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HACKER ENGLISH
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I spend a lot of time talking to people who speak English as
a second or third language and I have come to appreciate
many aspects of the exchange. Firstly, word choice is often
unlikely, evocative, and even meaningful in a sort of his-
torical sense. Last summer I was locked inside a bathroom
overnight in Paris (long story ...) and when the locksmith
finally arrived in the morning he declared that the lock had
``gained independence'' from the doorknob. On a bus in Ger-
many some weeks later, the driver explained delays by noting
that the highways were undergoing a series of ``repara-
tions.'' Translation is not simply between equivalent words
and compatible syntaxes, but between entire cultural con-
texts and values; revolution, mass humiliation, all these
deep psycho-cultural trauma pass through language in trans-
lation.
But most of the time I appreciate the absence of lan-
guage more than its revealing usage. Conversations tend
towards long silences, thoughts are whittled down to their
most terse and precise expression, facial expressions and
eye contact replace nuanced speech to communicate the sub-
jective measures of comfort, anxiety, trust, confidence, &c.
There's little use in correcting a mistaken conjugation if
the verbs and nouns are close enough, and you realize how
little must be said once there's such a high cost in con-
certed effort to accomplish any spoken communication.
The sincerity with which I approach malformed attempts
to communicate through partially-learned languages is by no
means universal. ``Errors'' of diction and syntax--in sneer
quotes because you'd need to be in the French political
establishment to support a top-down linguistic decree of
correctness--are mocked in the most malicious and xenophobic
forms of exclusion. And even one step below this explicit
malice, the more- or less-predictable mistranslations are
fodder for the full gamut of supercilious humor from slap-
stick (see ``Engrish'') to the most subtle of irony (``Lan-
guage Log'').
Back in America, the thoughtless, throw-away use of
language is devastating. My first stop after five months
abroad is an impromptu high school reunion at a collegetown
bar and no quantity of neither booze nor banter can reassure
me that my former classmates are on their way to actualized
or even contented lives. I had just about forgotten about
the existence of basketball, but its role here is to do
nothing but exist, to be a coherent referent that provides
comfort in its perpetual recounting and stable reconstruc-
tion, instead of the uncertainty outside of its narrow
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confines. Smalltalk depends upon and confirms an agreed-upon
ordering of the world, while the loneliness and decontextu-
alization of solo travel evidence the provincial, existen-
tial, fraud of this order. It might seem that going through
childhood and adolescence together would open up deep, effi-
cient lines of communication but instead we grasp to mass-
media icons and simulations, reinforcing in gesture and tone
the lie that there's nothing more to say. Conversation is
littered with the noise of a mass culture that has lost any
personal meaning, yet through the noise I manage two excep-
tional and moving exchanges with old friends about betrayal
and the musical expression. Lack of shared language, then,
is not making communication difficult so much as making the
difficulty of communication apparent. If I had expected the
change of place and language alone to enable deeper
exchanges, I was bound to be disappointed.
In fact, language difference is only one obstruction to
communication, and meaning is not predictably attenuated by
obstructions. A letter that takes weeks to deliver, spotty
cell phone reception, a limited text messaging plan, all of
these barriers force us to consider what is most important
and to increase the contrast and clarity of what we say.
Speaking through an imperfect channel of communication--as
all channels are--opens up new possibilities and even allows
for their explicit design. A precursor to Twitter was
designed to coordinate micro-level resistance at the sham
conventions of the Republican as well as Democratic parties
in 2004, and Twitter in its pairing of extreme message-
length restrictions with massive, mobile distribution still
finds uses by revolutionaries capitalizing on its peculiar
constraints. Poets long ago preempted information theorists
in use of terseness and structured data to guarantee data
integrity through the unreliable medium of oral culture, and
in their constrained medium the poets embedded the deepest
known packets of emotional transmission. Today in Kansas, a
middle-aged woman is caring for an ailing neighbor a couple
hundred miles away with whom an affinity was developed by
adding captions to pictures of cats on a website called ``I
Can Has Cheezburger''; the woman's son is a prodigious engi-
neer who reports that the most sophisticated information
company in the world conducts its frank internal discourse
similarly through image captions on an in-house ``meme gen-
erator.''
Companies like Facebook would love to design the next
instance of communication media as some fixed-form, central-
ized, ad-supported, virtual shopping mall network where all
correspondence is routed through the company and all activ-
ity subject to arbitrary approval of corporate whim/policy.
Even notwithstanding the egregious misuses of power (kicking
off labor organizers, turning over activists to the police,
&c) and the single point of failure (just one lonely node of
the network for a malicious power-broker to block), the
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entire premise of the online ``social network'' is based on
the deliberately constructed lie of private space, the
premise that all exchange is simply between you and your
``friends,'' as if Facebook or Google or anyone were able
somehow to stop photos or messages sent through them to
200-odd acquaintances from leaving this network. These com-
panies want you open to the world at your most intimate and
unguarded (to track desires, pitch goods and services) and
are indifferent to any resultant vulnerability, be it
social, political, or professional. Treated as a public
broadcasting mechanism, then, these websites dictate narrow
usages, terms, and conditions and could be seen as a massive
regression from the open Internet (or even early portals
like GeoCities) in nearly every regard (ie. by rigidly stan-
dardizing the form of all content, removing for example even
the most basic ability to define hyperlinks). Social Media
Co make private claim to a canonical interface for mediated
inter-personal communication, which they then deceptively
and deliberately push more public than we expect. Coupled
with a monotonous, modernist, design, the sum is a cynical
and distressing vision for the future.
There's a mass movement working to subvert, regain con-
trol over, and reinvent corporate mass media, ``social'' and
otherwise. Maybe it's less ``movement'' than old-fashioned
coalition: academics representing new computer science pro-
grams; nihilistic info-anarchists; cipherpunks; bloggers;
d.i.y. communitarians; libertarians and lefties; ``free
software'' programmers; the hive brain; ...
From this creative hodgepodge come a long listing of
viable alternatives: the core software infrastructure on
which the Internet (including the corporate Internet)
depends; Wikipedia, taken both as incredible resource as
well as a massively successful public network of collabora-
tive knowledge building; tools for making, aggregating, and
filtering blogs, community portals, fora, chatrooms, mailing
lists; and a full suite of protocol and software that
deliver strong encryption, perhaps the only responsible pre-
condition for translation of a private sphere to a digital
network.
All of these cells, not quite splinters, hardly even
internally consistent, came from around the world last week
to gather at the Chaos Communication Camp in an abandoned
military base some 70km outside of Berlin, and here is where
through broken English, hackers (I use this term to messily
encompass the aforementioned contradictory impulses) config-
ure their own cell network, wire in a link to the free
Internet, pitch tents into temporary villages, and come
together around the idea of radically decentered control of
modern techno-communication infrastructure. And so in the
context of good-enough English exchanges to realize common
communication interests, I was puzzled and amused by the
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preponderance of a particular t-shirt at this conference.
The shirt, black with blocky white text reading ALL YOUR
BASE ARE BELONG TO US, quotes from the now-infamous botched
translation of the intro scene to an old Sega game from the
Japanese into this unfortunate English. But while the gen-
eral level of English spoken by most attendees was excel-
lent, and certainly good enough for sharing projects and
building solidarity, English skills were not so good that
such t-shirt diction deserved a dismissive chuckle of supe-
riority. It's not even clear to me that many wearing the
shirt even understood what was ``wrong'' with the sentence!
One explanation is that the phrase occupies such a notable
place in video game/hacker history that it is understood and
appreciated as a ``fail'' even without a deep understanding
of why that is, and even if such linguistic kludges will be
earnestly used and excused while wearing the shirt. Or per-
haps the meaning of the shirt is irrelevant and it's about
some abstract group affiliation or vague, implied, affinity.
The final explanation for the shirt, which by the way
is my personal preference, is that the abnormal diction on
the t-shirt is beside the point but that the text still car-
ries the weight of meaning. It is a hacker conference, after
all, and so there's a real possibility that the underlying
message of victory and domination, encoded into Japanese in
1989, has survived two linguistic degradations and over 22
years to find an unlikely resonance here in the appropriated
hangars of an East German military base denominated by per-
haps a not-so-broken English. As a hacker dictum, then, ALL
YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US: when it comes to the future of
media and communication infrastructure, we can only hope so.
--R.M.O., Berlin, August 2011