Workshop // Hacker Tecniques
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etoy * THE DIGITAL HIJACK
"Joyriding the datahighway" - Basics on THE DIGITAL HIJACK

etoy: http://www.etoy.com
Original Web site: http://www.hijack.org
etoy's TANKSYSTEM: http://fanclub.etoy.c3.hu/tanksystem/
Digital Hijack 2: http://www.digitalhijack.org/dh2

The Digital Hijack was an act of deliberate sabotage of one of the most important tool for the common Internet user: the search engine. In the first days of the Internet age, it was one of the most relevant tools for creating hierarchy within the informations you could get on the Internet and an instrument of control and regulation of your behaviour.

Nothing new, every info-gate plays its game. DH principally aimed at challenging a social use of the net through search engines: what was at stake was the role of the 'user' of the net (that in etoy's vision had not to be a simple 'user' at all).

So, as the cultural role of the search engine was hijacking people's attention through (impersonally) selected social knowledge, etoy decided to hijack users by their own. Operationally, etoy wants to interfere into the process of management of informations, playing an active role within the conceptual machine of search engines: web page screening, indexing and results hierarchical displaying. Is Internet simply an archive or a new revolutionary and still hybrid mass medium? The answer is today pretty clear and the results achieved, but in 1995 this looked like a cultural battle still to be fighted.

In a moment when the WWW was just starting being populated with branded sites and the interfaces were more and more quickly achieving graphical features, etoy imagines the Internet as a stage for a 'total action' (ever heard about the 'total work of art'?). In etoy's words it becomes 'action entertainment': a mass show that hits people individually by making them lose control of their actions while innocently (too innocently....) navigating the net and searching for (not really innocent) topics.

Hacking here is still a metaphor but a good one: etoy did enter a system, that is not a server (like in the 'old school' server hacking) but a two-sided cultural artifact, made - on the one side - by designing a tool of selection and hierarchization and - on the other side - on a social use of this tool.

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THE DIGITAL HIJACK recipe

- Hacker-like attitude
- Pop culture as field of action
- Understanding Internet as medium
- Mis-use brand power (etoy.TANKSYSTEM)
- Legal sabotage: forcing the search engine way of processing informations through intelligent agents
- On the side of the user: the hijack alert and modifications on browser proper functioning
- Common people's reactions
- Reactions from hackers world


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Hacker Tecniques (english) / (italian)