ABSTRACT
A number of theorists had argued that, in the changed social conditions of the Twenty-first century, the political energies of critical theory need to be re-directed into conflicts that are spatially and temporally more restricted than the grand historical projects of the past. The dilemma of hacktivism may be to serve politics, which hacktivists must leam to judge for themselves, or to serve themselves on the terrain of cyberspace. The important point, however, is that, ironically, gaming culture turns out to be the cultural launching off point and to some extent the site of a constituency of social actors who refuse to assign a merely passive role in the networked society. As an intervention in the technological politics of computing, then, hacking as a practice is a blind alley. This chapter concludes by drawing further on critical theory and ideas from some classical thinkers on political right to gain insight to the underlying politics of information technology design.
