https://vimeo.com/58600146
The above video clip shows excerpts from a panel on street art, hacktivism, and subversive inspiration at the Critical Information Conference 2012, held at the School of Visual Arts. My advisor recommended I submit something to it, since it’s a conference aimed at graduate students and is in my own backyard.
The paper I presented, titled “We Do it for the Lulz: Graffiti as a Metaphor for Digital Defacement,” emerged out of research I am conducting regarding the political viability of DDoS actions as hacktivism. As they are so often accompanied by cyber-graffiti, I thought I’d take a shot at addressing their role and significance in hacktivist practice.
Pending: A conference paper on the convergence of comics, animation, and gaming in the webcomic Homestuck, a conference paper on lurking as a methodology for studying 4chan, an optional random paper on polemology, art, and The Dark Knight Rises, and posting proofs of current and pending publications. Also, still waiting with bated breath to receive edits on a piece on the logics of misogyny on 4chan, still thrilled by being included in Black Clock 16, and still surviving.
Access copy of the Critical Information Conference talk below.
We Do it for the Lulz: Graffiti as a Metaphor for Digital Defacement
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers School of Communication & Information
Critical Information Conference, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
December 2, 2012
[1] On June 8, 2011, Blackberg Security, an information security company, issued the above hacking challenge on its website. As part of its “50 Days of Lulz,” hacker collective LulzSec responded to the challenge, defacing the page with their brand image in addition to the declaration, “KEEP YOUR MONEY WE DO IT FOR THE LULZ.” LulzSec had previously compromised PBS.org as well, [2] superimposing their brand image on the Nyan Cat meme along with the memetic slogan, “All your base are belong to LulzSec,” and a false article exposing the survival of two famous rappers [3]. Despite purportedly “doing it for the lulz,” or the humor garnered from coordinated machinations against a shared target, LulzSec’s tactics were openly spectacular and satirical and covertly political. Mainstream media characterized these actions as sophomoric vandalism [4], but such defacements are composites of exclusivizing, collectivizing inside humor, territorial reclamation, and grassroots civic resistance. As exposé or critique of corporate control and lax information security, these alleged acts of vandalism acquire political dimensions resembling those of legitimate protest tactics [5]. In this context, online defacement is assimilated into civic engagement and the desire to regain a voice in an increasingly silencing surveillance society. The spectacular, territorial, and civic nature of online defacement parallels graffiti practice, as both are premised on self-vocalization, inversions of power, reclamation and renewal of a shared environment, and the challenge of placement [6]. As such, online defacement merits a less damage-oriented metaphor in order to recognize its subcultural functions and potential for expression in privatized public fora [7]. In this presentation, I will provide a brief overview of graffiti practices before analogizing graffiti to online defacement, here renamed cybergraffiti. I will then begin to make a case for understanding the cybergraffiti writer as an expressive altlaw indulging in productive lawbreaking to incite change. Albeit illegal in the U.S., graffiti and cybergraffiti offer alternate avenues for expression, representation, and political insertion, as their spectacular nature attracts media attention and public scrutiny to situations that would otherwise remain invisible.
Graffiti is performed by individuals who self-identify as “writers,” and who identify their writing activity as “tagging” or “piecing.” Dating to New York in the 1970s, the art was termed “writing” by practitioners who had no other name for it until the media renamed it “graffiti,” a minimizing term eventually appropriated by the artists. Contemporary graffiti may be divided between tagging [8], simpler signatory practices, and mural painting or piecing [9], where the final image contains more than a name and is generally more involved and time-consuming. It eventually spread to other urban centers by transplants and visitors perpetuating the New York style, catalyzing the development of local styles distinguishable by height, script, and tagging or piecing preferences. At the time, New York was suffering from an economic downturn caused by suburbanization, and thus the landscape became the canvas for disenfranchised youth to express their discontent. Tagging served as rebellious self-assertion and reclamation of territory, simultaneously providing precedents to surpass. This impetus to produce superior, spectacular graffiti resulted in its evolution from simple script [10] to ornate lettering [11] to painted backgrounds and calligraphic murals [12].
This trajectory speaks to the intersection of identity formation, spectacle and celebrity culture, and urban renewal in graffiti practice. Graffiti writing allows writers to publicize their identity, achieve fame in the subculture and, if the work is spectacular enough, potentially within a mainstream public, and claim their surroundings for themselves. As an often solitary, risky activity, it also allows writers to construct a strong self-concept, communicate independence, and emerge from anonymity to attain notoriety. Goffman and Harre have described these impulses as integral to an individual’s moral career, in which the project of identity is closely connected to the pursuit of prestige, consisting of “the stages of acquisition or loss of honour and the respect due from other people as one passes through various systems of hazard characteristic of different social worlds.” The moral career is encompassed by character-building, competitive play, in which the player is actively engaged in problematic situations that—like graffiti writing—test moral attributes such as courage, integrity, gamesmanship, and composure under duress. According to MacDonald’s ethnography of the graffiti subculture, illegality, adventure, and fame constitute crucial aspects of the “sacred subcultural activity” of tagging. Physical endurance and composure are tested through stealthily and distinctly marking one’s territory as visibly as possible and as much as possible. Courage, stamina, and creativity are tested through the risk of arrest [13]—the artist Risk bombing a limo at the premier of Exit Through the Gift Shop— territorial writer-on-writer violence, the challenge afforded by the selected site, the ability to cleverly use the space [14], and the pressurized nature of the task. The primal experience of fear, exhilaration, and unpredictability, long acknowledged as key to graffiti practice, is largely earned through risky and creative placement in highly visible spaces [15], such as stretches of the Berlin Wall that lay close to doorways that were heavily guarded.
Visibility is crucial to the quest for notoriety and, regarding graffiti, is facilitated by public outrage and ensuing media coverage. Outrage is often produced less by the image itself than by the spectacle of where it appears [16], as when an innocuous “Kilroy Was Here” appears on a World War II memorial or when, in online settings [17], a top-hatted gentleman drinks a toast on PBS.org. This indicates its value as a tactic to navigate environments increasingly subject to top-down definition and control. De Certeau has theorized about the strategies and tactics that producers and consumers have evolved to cope with the matrices of power resulting from routine production and consumption. While strategies belong to institutions and corporations, tactics are the methods consumers use to navigate the environments that are defined and controlled by strategies orchestrated from above. Everyday life can thus be construed as a tactical, contingent operation by consumers poaching on the territory of others, using cultural rules and products in ways that may be influenced by but are never fully determined by those rules and products. Accordingly, graffiti may be read as a tactic through which writers reclaim their spaces [18] by tagging and piecing in as challenging and visible a manner as possible, simultaneously advancing in their moral careers. The more visible the piece, the more outrage it is likely to provoke, culminating in notoriety for the writer in the subculture and the public eye [19], as in the anonymous anti-Communist artists who did this and were pursued by police. This is especially salient regarding issues of civic engagement, where graffiti expresses a political message or dissatisfaction with complacency concerning the social order [20]. According to Baudrillard, such measures are successful because they dismantle the existing, unquestioned semiotic system, attacking and exposing its codes as arbitrary and its audience’s faith as misplaced. To the mainstream public, graffiti exists as a zero-content message [21], an empty signifier, and as such may successfully intervene where it appears, resisting interpretation and definition, escaping the principle of signification, and exposing the flaws of a system and environment from which graffiti writers feel increasingly estranged.
[22] There exists a complicated dialogue between graffiti practices and online defacement. As a close parallel to graffiti practices and governed by similar tactical criteria, online defacement should be reevaluated as a less damage-oriented activity. A label such as cybergraffiti would facilitate considering it in terms of free speech and productive law-breaking, as the spectacle of cybergraffiti permits writers to make highly visible statements about the state of information security, transparency, surveillance, and control. Cybergraffiti is a relatively recent phenomenon and, like graffiti practice, also constitutes a moral career in its illegality and pressurized, dangerous nature, as it involves intellectual prowess and carries the risk of substantial fines or incarceration, Internet bans, and territorial infighting. Its frames of reference depend on insider rhetorical strategies and esoteric humor and imagery [23] that reinforce communal boundaries and create newsworthy spectacle. These signifiers, meant to bewilder those from above and gain support from those from below, are essential to the brand images that disrupt the existing order and maintain collective identity. Furthermore, cybergraffiti frequently possesses civic connotations pertaining to information freedom and security [24], as in bugbear’s tagging of Kevin Mitnick’s company—simultaneously lauding his freedom and chiding him for his lax security—or LulzSec’s piecing of Infragard Atlanta [25], an FBI nonprofit affiliate that served as an interface between the FBI and the private sector. Here, the cybergraffiti consisted of a version of the “Dimitri Finds Out” meme, a segment from a Russian news show transformed into parodic reaction videos, and the retitling, “NATO – National Agency of Tiny Origamis LOL” and “LET IT FLOW YOU STUPID FBI BATTLESHIPS.” Seemingly juvenile, the action drew public attention to the fact that a purported cybersecurity organization was so easily breached, and that several employees were, against company policy, using the same passwords for personal accounts, a flagrant misstep in securing one’s information.
In the case of Anonymous and LulzSec, cybergraffiti may be read as attempts to focus media scrutiny on the current state of the computer security industry. These groups target highly visible sites not only to gain notoriety through spectacle, but also because these sites are expected to possess greater levels of security. Cybergraffiti thus serves as a freedom-of-speech tactic by which individuals who feel constrained and exploited by the corporate- and government-controlled online information ecosystem can attempt to wrest back control through interrogating public expectations of security companies and revealing them as false. The LulzSec brand promised and delivered entertainment, but it simultaneously unsettled the widespread complacent faith in security companies, indicating a civic agenda underpinning the lulz. As such, Blackberg Security was defaced not only because their hubris invited it but also to expose the frailty of their security. As for the cybergraffiti on PBS.org, which was committed for “lulz” and “justice,” PBS’s content management system was outdated, making it easier for hackers to infiltrate the system. Both were considered low-level hacks, but the insertion of false content in a realistic news format, seemingly authored by PBS staff, destabilizes faith in the trustworthiness of news presented in spaces that are so easily breached. In terms of spectacle, within a few hours of publication the Tupac story had attained over 4,000 “likes” on Facebook and was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and the WikiLeaks Twitter feed. Though more overtly politicized, Anonymous’s cybergraffiti has been equally spectacular, as in the defacement of the websites of the governments of Zimbabwe [26] and Tunisia [27], explicitly committed in response to censorship and the suppression of citizens’ freedoms, such as censoring dissident bloggers and attempting to suppress WikiLeaks cables.
Graffiti may be unquestionably illegal in many parts of the world, but it has been simultaneously employed and condoned by dissident regimes, commercial industries, and artists in legally sanctioned, permission-based spaces, such as the curated 5Pointz city block in Queens [28] or Venice Beach’s Graffiti Pit in California [29]. Significantly, however, there exist no legally protected, “blank canvas” public spaces on the Internet for cybergraffiti. Furthermore, posting communications in legitimate forums effectively ghettoizes that speech, as it is not visible to the public or is easily blocked by the institutions being protested; by contrast, offline protests and sit-ins are immediately visible to the wider public. Patrons of online institutions may thus easily remain oblivious to online protest tactics executed on sites that are not connected to that institution’s website. In unsanctioned spaces online, cybergraffiti thus pushes the boundaries of legality in the manner of what Peñalver and Katyal term “altlaws,” intellectual property transgressors who, like outlaws, operate outside of the current law but do so in order to effect change. The altlaw typically attempts to communicate useful information concerning injustice, out-of-date policies or systems, or other dimensions of the owners’ use of the property, and may illegally use intellectual property in the expression of political speech. Disobedience has often been used as a tactic to express political dissent [30]; similarly, cybergraffiti allows altlaws to publicly voice and make visible their dissent and discontent with social, political, and economic structures, without doing lasting or permanent damage to the fora where it appears. By destabilizing unquestioned frames of reference, cybergraffiti overturns the widespread belief that institutions care about protecting sensitive information. As such, the cybergraffiti speech of expressive altlaws should be reevaluated under the First Amendment, as it represents a link in the movement from classic civil disobedience to information disobedience.
[31] Both graffiti and cybergraffiti are treated as criminal acts, and yet both have flourished in the face of arrests and removal efforts. Both allow practitioners to rise in their moral careers and to express discontent with systems from which they are estranged or excluded. Perhaps the most significant difference between graffiti and cybergraffiti is the latter’s open call for participation. Where graffiti writers encourage outsiders’ ignorance and limit access to specific knowledge in order to promote exclusivity, cybergraffiti invites multifaceted participation ranging from tagging to preserving to disseminating to selecting future sites. Even nonparticipants with insider knowledge may recognize a group’s signature or signal phrase—as in Jake Davis, aka Topiary, prominent member of LulzSec, photoshopped onto a billboard as though it were graffiti—and feel bonded with the group and thus more likely to spread the story, contributing to the spectacle, the attendant outcry, and the possibility of repercussion and change. Like the Kilroy graffiti of the 1940s, peering over high walls where he presumably does not belong, cybergraffiti reminds us that it is possible to unsettle accepted power dynamics and that, through spectacle, it may be possible to effect change through productive lawbreaking.
