The Hacker, the Commons and Beating the System
The simultaneous dread and desire for the automaton has been a pervasive part of modern imagination, which Artificial Intelligence makes real by creating machines that can outsmart human beings. This Frankenstein-type theme reveals the dark fears of our times at least since industrialization, and Nishitha Nirmal, a second year undergraduate student, decided to combine the idea of (wo)man vs. system with the issue of copyright and access to information via a video game. Nishita used the character of Aaron Swartz, blue-eyed boy of the Open Source movement, whose radical intervention into making JSTOR publications freely and widely available, resulted in his being charged under the American Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, eventually leading to his tragic suicide. As a design student, Nishita was acutely aware of the two sides of the copyright argument: one, which suggested copyright laws ensured fair remuneration to artists, designers, and creative persons, and the other, which suggested that copyright law was an unfair means to guarding the interests of capitalist ventures, without ensuring adequate remuneration to those whose work is being ‘protected’, while also unduly limiting access to their work. For the purpose of her inquiry, Nishita made a distinction between ‘material objects’ and ‘information’, explicitly developing her position on the ‘right to knowledge,’ inspired by the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: “Ideas, unlike material objects are not perishable, depletable resources. If an idea were to be passed on from A to B, B’s having it would not drain A’s supply. Information is of the same nature. And if passing that information on to our friends and peers is an option, it is almost our duty to do so. Information is no single individual’s to hoard.”[vii]
Part of my brief to the class had been to think of the form that their digital media work would take in relation to the concepts they were trying to engage with. The video game format lent itself particularly well to the fundamental concerns that animated Nishita’s project, namely: interactivity and the ability to ‘make choices’; the use of open source software in building the game; and making the game freely available online. It is interesting though, that while Nishitha started out with the objective of creating a ‘neutral’ game that that would provide information about the politics of copyright vs copyleft through the biography of Aaron Swartz, as her work progressed (both within this unit and in the other courses she was taking) she increasingly steered towards the bleak dystopia of undefeatable systems. Therefore, the final game includes three rather austere endings, based on the “illusion of choice,” which the entire digital language of modularity is in service of. The player can either protest and lose their life but win the game; or remain forever stuck in a loop between ‘activism’ and ‘criminality’; or be declared the winner but succumb to the system.
Check out the game for yourself [Aaron]
