Islands in the Clickstream. Hactivism and Soul Power. November 21, 2000

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

Forwarded By: Richard Thieme <richard () thiemeworks com>

Islands in the Clickstream:
Hactivism and Soul Power


The danger with taking the moral high ground is that, once you take
it, you no longer have it.

Saul Alinksy, a great community organizer, was committed to delivering
power into the hands of the powerless. He worked to create structures
that would shift the flow toward the dispossessed. He was an engineer
of the Tao, or "Way," which is often likened to a waterflow seeking
its own level. The Tao is impossible to resist because it's how energy
in the universe flows, it's the flow, and it's the energy, all at the
same time. So when we align our energies with the Tao, our actions are
boosted beyond anything we might achieve on our own.

Alinsky focused on the flow, not the organizational structures. The
structures were necessary but temporary, like irrigation ditches
designed to channel the waters of a river. He helped organize the Back
of the Yards Council in Chicago, for example, to give power to
neighborhood people but when, a decade or so later, the Council has
become reactionary, he organized others against it.

Once we seize the moral high ground, we lose it if we try to hold it.
We become what we are fighting. Organizational structures become
constraints instead of means of liberation. When we identify the right
with organizational structures and then act on behalf of those
structures, we can justify anything. Once we think we're right because
we belong to the organization instead of determining right action by
the context, we turn the Tao into a river of blood.

Enter hactivism.

We hear a lot these days about hacktivism. One form of hacktivism is
the use of hacking skills to crack web sites and deface them or
replace them with political messages.

During recent Israeli-Palestinian battles, criminal hackers or
"crackers"  affiliated with both sides attacked one another's Web
sites. In one incident, a Pakistani stole the credit card numbers of
members of a pro-Israel lobbying group and posted them on the Web.

A single computer in the hands of a child has more leverage in the
digital era than a rock in the hands of a rioter. Destroy one node in
the network and another node becomes the center.

Hactivism is celebrated by some as a sign that young technophiles are
growing up and using their skills to a purpose. Instead of leaving
graffiti, they are "hacking with a higher purpose."

If we mean that technophiles are creating software like "Hactivismo,"
a program that enables oppressed people to access human rights
information or news reports blocked by their governments, that might
be true.

But the use of cracking skills to defame and deface, regardless of
one's side, always defeats the higher purpose. Whatever sense of
righteousness motivated the act in the first place is lost in the act
itself.

Such hactivism is "hacking-and-hiding," throwing stones, then ducking
for cover, which merely escalates the level of virtual violence. It's
a power play on behalf of a power rush.

Action on behalf of the Tao, that is, action on behalf of the
powerless, the dispossessed, the genuinely victimized, always
transforms the battlefield by revealing injustice in the bright light
of undeniable revelation. Such action manifests what Gandhi and Martin
Luther King, Jr. called "soul power," which is the power of a human
being with integrity, focus, and high intentionality to expose an
unjust law by confronting it ... and accepting the consequences.

King's letter from a Birmingham jail sounds like it was written on the
Internet.

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, " he wrote,
"tied in a single garment of destiny."

This "systems approach" to human consciousness ought to resonate with
people who live on the Web. But for that to happen, we have to not
just live in a web - we all do, online and off - we have to SEE the
web in which we live, we have to see the luminous threads connecting
us indissolubly into a single field of consciousness. We have to see
that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" because
life in our quantum world is non-local.

"Whatever affects one directly," said King, "affects all indirectly."

A hacker once suggested to me that the chat rooms in which he once
hung out resembled an island of lost boys, bootstrapping themselves
into adulthood without benefit of counsel. They needed an image or
icon of higher possibility, he said, which could disclose, illuminate
and called forth their hidden possibilities into the light of day.

He too was talking about "soul power."

First, said King, collect the facts to determine whether injustices
are alive.  Then negotiate. Then comes self-purification, and only
then, direct action.

Self-purification has a quaint ring to it, doesn't it, after decades
in which we extolled greed and self-indulgence?

But listen to the words of a man who spent his life as a spy.

"We need something like a 'holy knight,' he said. "We need people
trained in the deepest spiritual truths. In some of the situations in
which we put our agents, the only thing preventing a horrible death is
their capacity to tune into multiple levels of awareness.

"We looked to the east, to martial arts and generic spiritual
disciplines back-engineered from other cultures, to train them in
those spiritual arts. But I think we have models in our own
traditions, we just don't know how to use them."

He was talking about the will and discipline to act on behalf of what
we see in the depths of our souls. The structures we build on behalf
of liberation may constrain us or set us free, but ultimately, it is
right action that creates freedom: Right action on behalf of real
victims of injustice, after which we have the courage not to mistake
the means for the end, the tools for the task, or the people now set
free for the freedom they sought.


November 21, 2000


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Islands in the Clickstream is an intermittent column written by
Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions
of computer technology and the ultimate concerns of our lives.
Comments are welcome.

Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer
focused on the impact of computer technology on individuals and
organizations - the human dimensions of technology and work - and
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Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 2000. All rights reserved.

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