When Technocultures Collide by Gary Genosko

Author:Gary Genosko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Hacking the Grid: Does Electricity Want to Be Free?

The most beautiful black hole that’s been seen was New York during the black out. When one can no longer see, anything—a great mass, strange fauna—can loom up out of the dark.

—Félix Guattari (1996: 81)

Free Web content idealists believe that information wants to be free. My strategy in this chapter is to ask: does electricity want to be free? If so, on whose terms, and by what means? I want to look for preliminary answers to my question in countercultural struggles against electrical companies, namely, in Yippie technoculture, practices of rogue electricians in the cannabis culture of grow ops, and in a classic of modern American fiction—Ralph Ellision’s Invisible Man (1995[1952]). I also regain some positive lessons from the history of blackouts, especially large-scale events in the northeast such as those in New York City (1965, 1977) and Toronto (2003). As cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988: 67) observed dreamily: “A black-out paralyses a whole region as quickly as the prick of a spindle sends the whole palace to sleep in the fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty.” Blackouts, as Guattari suggested above, have their own kind of alternate energies. Electrical hacks are real-world events that belong in the same category as urban exploration, but they are striated with fictions and online info-politics as well.

I will proceed by means of a series of questions designed to define electricity as an object of cultural analysis and clarify the stakes by building up a historical context against which to situate the socio-political problematic of real-world hacking within a contemporary revisioning of the grid as a relatively democratizable, and irreducibly turbulent, network.

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