Abstract Hacktivism: The Making of a Hacker Culture, by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås, is a 2006 publication from the University of Gothenburg that pairs two extended essays into a single argument. The argument is this: the computer is not just a tool. It is the dominant conceptual model of our time — the way we think about organisations, economies, politics, resistance. And the process by which this model became dominant was not a matter of technological inevitability. It was, in large part, paid for by the dot-com bubble.

This is a compact, theoretically dense book that moves fast and covers a lot of ground. Its ambition is to articulate a form of activism that is neither the countercultural rebellion of the 1960s nor the resigned pragmatism that followed its failure. Von Busch and Palmås call this abstract hacktivism: not the destruction of systems, but the opening of systems. Not smashing the cathedral, but building bazaars inside its walls.

Heresy as method#

Von Busch’s essay, Hacking and Heresy, is the more eclectic of the two. It moves between circuit bending, shopdropping, craftivism, fan fiction, urban exploration, and liberation theology — gathering examples of what it means to work inside a system without accepting its rules as given.

The liberation theology parallel is the most striking. Von Busch reads Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Edward Schillebeeckx as hackers of the Catholic Church. Their move was not to leave the Church, but to redistribute the power of interpretation. The base communities of Latin America practised what Boff called orthopraxis — right action over right doctrine. They did not reject the faith; they reprogrammed its social function from the bottom up.

This is the core of von Busch’s definition of hacking: it is constructive, not destructive. The hacker does not deny the power of the system. She acknowledges it and looks for points of intervention — what Tibor Kalman, the graphic designer who edited Benetton’s Colors magazine, called “the cracks in the wall.” Kalman’s position, as articulated in a 1996 Wired interview, is worth lingering on: corporations are omnipotent, yet open to interventions. The technocracy is real, but not total. There will always be openings.

Rick Poynor described Colors as Kalman’s “Temporary Autonomous Zone” — the concept borrowed from Hakim Bey — a parasite living unnoticed in its host, moving on once discovered. This is a far cry from the revolutionary fantasy of bringing the system down. It is closer to what the Spanish collective YOMANGO was doing around the same time: not opposing the logic of consumer desire, but modulating it from the inside.

Von Busch draws on Bruno Latour’s redefinition of the critic: the critic does not unmask; the critic assembles. She offers arenas where things can meet, not verdicts about what things really are. And “thing” itself, as Latour reminds us, carries an older meaning: an assembly, a parliament. The critical act is not demolition. It is the creation of spaces where forces can encounter each other.

McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto provides the class analysis. Wark updates Marx for the information age: the crucial conflict is no longer between workers and capitalists, but between producers of information (hackers, in Wark’s broad sense) and the “vectoralists” who control the channels of distribution. The property relation migrates from land to capital to abstraction. Those who create the new are systematically expropriated by those who own the pipes.

But von Busch does not stay in Wark’s framework. Hacking, for him, is not only a class conflict. It is an attitude toward closed systems — an impulse to open what has been sealed, to make public what has been enclosed. The circuit bender who rewires a children’s toy, the fan fiction writer who rewrites the narrative, the urban explorer who enters the forbidden building — all of them share this impulse, regardless of whether they have read Marx or Wark or anyone at all.

The economy as a sentient device#

Karl Palmås’s essay, The Dot-Com Fetish, takes a different route to the same conclusion. His question is historical and structural: how did the computer become the dominant conceptual model? His answer: the dot-com bubble paid for it.

Palmås builds on Nigel Thrift’s work on the performativity of economic knowledge. Thrift’s argument is that economic theory does not describe the economy — it produces it. The stories that economic actors tell about themselves — about networks, disintermediation, the flat organisation, the death of hierarchy — are not neutral descriptions. They are performative utterances that reshape the reality they purport to observe.

The dot-com bubble, in this reading, was not simply a financial catastrophe caused by irrational exuberance. It was a mechanism — a vast, wasteful, extraordinarily effective mechanism — for spreading the computer as a model of thought into every corner of culture. The deregulation of telecommunications (the 1995 Telecoms Act, pushed through by lobbying that Hutton traces to the largest PAC donors), the flood of venture capital that “suspended all prior rules,” the media ecosystem that fed on scoops about IPOs and mergers — all of this created an infrastructure for the transmission of ideas, not just the transmission of data.

Wired magazine sits at the centre of this story. Palmås, citing Cassidy, notes that Wired “helped to create the culture that it reported on. It made no pretense at objectivity or historical perspective.” The publication was, in Barbrook and Cameron’s famous critique, a vehicle for the “Californian Ideology” — a mix of cybernetics, free-market economics, and countercultural libertarianism. And yet, for all its ideological baggage, Wired was the conduit through which concepts like open source, read-write culture, and “reality hacking” reached a wider audience. DJ Spooky described his practice of scratching in Wired in 1994: “The idea is to have it so subtle that you don’t know if it’s you scratching or the record scratching. You blend yourself into it.” This was years before Nicolas Bourriaud would theorise similar practices in Postproduction.

The new media agencies — Razorfish in New York, Deep Group in London — were laboratories where the computer worldview was simultaneously practised and sold. Their employees had actively shunned traditional business; they feared, as one Razorfish worker put it when the bubble burst, not losing their job but “having to work in what hellish corner of corporate America.” These workplaces ran on the belief that the Internet would change everything. And that belief was not incidental to their business model — it was the business model. Deep Group, a consultancy, built its reputation by extrapolating new media trends for corporate clients: “coming up with a steady stream of outrageous ideas implied more clients, more media coverage, and more finance.” The distinction between predicting the future and constructing it dissolved entirely.

This is where Palmås arrives at his most striking formulation: the economy, during the dot-com boom, behaved as a “sentient device.” Drawing on Thrift, he describes an economic system with a “knowing character” — one that endogenously generates stories about itself. The overinvestment in new media was not the result of individual incompetence. It was a systemic property: contemporary market economies have the ability to amass vast resources to fund activity related to “the next big thing,” and in doing so they fund not just new technologies but new ways of thinking. The tulip bubble and the crash of 1929 are not remembered as vehicles for new paradigms. The dot-com bubble might be.

Was ‘99 our ‘68?#

The concluding sections develop a parallel between 1999 and 1968 as symbolic years — shorthand for cultural shifts that neither began nor ended in those calendar years, but that crystallised something. Both ‘68 and ‘99 produced a new vocabulary for describing the world. Both were partly romanticised after the fact.

But the relationship between them is not simple continuity. Palmås argues that ‘68 produced a critique of hierarchy — an attack on authority that has stayed with Western culture since. ‘99 produced something different: not a critique of the system, but a mode of working within the system using the system’s own logic. The children of ‘99 are not throwing gravel into the machinery. They are hacking it. They are as interested in reconstruction as in deconstruction — in building self-organised structures, not just dismantling hierarchical ones.

This is where the book positions itself against figures like Boltanski and Chiapello (who argue that the dismantling of hierarchy has been co-opted by capitalism as its “new spirit”), Heath and Potter (who argue that countercultural rebellion is itself a consumer commodity), and Sennett (who argues, somewhat mournfully, that “what the New Left might have learned from Bismarck was that strong ties can flourish under quite impersonal conditions”). Von Busch and Palmås reject the forced choice between countercultural posturing and a retreat to hierarchy. The hacker ethic, they argue, offers a third path.

The outro, jointly written, introduces two important qualifications. The first is about technological determinism. Drawing on DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze, the authors argue that the “abstract machine” of hacking existed in the virtual before it was actualised in computer networks. Liberation theology, Small Change development practices, Kalman’s parasitic design — all of these were hacking before hacking had that name. The computer did not create this mode of thought. It gave it a vocabulary and, through the dot-com bubble, the resources for widespread diffusion.

The second qualification is about power. The authors warn against the “allure” of self-organisation, emergence, and bazaar structures. The computer worldview is not the exclusive property of the good guys. “Everyone — not least big anti-market institutions/corporations — are increasingly seeing the world as a computer.” The rulebook is changing, but the powerful are reading it too. Bazaar structures can be forked, fragmented, and drained of energy. Those who benefit from cathedrals are already learning how to use the language of bazaars to keep structures intact.

What holds and what doesn’t#

Abstract Hacktivism is twenty years old now, and some of its references are dated. The new media agencies it describes are long dead. Wired has gone through several identity crises. The specific dot-com bubble is ancient history, though Palmås’s prediction that similar bubbles would appear around bio- and nanotechnology has been vindicated — not by those technologies, but by AI, which has replicated the pattern with remarkable fidelity: the flood of capital, the performative narratives, the creation of a culture that the reporting ecosystem simultaneously documents and produces.

The theoretical apparatus holds up better than the examples. Thrift’s performativity of economic knowledge, Wark’s vectoralism, Latour’s critic-as-assembler, DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze on abstract machines — these remain productive frameworks. The book’s central insight — that the economy functions as a mechanism for the diffusion of conceptual models, not just goods and services — is, if anything, more visible now than it was in 2006.

What holds most, though, is the ethical orientation. The refusal to choose between revolutionary fantasy and resigned pragmatism. The insistence that systems can be opened without being destroyed. The recognition that the powerful learn fast, and that any tool of liberation can be turned into a tool of control. And the sober final warning: do not mistake the attractiveness of an idea for its immunity to capture.

The book’s weakness is its brevity. At times it reads more like a manifesto than an analysis — provocative claims are stated rather than fully argued, and the connections between the two essays remain somewhat gestural. Von Busch’s essay is rich in examples but thin on theory; Palmås’s is theoretically rigorous but narrow in its historical scope. The outro attempts a synthesis but does not quite achieve it. There is a better, longer book hiding inside this short one.

Still, it is a useful book. Useful in the specific sense that it gives you something you can take with you: a way of looking at systems — economic, cultural, institutional — that neither surrenders to their logic nor pretends they can be overthrown by an act of will. Find the cracks in the wall. That is a reasonable programme. Not glamorous, but workable. And in a time when the cathedrals are learning to speak the language of bazaars, workable is worth more than glamorous.