Scan | Journal of Media Arts Culture
Volume 10 Number 2 2013

Code, Democracy and DDoS Attacks

Robbie Fordyce

Abstract

Few of us have access to the source code for the software that we use. In many cases, the effects of invisible code appear minimal - keys are pressed, and documents are produced. This predictable relationship between input and output, combined with the ideological masks of post-Fordism, obscures the political nature of code. The political components of code become more apparent and risky when the output of code has a directly political purpose. The epistemological error in relating social or interface-based cues as indicative of the politics of software’s underlying source code is the source of a quandary for online activism. By assessing the social organisation of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack methodology it is possible to see a gap between the politics and the code of software-enabled activism.

Introduction

The technological infrastructure of post-Fordism welcomes both productivity and insurrection with open arms. Political communication adapts to this infrastructure and pays for its use. Understanding the ramifications and effectiveness of different methods of dissent and their limitations becomes urgent for political use of networks. The politics of code is a wealthy field for inquiry. Langdon Winner’s ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ and the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) constitute a wide range of approaches to the question of the political nature of technological objects. A common methodological approach for these systems is to consider what political values are put into play by a network of humans and objects acting in concert through active analysis of devices, protocols, and users. The key observation is that whatever politics are interpreted from the objects of analysis emerge as a product of methodological inquiry. ANT, for example, searches for the ways in which values are located in objects, through a highly descriptive method, that notes where and when gaps arise in the network of actors. Work by Don Ihde, in Technics and Praxis constitutes further advancement in the set of concerns raised about the nature of social being in a technological world, engaging a wealth of discussions on the problem of embodiment in terms of the trialectic relationship between humans, machines, and the world (1979: 3-15). Albert Borgmann, also, questions the “underlying pattern in technology”, and provides particular purchase on the problem of interface in relationship to code when he states that “machinery can be changed radically without threat to the identity and familiarity of the function of the device”; in these comments he gestures to the problem of user interfaces, technology, and intention, particularly in relation to the complicating factors of technological skeuomorphs (Borgmann 1984: 33, 43). These positions amount to an assessment of the epistemological problems of technological interfaces.

The politics of technology is more than the political economy of interfaces; it is a political interrogation of technological possibilities of machines. Code becomes a necessary site of analysis because it mobilises hardware to particular ends. This paper fields itself within the same parameters as STS, ANT, and OOO, but without a strict investment in one of these methodological lineages. Primarily, this paper seeks to describe the limits to political possibility within technologically automated dissent practices that use communications networks.

Code is political; the design choices are human, and code carries its effects far and wide. Lawrence Lessig states: “Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us” (2006: 6). Lessig continues: “Codes constitute cyberspaces; spaces enable and disable individuals and groups. The selections about code are therefore in part a selection about who, what, and, most important, what ways of life will be enabled and disabled” (2006: 88). Code enables some behaviours and inhibits others. Andrew MacKenzie observes that life and code share similar metaphysical attributes, he takes this further, and identifies the politics of code with the Foucauldian concept of biopower; “Life came to be understood […] as an information system or as a program executing instructions” (2006: 37-38).

The coding process is abstract, and as such, what sits under the hood of the various user interfaces hides a politics that privileges certain processes in favour of others. Technological affordances and biopower dovetail under a political analysis of both the bios of the individual and the BIOS of the computer. When code is shrink-wrapped and compiled with an interface, it appears standardised; yet the interface is abstract, and hides the operations of the code beneath. The coding selections that Lessig mentions can become insidious - interfaces can stay the same, while the code may change. The question for this article is not whether this is the case, but rather how these political possibilities are expressed in certain instances. Addressing these problems requires a theory of code that cuts across the social and technological barriers, and is less conditioned by a distinction between software and code.

The ‘democracy’ that this article refers to is the collective self-action of individuals. Scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Antonio Negri both propose forms of ‘direct’ democracy that enable action without subordination to the problems of representative structures of governance. Part of the issue is that the use of computer networks for dissent is mediated, and thus digital politics is representational even before action has occurred. Noberto Bobbio (1990) contributes to the discourses of specifically libertarian democracy, by noting the contradictions that exists within such a concept. Whether the capacity to act collectively online meets democratic principles even within mediation is a problem this article hopes to answer.

The use of communications networks as vectors, rather than platforms, for activism has increased in recent years. The simplest are software-automated Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS attacks). This article will examine the political limits of these attacks within a network architecture, by critically examining the use of the ‘LOIC’ DDoS attack tool, particularly as used by the internet activist network, ‘Anonymous’. Online activism often acts as an analogue for unmediated politics, yet is subject to different protocols. These protocols apply limits that may be more or less relevant for certain forms of politics. Exposing the tensions between software and politics for activist groups identifies a problem for future action. Andrew Feenberg goes beyond the concerns with the mediation of politics that Borgmann refers to, and exposes the paradox that sits at the heart of technologically motivated politics: “sociotechnical transformation cannot be conceived in terms of instrumental categories because the very act of using technology reproduces what is supposed to be transformed” (2002: 63). This, more than anything, expresses the contradictions of the DDoS attack: dissent begins to mimic the ideal forms of high-speed post-Fordist capitalism.

Post-Fordism, communication, and the metaphysics of code

DDoS attacks require their targets to depend upon communications systems in order to have any success. The tradition of Italian Marxism is foremost in acknowledging that the production systems of post-Fordist capitalism are highly dependent on communications networks. Paolo Virno, in A Grammar of the Multitude (2003), as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 280-303), identify the privileging of communicative production. Under post-Fordist production, workers are no longer engaged in industrial production in the same manner as previous eras; increasingly production is dependent on intellectual labour in order to produce its efficiencies. Franco Berardi (2012) and Christian Marazzi (2011) note the importance of communication networks in the development of finance, and also the dependency that the post-Fordist economy has on communication to negotiate between production and finance. Post-Fordism is defined by Maurizio Lazzarato (1994) as the form of capitalism that integrates communication into production, and this tendency is something that Karl Marx identifies in the section of the Grundrisse (Marx 1973: 690-712). Many of the commodities and labours of post-Fordism are only able to be distributed along the channels of communication technologies.

Code, communication, and power are rife within post-Fordism. Mark Coté makes the nexus of data and power explicit, connecting Foucault and Lazzarato through the processes of debt, biopower, and Big Social Data:

[Big Social Data] comprise the endless payments we make to neoliberal digital or cognitive capitalism. In order to access any social media platform, any element of Web 2.0, we must generate social data. It is structurally unavoidable, and the motility of that data is the means by which its sociality is turned into economic value. (Coté 2014, forthcoming)

For Coté, the transaction between post-Fordism and the user is to be found in the fact of use of the networks themselves, and the correlated production of data which in turn reinforces the domination of biopower. This potentially resolves some of the tensions in the recent debates between Christian Fuchs (2012) and Adam Arvidsson and Eleanor Colleoni (2012) on the labour theory of value under post-Fordism, by connecting the laboured production of metadata to the abstracted financing of Big Social Data. While David Graeber (2011) shows that the power invoked through debt is far from unique to neoliberalism, Coté shows that Big Data sits at the forefront of biopolitical management of digital debtors, and is unique in terms of its scale. In post-Fordism, even the apparently neutral use of infrastructure generates both profit and the means of control.

These aspects of post-Fordist capitalism are completely contingent on a stable communication network to carry financial information, distribution requests, designs, messages, and even the commodities themselves. These networks have themselves become the targets of dissent from a range of political organisations, primarily hacktivist groups and anti-globalisation organisations. As the production systems of post-Fordism are increasingly dependent on the massive networks of international communication, they become vulnerable to attacks on these networks. The double bind is that this vulnerability requires dissenters to be subjects of post-Fordism in the first place.

Code sits at the forefront of the automated, computational aspects of post-Fordist communication. Different types of codes, however, are mobilised for a DDoS attack. Social codes mobilise online activism, and express a set of organisational codes within the group; the code of the software is a second layer to the DDoS attack, while the code of the network is another. Rather than viewing code in terms of the different layers of the internet, I wish to avoid suggesting a concatenation or hierarchy of significance within the different layers of code described above. I wish to take a position that is opposite (although not opposed to) that of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s ‘layers’ of the internet. Galloway and Thacker state that “These technical layers are nested, […] Each layer typically interfaces only with the layer immediately below or immediately above it” and furthermore, the “agnostic quality of layer nesting […] is one of the core technological design principles that allows for the distributed model of sovereignty and control to exist” (2007: 42-45). This delivery of code has been routinely implemented under the IETF model of abstraction layers, reported in RFC-1122 (Braden 1989), and has been taken up as an international standard for internet communications (ISO 1996). Despite this, the DDoS attack cuts across the interpretation by Galloway and Thacker of the separate layers of abstraction, as the code sends data at the application layer, but only insofar as it is harmful to network layers. Once social effects are understood across layers then the complete effects of the network attack cannot be understood. Inscribing forms of abstraction hierarchy certainly is useful at other times, but it obscures the understanding the political concerns of the DDoS software. Firstly, the organisational elements that operate as names are equally as functional for people as they are for machines: the DNS system correlates names to IP addresses. The code of a specific IP address or set of IP addresses is redistributed within the community, and becomes both a viral string of information, as well as a necessary key for conducting a coordinated attack on a target.

This naming of a target harks back to mythologies of the power of ‘true names’ present in religions and fairy tales the past. Knowing the real name of God, or of a person or demon, was thought to grant power through the knowledge of secret names. Of these, the most famous is Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a well-known early-20th Century cabbalistic mystic who published extensively on Hebrew numerology as a source of magical power. His work, Liber 777, is a dense tome that attempts to construct a multi-lingual grammar of magic from the different mystic traditions of Hebrew, Arabic, and Coptic languages, on the basis of the names of God given in each language and numeral significance each has with the zodiac. The Lesser Key of Solomon (1903), an anonymous 17th Century text and one of Crowley’s primary inspirations, states specifically that the names of God are “vibrations” that allow specific and general methods of control over both demons and people. In a contemporary environment, the relationships between names, numbers, and authority are less mystical, but no less powerful. Names and numbers have a direct application to governmental systems in terms of the retention of certain types of data for the purposes of governance, for instance, Social Security Numbers, Medicare numbers, tax numbers, and so on. Their application in the plane of politics and governance is obvious, as they tie control over individuals across a number of connected institutions. Such mythologies of the hidden powers of names are somewhat more practical in the context of computer networks, whereby those that know the functions of various types of code can change the manner in which computers interact internally, as well as over different types of network. While having something equivalent to a ‘true name’ perhaps overcodes the need for such things in networks, but nonetheless the TCP/IP suite - the set of networking protocols that the internet functions on - uses the assignment of names as an operational requirement. The name of a business, such as MasterCard, has its primary domain name at number: 216.119.209.64; this is just as true as for any computer, which is always capable of referring to itself - 127.0.0.1 - or any other valid IP address as a possible target. Identifying this connection shows the tie between the political implications of code, and governance through biopower.

Unlike the theurgical true names of mythology, IP addresses of targets provide a tangible locus for the DDoS attack methodology to converge upon. While for Crowley, the magic of true names was a metaphysics that rendered language as a preontological function of reality, IP addresses and the commands of the internet Protocol suite can claim no such grand power but only operate in relation to each other. While there is a very real problem with the releasing of personal names and information over internet channels, this is an entirely different problem to the concern I am raising: that is, how IP addresses operate on a symbolic level, that then has carry-on effects onto the actions of both the people and machines that take their cues for action from the arrangements that emerge from computer networking. IP addresses represent a computer’s location within the matrix of connections on the internet, and disruptions aimed at this point produce carry-on effects on the operations of the target by destabilising or removing its ability to engage with other nodes on the network.

DDoS attack fundamentals

A DDoS attack is a mobilisation of machines to simultaneously and persistently access an IP address, preventing that IP address from serving data. These attacks exploit the material architecture of networking technologies, and are only able to be defended against on a limited basis. As I have noted elsewhere (Fordyce 2013), these attacks retain a largely similar methodology and effectiveness whether they are deployed at the level of the TCP/IP protocol, at applications, or even offline in the social or material level. Whether the end point is a computer server or a human being, an excess of information can stress the victim beyond a capacity to respond. Networks contain a material asymmetry: a many-to-one relationship between attackers and victims. This means that while new software methodologies can be deployed for defence, the architectural structure of the internet cannot be reconfigured, so the technological basis for attacks remains in place. Compare this to Galloway’s comments on the nature of networks: “In a decentralized network, instead of one hub there are many hubs, each with its own array of dependent nodes. While several hubs exist, each with its own domain, no single zenith point exercises control over all others” (2004: 31). Galloway also discusses distributed networks, where hubs do not exist. There is no ‘ruling node’, but every point is subordinated both to each other, and to the network as a whole. The second element that renders the DDoS attack effective in an online space is the fact that any data sent via TCP/IP is (generally) delivered without examination by intermediaries. Jerome Saltzer et al. note that often data can only be rendered sensible with precise knowledge of its purpose (1984: 278). Such early ‘end-to-end arguments’ became the logic which determined much of the development of internet networks. So DDoS attacks use both the material architecture of the network, and the protocols that organise it. While it is possible to defend a server or computer from these attacks, it is reasonably difficult, and often requires the macro-level analysis of networks in order to determine that they are even occurring (for further analysis of this fact, see Yuan & Mills 2005). In the case of Anonymous, the software used is often the LOIC, or ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’, an open source network stress testing and DDoS attack application. This software is not a platform for communicating politics, but engages a direct attack on other means of communication within the internet.

Network attack vectors

There are many mechanisms through which computer networks can be used to engage in dissent. The use of the internet as a political platform is well documented (see Gillespie 2010), while attention to the use of network connections between computers for security intrusions such as ‘hacks’ or ‘cracks’ has been increasing in the social sciences. Expressly political purposes are many: we can look to the political ramifications of the STUXNET virus, which is specifically designed to target the functionality of Iranian nuclear centrifuges; or the espionage and sabotage capabilities coded into the ‘Flame’ and ‘Duqu’ viruses. Many different types of less well-known malware are designed to give over some degree of a compromised computer’s processing power towards password cracking or to integrate a computer into a botnet. Botnets are constructed to engage in centrally controlled brute force attacks, which include the DDoS methodology. In this case, a DDoS attack can be mobilised on a large scale by a limited number of individuals.

Organising a DDoS attack along social lines is different from using a botnet, yet the attack itself remains largely the same. There is little difference in outcomes between a large number of centrally-controlled computers engaging in an attack, and a large number of individuals autonomously doing the same thing. While the discourses that frame these attacks often use a sense of justice or libertarian free speech principles - for instance attacking Paypal for blocking WikiLeaks donations during ‘Operation: Payback’ (see Fig. 1), or attacking MasterCard for similar actions - the targets are usually blogs, community homepages, or equivalents. Thus high-visibility spaces of branding or communication are targeted, but rarely are the effects felt by the infrastructural systems of such institutions.

In the frame of technological dissidence, one of the most significant examples is the ‘Anonymous’ network. Anonymous is a publicly visible ‘brand’ under which a number of associated affinities and agendas mobilise common sites for discussion, and common patterns of behaviour. The true name of the individual is occluded by the expressly false non-name of Anonymous - acting as the name of the nameless. In many cases, groups within Anonymous use common sites for organisation, and common computational tools for dissent. Organisational materials are distributed as image files containing calls for action that operate as short-term manifestos decrying some seemingly amoral situation. The images include a short exegesis of the political problem at hand, as well as sufficient information regarding attack times and IP addresses to allow adherents to contribute to an attack, and in this sense operate as a call-to-arms. Regular targets for Anonymous are the Church of Scientology, local police departments, government websites, as well as a range of businesses. The DDoS attacks by Anonymous sit amongst a number of global DDoS attacks. In an analysis by the Kaspersky security group, 2011 saw DDoS attacks on the Israeli Defence Force, the Mossad, the Oakland police department, MasterCard, PayPal, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (Garnaeva & Namestnikov 2012). Kaspersky classed these as particularly high-profile attacks, which we can read as attacks with a degree of political, rather than economic, significance. Mexican drug cartels, as well as the government websites of Egypt and Syria have been targets in the past, and there have been plans to target Israel over the escalations in Gaza at various points throughout 2011 and 2012. The rhetorics that are used to justify these targets within the political collectives usually note the disproportionate amounts of power particular groups might have, and attempts to subject the target to destabilisation attempts from ‘ordinary individuals’. The figure of the ordinary individual, the disgust of ‘the people’, the expropriation of the digital and non-digital commons, the romantic notion of the corporate power succumbing to the actions of the individual - these are all included in narratives of political protest by Anonymous and its associated groupings.

The totalising and somewhat ambivalent character of the Anonymous attacks compare well with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of ‘the war machine’; the comparison has a reality to it that is beyond simple poetic association. There are many qualifiers for the concept of the war machine, but as Paul Patton notes (2010: 32-33), the idea is such that it is difficult to find any relation between the war machine and other systems of pseudo-organisation. The primary similarity between DDoS attacks and the war machine is the metamorphosing exteriority of the DDoS attack with respect to its composition. As Deleuze and Guattari state, “bands, no less than worldwide organisations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine” (1987: 397). The war machine is “a machine against the apparatus” (1987: 390) - in this context, the apparatus is the apparatuses of the state, but to read this through the eyes of Giorgio Agamben (2009: 7-10) is to find that it is an assemblage against the economy. As a war machine, the DDoS attack is equally capable of producing disruptions against the state or against the informational economy, but this seemingly natural state of anti-capitalism should not be understood as necessarily pro-democratic or pro-communist in the same breath.

Complicating DDoS

The politics of Anonymous is something that often attempts to target a genuine problem, via the only available means. While it would be easy to suggest that DDoS attacks are either pointless, unwieldy, a case of ‘slacktivism’, or politically dubious, the case remains that it is one of few available digital dissent methodologies. It is not, however, without problems. While the political use of DDoS attacks is normally correlated to Anonymous, they are simply one group among many state and non-state apparatuses that use the DDoS attack. Chinese nationalist Honker Union is one non-government group that uses DDoS attacks, the Silk Road until recently offered DDoS attacks as services for sale, and the game League of Legends has had problems with DDoS attacks targeting primary servers during high-profile matches. There is also speculation in technology circles that the government-linked Russian Business Network has connections to Command and Control servers. By opening up the DDoS attack to its political limits, it becomes possible to understand the danger of its use.

Part of the problem is the misidentification that simply because a DDoS attack can be mobilised by many people, then it is also a democratic form of resistance that can be conflated with some idea of the ‘will of the people’ or that it somehow fulfils Arendt’s concept of people constituting themselves as a monarch (1958: 221). This is not the case. Using a network of infected computers, a single user can automate large numbers of compromised machines towards a DDoS attack, representing only a singular but highly influential intervention into a political situation. In other cases, it can simply be a case of specialised software simulating a DDoS attack, but targeting other network elements instead - such as in the case of Anonymous’ alternate dissent software implementation, #refref. The Jester (often stylised as ‘th3j35t3r’ and ‘JΞSTΞR’), another online dissenter, is either an individual or small group of individuals who routinely oppose Anonymous in low-scale hacker wars, with the main currency of battle being the personal information of participants. Like Anonymous, The Jester often use DDoS attacks in their attack methodologies. Assessing either individuals or machines as the site of politics or action ignores the cohesion between machines and individuals when they are considered as a whole, and the oppositional political discourse between Anonymous and The Jester point to the problem of a purely democratic logic behind the idea of the DDoS attack. Gerald Raunig writes that “the workers operating the apparatuses are just as much a part of the machine as the intellectual, cognitive labor of those who have developed the machine and make up its social environment” (2010: 22-23). The relationship between individuals and politics is limited by the machines that they are engaged in; which is to say that individuals have become automated machines that are subject to and limited by the politics that are enabled by one machine or another. Formally, Raunig has developed this concept from a combination of Marx, Deleuze, and Guattari.

Amongst his early notebooks, Marx provides an analysis of the social machine. In this schema the individuals within a social system are implicated into limited forms of behaviour as organs in a grand assemblage of machine-based production as the “matières instrumentales” wherein the worker is “reduced to a mere abstraction of activity” and becomes “regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery” (Marx 1973: 693). Marx goes further in Capital Volume I: “the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force” (1990: 544-545). Deleuze and Guattari understand different mechanisms by which individuals relate to various forms of assemblages. Here we can think about the machine as a combination of literal machinery (computers and software), machinelike human beings (individuals) and the entire social machine that conditions humans into one frame or another. Developing this frame allows us to understand the collected power of a group of individuals and machinery together, rather than simply identifying the individual humans or machines as operating on independent frames of reference. Understanding a DDoS attack as organised by a unified committee - or that it is simply a product of only the network architecture, or only the computers - will give a picture of political mobilisation that confounds the ability to understand it as an assemblage of a number of related, but discrete and dividual computational, social, and organisational resources. DDoS attacks not only exploit an asymmetric difference inherent in the architecture of computer networks, but are themselves an agglomeration of asymmetric powers of machines and individuals, which in turn subjectify their proponents as a part of a DDoS machine.

In this sense, Anonymous is a machinelike assemblage that mobilises and is mobilised by individuals, through devices such as calls-for-action, and the development of individual security practices that run counter to corporate and state mechanisms of capture. These assemblages develop in order to achieve particular political ends, often in combat with the structural functions of other machines - machines that we might label as particular corporations, or particular governmental structures, or equally, certain economies and certain political groupings. The goal that Anonymous seeks to achieve is to upset the balance by destabilising the processes that constitute these other machines. This upset is never total, and rarely seems to affect the social elements of any one of these assemblages - instead the machinery and the labour within these machines simply finds a new equilibrium for functioning. The DDoS attack is unable to do much more than simply provide this assemblage with an excess of input, forcing it to change, but not changing the formal terms which render it so problematic. In this sense, the process has elements of a democratic methodology, but this does not result in new system under the terms of a democratic unity, but instead forces a change in the victim that tends to reassert the existing asymmetries.

The DDoS attack is often presented as a form of democratic protest. This is mainly because the particular methodology for dissent expresses its political power as a factor of the number of individuals involved. The more people included in an attack, the more effective it will be. At the other end of the scale, a one-person DDoS attack is unlikely to have any effects whatsoever, yet through the user’s IP address, will tie a crime to an individual. The DDoS attack methodology takes the functionality of a network as its primary means of destabilising its target. The methodology is relatively simple - many users simultaneously attempt to access an IP address. The data exceeds the address’s ability to respond, and the surplus fills the processing queue - rendering a target inoperable. Furthermore, because the attack methodology uses the architecture of the network itself, essentially any target IP address operates as a potential victim, irrespective of all but the largest networks. As noted earlier, the machine/human assemblage that Raunig develops points to the fact that the protest is a function of both computational power and human involvement. Using this idea of democratic power, Anonymous specifically describe their protests as a form of ‘digital sit-in’. The ‘digital sit-in’ is a rhetorical device that seeks to find an ideological equivocation between DDoS attack methodology and the offline political dissent methodologies of the Occupy protests or the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement in the United States. The assumption that the DDoS attack is a form of sit-in relies on a set of criteria for libertarian democracy that DDoS attack only partly fulfils, with four concerns being particularly important.

Firstly, the DDoS attack expresses its strength as a factor of the number of machines involved, not the number of individuals. Furthermore, each machine’s contribution is a combination of its processing power and its network connection throughput. A user’s contribution is based not on their individuality (such as would be relevant for a democratic protest) or their hacking skills, but rather on their ability to corral computational and network resources. This means that individuals do not have equal levels of contribution to protest. From this perspective, the democratic nature of the protest has been undermined in favour of a more republican type of dissent: it is not the individual, but rather each individual’s capacity to mobilise resources towards a political project, which is to say, their capacity to put computing and network connections towards a common goal.

Second, the DDoS-attack-as-sit-in brings up questions of legitimacy. A now-closed petition on the White House’s official petitions page, from January 2013, demanded that DDoS attacks be recognised as legitimate protest (White House 2013). A specific component of the closed petition lists the similarity to hitting ‘refresh’ on the computer as a key component for justifying the protest as an already-valid action. While the Civil Rights era ‘sit-in’ protest attempts to force access to a public space by the excluded, the DDoS attack, on the other hand, is only accessible to those who have access in the first place. This creates a two-sided problem. On the one hand, the DDoS attack is only available to those who were never barred in the first place, while on the other hand, it demands that the practice be legalised as a legitimate democratic politics. The failure of the petition means little in itself, but should we be lead to believe that the signatories have ceased operating? And if it were validated, would it have the same purchase as a form of resistant political action?

Thirdly, DDoS attacks are time-limited and centrally organised. Once a DDoS attack has begun, there is no space to develop a system for communicating the terms for continuing dissent. The protest is rarely organised by a democratic unity, and is more often declared by arbitration within particular groups in Anonymous. The only option for democratic engagement by individuals is simply a choice of whether or not to join in an attack that one may only support tangentially. There is no option to engage in a DDoS attack of one’s own devising and still expect to be effective - one must submit to the terms of the group. Websites go down, and then recover eventually. While the server reboot may open up opportunities for security intrusions, the remainder of the damage comes in a form of communication that is outside the technical infrastructure of the internet. Even the discussions within the communities that engage in these actions talk about the victory as symbolic when it is perpetrated against large multinational corporations. This means that the terms of victory are symbolically determined, but disallow individual expression within the unity, and thus individuals become subject to symbolism that they may not subscribe to. Noberto Bobbio quite rightly attacks the libertarian idea of democracy as a totalitarian system of oppression of the margins by the majority through a critique of Benjamin Constant’s understanding of Rousseau whereby “the individual ends up being subordinated to the authority of the whole” (Bobbio 1990: 2) - however this is not the same as the issue here, as individuals are certainly free to leave or to refuse to participate. The issue is that the goal of insurrection achieved during periods of dictated attack commands that it emerges from the group or, according to Aiko Pras et al. (2010), the more common conclusion is made through an exclusive executive process. In either case, the system can only be effective if the decision is made concrete and inflexible.

Finally, while individuals can become a part of a DDoS attack from any corner of the globe, the fact that individuals engaged in the protest system may not be local to the problem means that elitist or universalising politics can often raise their heads and ride roughshod over local concerns. The capacity for individuals to determine their own relationship with local problems begins to suffer under such an approach as the terms of the symbolic victory that the DDoS attack operates under may not necessarily be informed by the local concerns of politics. This is particularly important in the context of post-Fordist capitalism - while individuals may be able to engage in dissent at select targets from any corner of the world, and engage in political problems outside of their immediate national concern, the effects are limited, and the non-democratic nature means that local concerns can be erased under the banner of a universalised approach to politics. Furthermore, the individualised nature and distributed nature of participants in the DDoS assemblage is a risk, insofar as the IP address of the individual is a part of the packet of information that makes up the attack - that is, the ‘true name’ of the individual is given out whenever anyone engages in a DDoS attack. This individuation is a risk, as it ties a body to a location and a crime, and - as some members of Anonymous and Lulzsec have already discovered - this can lead to imprisonment.

Final remarks

The concern over democratic approaches leads to a situation where the DDoS attack can be considered less a ‘digital sit in’ (with all the overtones of liberty, democracy, and civil rights) and more a Deleuzean war machine, that cuts diagonally through the layers of the abstraction model of the internet. Individual contributions may help to destabilise a select victim, but usually draw little in terms of long-term democratic change and, where they do, they simply intervene in a problem for a brief period of time, without a long-standing input into what are often complex political situations. The system of DDoS attacks continues, and replicates the conditions whereby the attacks continue to be effective. Nested in this is a race between the processing power between those home computers that have been mobilised for attack, and the victim server computers. The condition for a continuous war between assemblages is rife. As Hardt and Negri state, in the context of a discussion on the concept of the war machine, the new strategy for networks of resistance must take on the same means of resistance as the postmodern military philosophy of full spectrum dominance, “engaging the network not only militarily but also economically, politically, socially, psychologically, and ideologically” (2004: 58). DDoS attacks are not sufficient for a democratically motivated revolution, such as any such revolution can be said to be possible; when used they must be a part of an economy of techniques employed in a revolutionary system. As DDoS attacks can only be sufficient for a re-coding of existing machines - that is, of re-articulating the status quo, and demanding a certain amount of attention - then they must be understood to operate in just this fashion, and the symbolic value must be shifted from a social symbolic value to a financial or computational symbolism that can radically restructure the status quo beyond all repair. This means clearly attempting to change post-Fordist production beyond its own terms and moving to a space for resistance that expands past the digital environment.

Works Cited

Agamben, G. (2009) What Is an Apparatus?, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Luke van Ryn, Scott Wark, Katarina Damjanov, and Tom Apperley for their input in bringing this paper to completion. I am also deeply indebted to my reviewers, who have improved the quality of this publication immensely.

Biographical Note

Robbie Fordyce is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His research examines post-autonomist theories of political action and communication. His research interests include videogames, encryption, digital economies, software studies, and Italian social theory.