“Coke Side of Life” advertising campaign (2009)

Essay by Tatiana Bazzichelli: “If You Can’t Hack ‘em, Absorb ‘em or the Endless Dance of the Corporate Revolution”, published in Concept Store nr. 3, journal by Arnolfini Contemporary Art Gallery, Bristol, UK. Get the issue here. Get the PDF here. Read the full text below.

What were once the values and philosophy of the hacker ethic are since some years the domain of many of the business companies which represent the development of Web 2.0 and contributed to create the notion of social media.

According to Steven Levy, the first one to use the term hacker ethic as described in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), the hacker ethic was a “new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic and a dream”.

A philosophy, which had its own language and rules, and its own representative community, whose roots went back into the 1950s and 1960s, crossing the activity of the hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in the Seventies, the rise of the sharing computer culture in California (well represented by the Community Memory Project in Berkeley and the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley). Embracing the ideas of sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers, world improvement and the hand-on imperative (Levy, 1984) the hacker ethics has been a fertile imaginary for many European hackers as well, who started to connect through BBSes in the Eighties.

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Last July I started my collaboration with Punto Informatico (“Informatic spot”), with the column “NetStArt”, on social networking, hacking and art. NeStArt as a starting point after the net art.

Punto Informatico is an Italian daily online newspaper, and according to Wikipedia “one of the most famous of Italy’s online newspapers, and the oldest, founded in 1995 by Andrea De Andreis” (it was part of the Italian BBS network). Since 1995 it was managed by De Andreis Editore and directed by Paolo De Andreis, from 2008 to date has been directed by Edizioni Master.

The column, “NetStArt”, wants to reflect on the intersections between art, social networking, hacktivism, and contemporary net culture – therefore it is mainly focused on the transformation of politics, art and culture in the era of Web 2.0. It is strictly related with the research I am developing at Aarhus University on the disruptive art of business (2010).
It is online every 2 weeks, coming out on Wednesday.

Until now, two articles have been published (in Italian):
NetStArt/ Per un NetStArt artistico e tecnologico
NetStArt/ Arte disruptiva e giochi identitari