 1945, Vannevar Bush envisioned the other form of organization: Memex, a hypothetical indexing machine integrated into a desk. A scientist with a walnut-sized camera on their head was meant to associate the bits of knowledge with links, forming a complete chain of information. In his countercultural, self-published zine Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Ted Nelson manifested freedom of computerization from IBM and coined such terms as hypertext, hypermedia, and intertwingularity. These literate dreams predicted the emerging shape of a new social organization, finally enforced by the invention of ARPANET — the first TCP/IP based-project which enabled the communication between computers. A deeply complex and dense entanglement of machines, data, and us — the network — proved to be the right allocation for the new cultural and societal development stage.
Phreaks in My Dreams
In the beginning, the hardware was not intended for the public, but all software was free. The programmer and the computer communicated straightforwardly, using machine language without any mediation. Despite its automatic nature, raw binary code has a lineage in human affection, curiosity, and joy. Throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, a group of MIT students made a communal effort to explore and expand the limits of computation, sacrificing their basic needs to the grind. They named themselves “hackers,” referring to the elaborate pranks performed on other students. Their core value was to share the results of work freely out of genuine appreciation for the beauty of technology. The realest know that all information wants to be free. Information is also abstract, quick, and omnipresent. The question of possible financial profit arose with the progressing complexity of computation. How can one come to the ownership of data? Symbolics, a company founded by some of the MIT staffers, created a schism in the hacker community when they usurped the communal fruits of labor for themselves. Then, in 1983, IBM released their object-code-only policy, which limited users from access to the source code of their software. Finally, in the same year, the Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. lawsuit ruled that copyright can apply to computer programs. The data priesthood slowly established its mythology on individualist tech-gods, greed for profit, and the appropriation of DIY culture. The vectoralist — labeled and defined by McKenzie Wark as the one in control of information — is to the hacker what the capitalist is to the worker. To hack means to create a difference with creative labor. Indulged in the chaos of free-floating data, I wondered if I should store all my files out of sight and out of the cloud, engraving them somewhere permanently.
Memory Leak from the Intellectual Property (TW: suicide)
I really hope my hard drive never breaks. But just in case, I memorized every name of the copied files by heart. Every day, I look in the mirror and repeat the sequence — each of the code lines encrypts the labor of my nighttime image-saving routine. Based on an act of gift exchange, the network was not so easily subjected to commercialization with its vastness of visuals, texts, and software circulating between the users. The concept of intellectual property guided the culture into the logic of commodification, barring the audience from creative discourse and knowledge, while maximizing the profit for the media conglomerates. The accepted understanding of ownership derives from the seventeenth century, when property turned from a right to a thing and every object started to belong to someone. Such reasoning was insisted upon information, and copyright protections for intellectual property became the display of common morality. On January 6, 2011, authorities arrested Aaron Swartz , a programmer, hacktivist, and Internet’s favorite boy, for the alleged bulk download of 2.8 million research papers from JSTOR in an MIT closet. The US justice system exposed itself and the ruthlessness of the sacred copyright when the Creative Commons advocate, impacted by the persecutions, committed suicide in 2013. Constituted by its own code, the cyberspace relies on different dynamics than nation-states, but some legislations imposed on it do not recognize it quickly enough. In the legacy of Aaron Swartz, I have downloaded 777 PDFs from LibGen, slowly building my library empire.
The Death of the Network
At the same time when the Internet and Unix were born, John Conway developed the Game of Life computer simulation. Its world consists of a 2D infinite grid and square black cells, moving along guides. Following simple rules, the cells interact with each other and as a result, they create unexpected phenomena, without the involvement of the designer. When alienated but also overcrowded, they die. It used to be a hackers’ favorite. The network, bred by Silicon Valley into the hyper–mutant as we know it today, was subordinated and forced into the architecture of social platforms. We can trace the pattern and get to the bottom line of the concern — when commodified, social relations become demobilized and lifeless, just like cultural exchange and computation. For Bogna Konior, communication, as a basic human need, serves as a means for survival. It also constitutes the source of the unavoidable entropy, as it generates conflict, narcissism, and paranoia. Web 2.0 relies on complex networks of socialization; therefore, it depends on us to stay on the verge of destruction. Do you have to be some pathetic loser to get tricked into the political discussion by Reddit karma bots? Not really, the net is just too dense and everything in sight got blurry. Following the flow of 0s and 1s, for a moment I felt liberated. But I quickly lost hope and could only romanticize the figure of a nerdy hacker, unbothered by the 9–5 time frame, writing lines of code at night just to share it freely with others. It might not seem the right solution for my sorrow, but I look for cracks in the reality, which can bring the sense of temporal relief. This technological timeline might have been predetermined by the laws of nature, just like the algorithm of Conway’s Game of Life — why do I mourn over it so much then?
Was Sisyphus Actually a Baby on a Conveyor Belt?
Knitting Loops of Labor
I have stopped all the work I had to do to look for a while at a video of a hamster in a running wheel. Debating with myself if the animal’s activity was a choice made for fun or one of the responsibilities within its everyday schedule, I became aware of my class affiliation with the digital artisans among other designers, computer scientists, and engineers. Labor contained in files—transferred via cloud software, abstracted by the physicality of technology—demands the paradoxical repetitiveness in creating new pieces of information. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus made an absurdist conclusion that if not for the consciousness of Sisyphus’s curse, we could imagine the mythological figure as happy with the acceptance of the task’s purposelessness. In the networked hierarchy, you do not even have to touch the stone.
The Imaginarium of a Moneymaxxer
In 1955, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss introduced the characters of Joe and Josephine — a display of a human form with every part and joint measured, averaged, and standardized to fit the technological products of our creation. One might suspect that such a body, defined by percentiles and binaries, could occur in its augmented variety in an imaginary realm of a contemporary Alpha hustler. Sculpted and adjusted to fit its chosen position on the social ladder, the hypermasculine physicality functions as a reflection of his own illusionary utopia. He bullies himself with a TikTok quotation of a middle-aged white man podcast with a libertarian agenda — “be your own boss.” This mantra constrained each of his bones as he believed in his self-agency. In the age of information, the conflated body, mind, and machine created a belief system powering the subject with motivation to use itself for the profit of the capital. The anthropometric chart adjusted itself to techno-accelerationist working conditions with the delusion of its separation from the network of other bodies.
Encapsulated Playgrounds for 9–5
Contrary to the abovementioned Joe and Josephine, pastel flat characters of millennial aesthetics serve to include everyone in the workforce. Associated with creative and technological industries, Corporate Memphis-styled vector illustrations build the visual reality of neoliberal social bubbles. Lighting in the coworking space is not primitively blue white anymore and comforting surroundings, reminiscent of a playground, dilute the oppressiveness of the stiff and old-fashioned working ethos. In the essay “The Californian Ideology,” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron describe the post-industrial, technology-focused economy as a form of hybrid faith of the New Left and the New Right of the ’60s. The hippie fused with a yuppie works for self-fulfillment through abstracted fruits of labor, maintaining the growth for the private sector with a vision blurred with a futuristic paradise. Reflected nothingness in clear, filtered coffee helps to get in the deep focus mode.
Air-Fried Brain Preserved with Nootropics
At the beginning of pushing the wheel of reification, you notice the artificiality and groundlessness of the imposed activity. Gradually, you become increasingly absorbed in the unfounded activity, like an unaware baby fixated on the shimmery reward at the end, maximizing your time spent on various habitual forms of self-regulation. Motivated by a fear of creating your own image as an economic failure whenever you feel like withdrawing, you start seeing this state as a permanent part of your reality, almost natural or even embedded in God’s will. But maybe there are ways of trickstering the shopping belt? With the air-fried brain preserved with the nootropics, you may finally consider your own body as an efficient machine, enough to give yourself the illusion of power over the shopping belt. My daily diet consists of CDP-Choline to increase my dopamine influx, exercises, Agmatine for reset, 20-second cold showers, and in the end, Zizyphus supplements to finally soothe my tension for deep, nocturnal rest. Getting a good night’s sleep may feel like a Sisyphean task.
Why Play RPGs If You Can Game the System?
Getting over Institutional Trust Issues
One of the founding myths of bitcoin starts with an altruistic figure of Satoshi Nakamoto, who abandoned his one million bitcoin for the benefit of humanity. The very first bitcoin transfer was sent to Hal Finney’s wallet, a software developer known for his merits in cryptography and belief in the liberating potential of computing tools. Emerging from the hacker community and cypherpunk values, energized into action by the WikiLeaks financial blockade, Bitcoin became a technical object heavily marked by politics. This cryptographic gift constitutes a promise of a stateless economic system, replacing trust with an automated framework free of human bias. The most prominent Silicon Valley investors, such as Balaji Srinivasan, envision a sovereign, virtual country governed by crypto principles. Imagine a system based on user data ownership, universal basic income, and the overcoming of political disagreements, all within an infrastructure, shaped in the letter B. Over the years, crypto started to appeal to both liberal altruists and anarcho-libertarian entrepreneurs. Additionally, nearly three in four would be more interested in a second date with a person who paid the bill in bitcoin, so owning crypto will totally get you laid. In code we trust.
Building Block of a Decentralized Wet Dream
Born from the same model as peer-to-peer networks, like BitTorrent or Napster, blockchain ideologically rejects the state and corporate control known from the centralized Web 2.0. Information wants to be free and so it is, by being equally distributed throughout all devices belonging to the network. When the copyright industry takes one of the servers down, the information still circulates freely. Once something gets encrypted on the blockchain, there is no way of editing or deleting it. One will need to think twice before posting on social media, as Musk wishes to create a blockchain-based social media system. No more throat choking or censoring. Platforms will not have any rights to your data, and with tokens native to Ethereum’s ecosystem, you can even encode your rights to it! Tokens function as any type of assets, such as currencies, ownership rights, marriage certificates, or rights of access to specific places. The blockchain infrastructure allows them all to be secured and verified without additional institutional agency, or even transferred to someone else, treating trading like a medieval bazaar. If you end up owning a token with access rights, you can participate in a specific decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Just like in RPG’s guilds, in DAOs power is distributed across all token holders, who team up to accomplish common goals, participate in the decision-making process, and have an equal stake in the products of this cooperation.
Gaming the System…
Gaming has always been encoded into the mechanisms of crypto — with tokens as a perfect fit for game assets, in the formula of trading and mining rivalry but also the strategy behind crypto bros’ ideological views. Vitalik Buterin admitted that one of the moments when he truly realized the horrors of centralization was when Blizzard nerfed Warlocks in patch 3.1.0. Ethereum, the second biggest blockchain, would not exist if not for World of Warcraft. But why play only RPGs if you can simultaneously game the system? A multitasking king never restarts his RAM. Sam Bankman-Fried can play LOL while giving an interview, rendering his image not as an ignorant or financial n00b but a genius, too smart to even care about norms. If in this political and financial game you can score points, which puts you in a place that feels meaningful and heard, why cannot you resolve its gravest problems through a calculation based on stats, points, rankings, performance graphs, and badges? A new tactic has just dropped toons—you can finally get rich for global well-being, promising to maximize the impact of each charitable dollar. Effective altruism, an ideology constructed to flatter the egos of crypto and tech bros, constitutes a structured/data-driven approach to philanthropy. With crazy mop-like hair and half-fitting cargo shorts, the monks of the digital age create their image like they never really cared about money. They are the world saviors, driving their Lambos or attending panels about longevity and human liberation by AI with Grimes at the pop-up city of Zuzalu. Boys do not care about helping the poorest though, they get laser-eyed planning how to achieve a world driven by fully automated luxury, human longevity, and space colonization. All problems are engineering problems and unsolved problems simply indicate that nobody as smart as you has come along to solve them.
...Or Playing Themselves?
The crypto wonderland seems to slowly vaporwave into the air, burned by overheated, unregulated proof-of-work mining rigs. With the current block verification processes, you can either annually use the energy equal to the electricity consumption of a small country or try proof-of-stake, which prioritizes miners owning more tokens. The same pattern applies to democratic DAOs, which started to prioritize votes of the wealthiest token owners within the guild. Blockchain cannot handle the current hype, which leads to the emergence of intermediaries trying to speed up the use of decentralized services. Mediators, who end up influencing and controlling services, caused a wave of recent crypto failures, including FTX and Alameda. Instead of realizing the vision of decentralized finance for everyone, FTX’s bankruptcy affected budgets of approximately fifteen million people. What if Satoshi disappeared not due to his altruistic premises, but because he just saw the setback coming soon, took the money, and ran? Nothing is clearer in history than successful rebels adopting the methods that they originally condemned. It took a decade to centralize the PC and web. However, it had taken only a couple of years with crypto before the majority of the value was held by the biggest bagholders, acting as spokespersons and wise prophets. Making a decision about a protocol equals making a political decision. Reactionary software will always have politics encoded deeply within it, designed to produce chaos and disruption or bring disorder to the previous ways of living. When Lambo? Well, sorry fren, crypto is down and Lambo has just announced they are not accepting any returns. Left with a drained wallet and a car with imprinted Bitcoin logos, there is nothing else left for me but to abandon this calculated hellhole. By design, I thrive in speed, as all of them do. My thoughts are much clearer while driving, though the horizon gets blurrier. I still think of encryption sometimes. Following the route forward, I have grieved and accepted the pattern that has been running my life, as it seems that there is no way out.
