‘A revolution in code’? Hari Kunzru's Transmission and the cultural politics of hacking

Abstract

Hari Kunzru's 2004 novel Transmission offers an important imaging of the hacker as a troubling figure within the global polity: its principal character is a migrant hacker who tests and resists the protocols of national and multilateral organizations which seek to regulate cybercrime, but here technology is seen to effect a reassertion of space and identity as much as it allows new forms of transnational movement. Drawing in particular on Castells’ The Internet Galaxy, Parikka's Digital Contagions, and Wark's A Hacker Manifesto (as well as work on the wider social, historical, and legal context of cybercriminality), this article considers the ways in which hacking acts against neoliberal narratives of global inclusion and points instead to an alternative politics of social intervention.