War Machines of the World Wide Web
Notes - 7/3/00
abstract:
In February of this year several of the world's major commercial websites,
such as Amazon.com, were crashed and temporarily shut down under the impact
of attacks made against the servers by specially designed software. The
companies have claimed that this was the work of malicious teenage pranks
but other evidence suggests that this may have been an example of direct
action by internet users who are politically opposed to the attempts of such
companies to monopolise the internet. Similar tactics were used by the artists
group eToy in their battle against the commercial corporate eToys who attempted
to have the artists removed from the web so that the company could gain full
control of all domain names related to theirs. The web-site of Leonardo, the
digital arts magazine, is currently involved in a similar legal dispute with a
lawyers firm who are also trying to monopolise areas of internet access.
This online activism not only has relations to other forms of political action,
such as the Seattle riots, but can also be related to wider issues about some
of the possible ways in which "art" and online culture may develop in this century.
These issues will be discussed alongside an analysis of the "aesthetics" of the
online war machines.
1 Amazon, Yahoo, eBay
- who these sites are
- what happened
2 How was this done?
- Denial of Service attack
- how it works
- different types of software
4 Who did this?
- hackers
- political activists
- FBI
5 Political activism, WTO
- the WTO online sit-in
- Seattle riots
6 artist activism
- the eToy campaign
- Leonardo campaign
- RTMark
7 online activism
- the Zapatistas
- Hakim Bey
8 hacker politics
- Eric Raymond, Open Source
- Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation
- Libertarianism
9 government view
- RAND paper
- netwar
- cyberwar
10 wider artistic context
- parody: Slovenja, irational
- uselessness, anti-interactivity: CAE, antiRom
- deconstruction: potatoland
11 aesthetics
- distributed media: online sound
- virus media, crashes: m9ndvirus, distributed human
12 wider context
- emergent and distributed models of society and culture