Hacking generatively scales up energy to reorganizes power relations to challenge broader political structures.

Previously in the chapter it was said that up until the breakthrough of capi-talism, nation states, and a modern juridical system, commoners tended to identify themselves more with outlaws than with law authorities. Indeed, the social bandit as a champion of the little man is a recurrent theme in folk lore stretching from ancient China and feudal Europe to nineteenth cen-tury America. The argument put forward here is that the hacker movement might signal the return of the social bandit. The status of hackers as either social bandits or criminals depends on their relation towards the majority of ordinary computer users and citizens. Law, norm systems, and technology are intertwined in a struggle over fixating the public image of the hacker as either one or the other.File-sharing networks provide a good example of how a particular archi-tecture can strengthen the social aspects of lawbreaking. The open invitation millions of regular computer users to share copyrighted files with each other has contributed to undermining the legitimacy of intellectual prop-erty. Efforts by law enforcers to isolate infringers and identify ringleaders are frustrated by the response of hackers to dislocate information flows, involve more people, and boost the heat losses of the juridical system. In the old days, a single pirate sold thousands of copies of a copyrighted work for profit, mirroring the position of the official vendor. In file-sharing networks, the position of the distributor has been replaced by thousands of individuals all acquiring a single copy from disparate sources. Since every petty violation of copyright is, in its aggregate, equally destabilising to the intellectual prop-erty regime as any other, the law has to track down every single perpetrator. Hence a growing number of ordinary computer users come to know the punitive side of law and order. Just as with a light bulb, the way to counter for heat losses in the juridical system is to scale up energy. In other words, the penalty for violating intellectual property must be set much higher than is called for by the nature of the crime in order to compensate for the small likelihood of getting caught. At the time of writing, copyright infringers are being fined and sued; however, judging by the current trends, they might soon find themselves behind bars. The distinction which courts tradition-ally have upheld between for-profit and non-profit motives, corresponding with the separation between civil and criminal offences, is being erased from both European and American copyright law. The reason is that if any safety vaults are left in the statute book, whereby some conditions must be met to merit a harsher sentence, hackers will quickly reorganise information flows beneath that minimum criteria. Likewise, the other hallmarks of the rule of law, predictability of outcomes and checks on law authorities, pro-vide loopholes that can be exploited by hackers. Consequently, directives on intellectual property are made obsolete and have to be replaced at an accel-erated pace. Ideally, in order to be effective, the police would need a penalty system that could be adjusted at the same speed as hackers write code. That would require an open-ended law, providing corporate lawyers with a carteblanche for making up enforcement policies as they go. It would require, in other words, a permanent state of exception. The reflections above suggest a similarity in strategies between hackers and the Baader-Meinhof league, though hackers are considerably more peaceful, playful and effective in their course of action. Namely, the idea that by provoking the democratic state into exaggerated and indiscriminate violence, the masses will be forced to choose sides. When legislators become increasingly out-of-step with public sentiments on intellectual property law, people tend to identify themselves with the cause of hackers. It is thus hackers can reclaim the status of social bandits.These observations clarify the proposition made in the introduction of the book: Intellectual property law ought to be read out as a negative shape in the struggle of hackers. The inability of legislators to affect outcomes and enforce policies owes to capital having lost its monopoly over the means to dissolve and reorganise the virtual, networked space. This statement can be examined in more detail by borrowing from the anthropologist David Harvey. He says that the means of distributing space is continuously being revolutionised by capital in the same way as it revolutionises other means of production. In this drive, the incentive to reduce spatial barriers and to shorten circulation time are two guiding principles, in addition to the prior-ity of removing strongholds of working class power. But to dissolve rigidi-ties in one dimension necessarily implies the construction of a new rigid structure on top of which the previous terrain can be restructured. In Har-vey’s words: “In order to overcome spatial barriers and to ‘annihilate space with time’, spatial structures are created which themselves ultimately act as a barrier to further accumulation. These spatial structures are expressed, of course, in the fixed and immovable form of transport facilities, plant, and other means of production and consumption which cannot be moved with-out being destroyed.”53 The Internet is a showcase of how communications and logistics have been reorganised to undermine national borders, over-turn traditions, redefine power relations, accelerate product-cycles, unlock financial flows, and expand global markets. Concurrently, however, the opti-cal cables, the computer terminals, the Internet protocols, the widespread familiarity with a particular graphical interface, to mention just a few fac-tors, cause a temporary fixation of the current setup of the Internet. Note to be taken, capital is not hindered from replacing the Internet because the structure is deeply entrenched. It is the other way around. The Internet is the most fluid form of structure allowing the widest scope of flexibility and per-petual restructuring within its set framework. The benefits are easy to spot. Nationally based working class organisations have been mortally wounded by the removal of frictions to capital, in part made possible by electronic networks. The advantage capital has won in this regard against organised labour is, however, offset by a new challenger. At least in some respects, capital and living labour meet on near equal terms in the computer network, since everyone is moving at the same (instant) speed. If capital finds a way to dissolve the current setup into an even more fluid form, it certainly will. But that would, (1) level the balance of power between living labour and capital/dead labour yet further, and, (2), this time around, it might be labour that dissolves and redefines the latest fixation of space.