Reality hacking

Reality hacking is an artistic practice that emerges from the intersection of hacking and hacker culture, contemporary art, activism, and net culture. Reality hacking takes as its basis a broad, phenomenological point of view of the world, and considers (often unorthodox) investigations into everyday objects and situations a meaningful way of probing into the working of varied social contexts.

History

The word 'hacking' or 'hacker' comes from the 1960s when the first computer hackers emerged at MIT, and later took root in actions such as phone phreaking, BBS culture, and virtual sit-ins in the 90s.

Art movements such as Fluxus and Happenings in the 70s created a climate of receptability in regard to loose-knit organizations and group activities where spontaneity, a return to primitivist behavior, and an ethics where activities and socially-engaged art practices became tantamount to aesthetic concerns.

The conflation of these two histories in the mid-to-late 90s resulted in cross-overs between virtual sit-ins, electronic civil disobedience, denial-of-service attacks, as well as mass protests in relation to groups like the IMF and World Bank. The rise of collectivies, net.art groups, and those concerned with the fluid interchange of technology and real-life (often from an environmental concern) gave birth to this new practice.

Reality Hacking as Political Activism

“Reality hacking” is a form of activism that relies on tweaking the every-day communications most easily available to individuals with the purpose of awakening the political and community conscience of the larger population. The term first came into use among New York and San Francisco artists, but has since been adopted by a school of political activists centered around Social Redemption.

As a principle of political activism, “reality hacking” takes advantage of the insight of linguists and sociologists who argue that post-twentieth-century mass culture in the advanced world has become particularly impervious to either positive or negative rethinking of community. Negative assertions about community – in the form of negative news stories and mass political protests – tend to fall on ears overloaded by daily tragedy in the news, even when the causes and facts they relate are valid and deserving. Positive reimaginings of community – in the form of utopian havens, alternative religious or political structures, or idealistic protest against the status quo – equally tend to fall upon unbelieving ears of busy individuals who have already accepted the standards, sacrifices, and limits of the reality in which they normally operate.

As an alternative to these dead ends of twentieth-century political activism, “reality hacking” tries to capture the attention of individuals in their normal course of regular information consumption. It may involve attracting mainstream media attention to an attention-getting fringe political issue more liable to generate rethinking of cultural norms than standard debates to which the public has already become jaded. Or it may involve harnessing the means of information dissemination itself, using online information sources to disseminate alternative definitions of commonly accepted facts.

Context in the occult world

Reality Hacking has also recently emerged amongst fringe internet occult-based communities. The word takes on the traditional meanings of 'altering reality through intent', with an added hacker-culture twist/bias. The term was originally coined by 'Squink', long term 'reality hacker' and designer of Irreality.net.

The concept of reality hacking as an occult facet was furthered in the goth-punk, occult-inspired White Wolf role-playing game Mage: The Ascension. In the game, Reality Hackers are a subculture of the Virtual Adept Tradition who use the computer hacker phenomenon as a metaphor. These Reality Hackers seek to actually "hack" reality through a variety of real-life parallels; for example, a Reality Hacker wishing to improve his health might actually find a way to manipulate his own "source code": his DNA. Reality Hackers find systems in all places, from chemistry to economics, and use their knowledge of the factors within those systems to alter those systems in the same way a traditional computer hacker would alter the source code of a program in order to manipulate its operation or purpose. In the game, the Reality Hackers often viewed reality itself as one big program; the computer hacker and computer cracker attitude towards programs and systems often extended into this observation, as far as what the Reality Hackers thought would be ethical use of this knowledge.

The Reality Hacker is also a class used in the game Realmwalkers: Earth Light by Mind's Eye Publishing, where they have abilities like the characters in the movie The Matrix.

Reality hacking further blurs the lines between scientific method and occult studies through a critical review of fringe science. The commonly used method (and above anecdote) - involving DNA hacking has since been partially verified through continued studies of Epigenetics - the "mysterious second genetic code that turns our genes on and off."¹

¹ - The Globe and Mail - Code 2 (11/03/06)

Practitioners

Reality hacking has many different types of practitioners, varying from art-historical methods of inquiry to others that are more nebulous.

• Space-Hijackers
• RealityHacking
• Fravia's web searchlores and its Reality cracking Lab
• Surveillance Camera Players
• Interacting Arts
• Irreality forum thread on Reality Hacking