IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2019 - 14

Nathaniel Knopf

High Tech Zombies
Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life.
By Colin Milburn, Duke University Press, 2018, 312 pages.

n 2008, a wave of
bizarre protests began
spreading across the
United States. Sporting Guy Fawkes masks
from V for Vendetta, anonymous protestors congregated outside Scientology Churches holding signs that
read "the cake is a lie," and singing a song about doing science in
order to "stay alive." For the average
bystander, it was hard to tell what
these masked protestors were trying to accomplish, or why they were
all dressed so strangely and dancing
around Scientology Churches. But
the protestors themselves seemed
to be clued in on whatever it was

I

Milburn explores correlations
between video game culture
and online social and political
hacktivism.
they were doing. Guy Fawkes masks
and signs about cake were elements
of every one of these gatherings.
Clearly, something was operating
underneath the surface to give these
protests cohesion, and to band them
into a larger movement.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2019.2952295
Date of current version: 2 December 2019

14

The masked protestors were
members of Anonymous - a loosely-organized collective of Internetbased activists. These members,
who called themselves anons, were
engaged in one of Anonymous' first
missions: Operation Chanology.
Anonymous had used chat room
and YouTube videos to rally support
for this operation, and their goal
was to "systematically dismantle
the Church of Scientology" and "expel
[it] from the Internet." All of these puzzling references to cake, science, and
V for Vendetta were part of Anonymous' meme culture, heavily influenced by video games (in this case,
the 2008 video game Portal).
Operation Chanology
was a textbook example
of a n emerging for m o f
activism called hacktivism, in which anonymous
hackers try to subvert organizations they believe to be
acting unjustly with unconventional demonstrations
and rogue computer hacking. In his book Respawn,
Colin Milburn examines the
relationship between hacktivism and
video game culture through the lens
of technogenesis, which he defines
as "the entanglement of human
evolution with technological evolution." Milburn treats both hacking and video games as forms of
"applied science fiction," where the
principles of science fiction - using
technological and scientific knowlIEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

edge to craft clever solutions to
impossible problems on the fly - are
applied to the real world. He argues
that hackers use their knowledge of
computers and the Internet to bend
the behavior of technology to their
wills, and that the pioneers of video
game development have thought up
clever programming tricks to push
the envelope on what experiences
computers could deliver. Having
drawn this parallel, Milburn then
explores correlations between video
game culture and online social and
political hacktivism.
Beginning with a study of Adventure (1977), the first text-based adventure game for computers, Milburn
argues that video games teach players to fight against obstinate systems
with the very tools those systems provide. In Adventure, the player tries
to escape a cave by interacting with
the game world using a command
prompt that can decipher simple English commands, such as "go west" or
"examine object." At the end of the
game, players escape the cave, only
to find themselves trapped inside a
representation of the game's own
source code. In other words, players
discover that they are trapped inside
the system that had been generating
their virtual world all along.
The game's recursive twist dramatizes a central theme of the technogenic condition Milburn describes:
obstinate systems, operating in
(continued on page 82)
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DECEMBER 2019
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2019

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