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