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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478002789 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2018 |
| Series: | Experimental Futures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 89 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
MAY THE LULZ BE WITH YOU
A long time ago in a laboratory far, far away ...
The primal scene of hacking, remembered and repeated with all the force of mythology, was the creation of a game — one of the first and most influential works in the history of video games: Spacewar! This legendary feat of coding came together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. The original hackers — that is to say, the MIT research scientists, students, and technology enthusiasts who called themselves hackers — were engaged at the time in experimenting with the university's new DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer and CRT display. The PDP-1, a machine the size of two large refrigerators, had been acquired in 1961 to supplement the more formidable TX-0 mainframe. During official work hours, the hackers would tackle computational analysis and statistical calculations for various research projects at MIT. During off-hours, they would develop new programs or "hacks" for the PDP-1, performing ingenious mathematical tricks and other displays of technical virtuosity.
The Spacewar! project was a glorious hack: a collaborative effort to make the computer do something other than orthodox science, to test its capacities and affordances, to innovate through fun and games. It was imagined, from the beginning, as an exercise in applied science fiction. According to Steve Russell, one of the key figures in the project, "I had just finished reading Doc Smith's Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction. The details were very good and it had an excellent pace. His heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar." For Russell, the game was an expression of tactical affinity, an affirmation of heroes who "invent their way out of a problem while they are being pursued," tinkering their way out of a jam, in the middle of things ... from the inside.
Another key figure in the project, J. Martin Graetz, has also recalled that a steady diet of science fiction novels and films "established the mind-set that eventually led to Spacewar!":
At the time, we were crashing and banging our way through the Skylark and Lensman novels of Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., a cereal chemist who wrote with the grace and refinement of a pneumatic drill. These stories are pretty much all the same — after some preliminary foofaraw to get everyone's name right, a bunch of overdeveloped Hardy Boys go haring off through the universe to punch out the latest gang of galactic goons, blow up a few planets, kill all sorts of nasty life forms, and just have a heck of a good time.
In a pinch, which is where they usually were, our heroes could be counted on to come up with a complete scientific theory, invent the technology to implement it, build the tools to implement the technology, and produce the weapons to blow away the baddies, all while being chased in their spaceship hither and thither through the trackless wastes of the galaxy (he wrote like that).
As indicated by these recollections, the Spacewar! project was not merely about morphing the tropes and narrative conventions of space opera into playable format. A certain ethos was also extracted from Smith's fiction — a disposition toward the practice of science as much as everyday life: a reckless spirit of adventure, an eagerness to go beyond the limits of established knowledge, innovating on the fly. Certainly, those involved in the Spacewar! project were keen to represent scientific accuracy as much as technical prowess. For example, Dan Edwards added physical calculations to more realistically simulate the gravitational pull of the central star, and Peter Samson updated the cosmic background so that it mapped the real night sky as seen from Earth, even indicating the relative brightness of actual stars. But at the same time, some things had to be fudged:
The torpedoes were not quite consistent with the Spacewar! universe after the Heavy Star was in place. Gravity calculations for two ships were as much as the program could handle; there was no time to include gravity for half a dozen missiles as well. So the torpedoes were unaffected by the Star, with the odd result that you could shoot right through it and hit something on the other side — if you weren't careful getting round the Star, it could be you. We made up a typical excuse, "mumblemumble photon bombs mumblemumble," but no one really cared.
Leveraging fiction for the sake of technics and vice versa, making up stuff as needed to get the job done — ingenious hacks, in every sense — the Spacewar! project played out as applied science fiction in a manner only superficially indicated by the game's content (fig. 1.1). For it suggests the extent to which all video games inherently belong to science fiction, insofar as they present imaginary worlds whose existence is generated algorithmically, worlds whose operations depend on high-tech hardware, and whose representational conceits involve some admixture of technical realism and fictive irrealism, whether at the level of narrative or at the level of gameplay mechanics, physics simulation, and so forth. But more importantly, in attempting to reproduce the ethos of Smith's novels at the level of representation, the Spacewar! project also reproduced it at the level of technical practice: an experimental zeal to go where none have gone before, confirming the values of modern science while also taking an irreverent and cavalier attitude toward proper forms of method, reproducible results, and institutional norms. In this regard, the project established a relation to the scientific imagination that was both affirmative and subversive — in other words, equivalent to science fiction.
The hacker St. Jude (a.k.a. Jude Milhon) has offered the following summation: "Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics." Certainly, science fiction as an aesthetic form would represent a similar provocation, a similar circumvention of established limits — whether the laws of society or the laws of nature — through its characteristic performances of cognitive estrangement and speculative fabulation, to say nothing of technobabble, a favorite quick-and-dirty way to overcome black holes, plot holes, and other obstacles in the path to adventure ("mumblemumble photon bombs mumblemumble"). These qualities of science fiction have served as epistemic resources for hackers throughout the history of hacking. John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, Vernor Vinge's True Names, William Gibson's Neuromancer, and the ensuing discourse of cyberpunk shaped the consciousness of legions of young hackers in the 1980s and 1990s. For many in the hacker community — whether they keep to the underground or converge at events like DEF CON, Chaos Communication Congress, and Hack in the Box — films such as Tron,WarGames, and the Matrix trilogy; tabletop role-playing games such as GURPS Cyberpunk; novels such as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash; and cyberpunk-inflected video games such as Deus Ex and System Shock have long been core references, touchstones for social identity as well as technical exploration.
The prominent hacker and open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond has suggested that science fiction is crucial for developing the hacker mind-set. He advises new hackers: "Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers)." Marc Pesce, a computer engineer and coinventor of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), has likewise pointed to science fiction as a driving force among software developers and hackers: "The recent history of hard science fiction has been the deciding influence on the direction of software development. The hacker community has been strongly shaped by science fiction texts, and this has led to a direct, often literal concretization of the ideas expressed in those texts. ... To the degree they [science fiction writers] are successful in 'infecting' the hacker community with the beauty of their ideas, they can expect to see those ideas brought to life."
Or to put it another way: science fiction is the theory, hacking is the practice. While this relationship is usually tacit, immanent rather than prescriptive, it nevertheless seems to underwrite a variety of hacker customs and habits. Conspicuously, hackers have often performed an affinity to speculative fantasy and imaginative literature through their playful jargon. Technical functionaries such as demons, wizards, sprites, and other representatives of the fantastical tradition abound in the history of computing, for instance, while open-source programmer applications such as OpenGrok propagate science fiction concepts (namely, Robert A. Heinlein's notion of deep, systemic "grokking") as they spread among users. A layer of science fiction frequently clings to the material culture of hacking, the instruments and environments of the craft, ranging from network penetration tools such as Armitage and Cortana, which allude to the cyberpunk futures of Neuromancer and the Halo games, to famous hackerspaces such as c-base in Berlin, which presents itself as a site of archaeological excavation, reconstructing an alien space station that crash-landed on Earth billions of years ago.
The language of science fiction pervades the hacker tradition of colorful codenames as well. Emmanuel Goldstein (a.k.a. Eric Corley), the editor and cofounder of the essential hacker journal 2600, named himself after the fabled enemy of the state in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The infamous German hacker known as hagbard (a.k.a. Karl Koch), who sold state secrets from Western governments to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, took his name and motivation from the character Hagbard Celine in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The hacker collective Legion of Doom, founded by Lex Luthor (a.k.a. Vincent Louis Gelormine) and considered one of the most sophisticated groups in the hacker underground of the 1980s and 1990s, borrowed its supervillain image from the cartoon series Challenge of the Super Friends. Count Zero, a member of the pioneering hacktivist group Cult of the Dead Cow, copied his handle from the main character of William Gibson's novel Count Zero. Rising to international prominence in 2012, Team GhostShell adapted its brand and some of its principles of "Dark Hacktivism" from the cyberpunk manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell. In 2014, a group of Russian hackers involved in international espionage came to be known as Sandworm Team, due to their penchant for hiding allusions to Frank Herbert's Dune novels within their spyware. In 2016, hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers began leaking zero-day exploits and infiltration tools stolen from the NSA, leading to an epidemic of malware as other hackers around the world started playing with the NSA's secret weapons. The Shadow Brokers got their name from a character in the Mass Effect game series, a mysterious information dealer wrapped in political intrigue. Similarly, the Dark Overlord — a hacker group that became notorious in 2017 for stealing data from healthcare organizations, swiping unreleased movies and television shows from Netflix and Disney, and holding these materials for ransom — named itself after the transdimensional monster from the 1986 film Howard the Duck. Around the same time, a crew of Brazilian hackers infiltrated the "stalkerware" companies FlexiSPY and Retina-X, leaking corporate documents and source code on the internet in order to expose the unscrupulous, borderline-legal industry of tools for spying on children, spouses, and employees. The hackers identified themselves as Leopard Boy and the Decepticons, recalling a memorable line from the 1995 film Hackers, itself a nod to the robot universe of The Transformers. The list goes on and on ... innumerable examples, prolific entanglements.
Applied Science Fiction
Of course, science fiction has often asked the question of its own application, that is, how to do things with science fiction. Myriad stories have depicted the genre itself as a source for new scientific discoveries and technical innovations. The teenage heroes of Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo, for example, are uniquely capable of building a spaceship and flying to the moon because they have been reading science fiction alongside scientific textbooks: "Behind [the boys], bookshelves had been built into the wall. Jules Verne crowded against Mark's Handbook of Mechanical Engineering. Cargraves noted other old friends: H. G. Wells' Seven Famous Novels,The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and Smyth's Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. Jammed in with them, side by side with Ley's Rockets and Eddington's Nature of the Physical World, were dozens of pulp magazines of the sort with robot men or space ships on their covers." A character in Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" likewise suggests that successfully thinking outside the bounds of established, consensus scientific knowledge owes something to science fiction: "It sounds as if I've been reading some of that fantastic fiction, I suppose."
Promoted by science fiction itself, such notions reflect and reinforce a number of well-known instances from the history of science where concepts, inventions, or research programs were stimulated by particular science fiction stories: Leo Szilard's theorization of nuclear chain reactions in response to his reading of H. G. Wells's The World Set Free; Gerald Feinberg's quantum field analysis of tachyons in response to his reading of James Blish's "Beep"; John Shoch and Jon Hupp's computer science research on self-replicating "worm" programs, which drew from both The Blob and Brunner's Shockwave Rider; and so forth. Such examples contribute to a wider belief that science fiction complements and fortifies scientific thought more generally. For example, a 2007 editorial in Nature suggested that "science fiction provides crucial raw material [for science] — the minds of young people who will in time become scientists themselves. Not every science-fiction-reading teenager becomes a scientist, nor do all scientists grow up with shelves of Wells, Asimov and Le Guin by their beds. But the inspirational value is real." In a 2008 survey of scientists' attitudes, the sociologists Kenneth Fleischmann and Thomas Clay Templeton similarly concluded that "there definitely appears to be some kind of relationship between an inclination toward the practice of science and the appeal of science fiction."
Yet science fiction just as frequently represents its applied value more at a sociopolitical level, as a resource for cultural change. In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for instance, the outlaw androids dare to challenge the established social order partly because they have been reading pulp science fiction. According to the android Pris, this kind of fiction inspires hope, a longing for difference:
"Stories written before space travel but about space travel. ... Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization. You can imagine what it might have been like. What Mars ought to be like. Canals."
"Canals?" Dimly, he [Isidore] remembered reading about that; in the olden days they had believed in canals on Mars.
"Crisscrossing the planet," Pris said. "And beings from other stars. With infinite wisdom. And stories about Earth, set in our time and even later. Where there's no radioactive dust."
"I would think," Isidore said, "it would make you feel worse."
"It doesn't," Pris said curtly.1
Pris highlights the utopian impulse characteristic of science fiction, a sense of what things "might have been like" and what things "ought to be like" all at once. She also points to the potential of speculative narratives, whatever the accuracy of their scientific contents ("in the olden days, they had believed in canals on Mars"), to sustain positions of alterity and even resistance to the status quo-in real life as in fiction.
For instance, consider the Star Trek fans who boldly adopt ethical principles and forms of behavior from the media narratives into their own lives. There are also polyamory organizations, such as the neopagan Church of All Worlds in California, whose progressive perspectives on group marriage stem directly from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Or we could point to the "real-life superhero" phenomenon, a growing movement involving people all over the world who take on comic-book personas to do good deeds or even fight crime in their neighborhoods.
These two modes of applied science fiction often seem quite distinct. On the one hand, an instrument for scientific experimentation; on the other, an instrument for social experimentation. On the one hand, the production of a scientific elite; on the other, the cultivation of a grassroots counterculture.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Respawn"
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Table of Contents
Introduction. All Your Base 11. May the Lulz Be with You 25
2. Obstinate Systems 51
3. Still Inside 78
4. Long Live Play 102
5. We Are Heroes 134
6. Green Machine 172
7. Pwn 199
Conclusion. Save Point 217
Acknowledgments 227
Notes 231
Bibliography 271
Index 293
What People are Saying About This
“Drawing out the tight historical, aesthetic, and even political connections between sci-fi, video games, and hacking, Colin Milburn offers an engaging and innovative account of how video games give players a place to experiment with speculative futures and to form critical habits of thinking and acting. Respawn is a fantastic book.”
“Respawn is more than just a book about video games; it is an exploration of digital culture at a moment in which games have reached unprecedented popularity. Employing a lively style, anecdotes from online culture, and a deep archive of games,Respawn contributes to a number of fields, including studies of the history of science, fan cultures, science fiction, games, and even cybersecurity.”