Hacking Coyote E-Book

Alan Mills

• Herausgeber: mikrotext
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 93

Beschreibung

Good-bye, rational culture! Let Guatemalan writer Alan Mills welcome you to the philosophy of tricksters. Follow him on a tour through indigenous mythology, classical education, and the literary canon, thoroughly mixed with hacking theory and with popular culture—from Star Wars and Breaking Bad to familiar figures like Bugs Bunny and El Zorro. Get to know Michael Jackson and David Bowie, Guy Fawkes and the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya-K’iche’, through this fulminant essay on old and new strategies for resisting superpowers. Or, in the author's own words: “This open-source codex seeks to unite the contemporary traffickers of information with the smoke signals of their totemic animal.“ "El guatemalteco Alan Mills escribe tanto novela en español como ensayo en inglés. Son transgénero, como todos nosotros." New York Times “At times the author’s approach reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism.” Eva Wißkirchen, comparaison d’etre “This hacking essay is punk.” Tania Folaji, elektroprint “Like a conspiracy theorist.” Enno Park, Deutschlandradio Kultur Alan Mills was born in Guatemala in 1979 and lives in Berlin and Vienna. In the past ten years, he has lived in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Paris, Madrid and Leipzig, and has read at poetry festivals throughout Europe and Latin America. He just finished a dissertation on contemporary Latin American literature, in particular indigenist science fiction. He is on Twitter as @alan1000s. https://twitter.com/alan1000s His collected tweets have been published in a German translation as "Eine Subkultur der Träume".

Leseprobe

Alan Mills

Hacking Coyote

Tricks for Digital Resistance

a mikrotext

Editing: Cory Tamler

Pictures: Alan Mills

Cover Design: Andrea Nienhaus

Cover Picture: pixabay.com (Lizenz CC0 1.0)

Typeface on Cover: PTL Attention, Viktor Nübel

Production: Booktype

www.mikrotext.de – [email protected]

ISBN 978-3-944543-38-3

All rights reserved.

© mikrotext 2016, Berlin

Summary

Good-bye, rational culture! Let Guatemalan writer Alan Mills welcome you to the philosophy of tricksters. Follow him on a tour through indigenous mythology, classical education, and the literary canon, thoroughly mixed with hacking theory and with popular culture—from Star Wars and Breaking Bad to familiar figures like Bugs Bunny and El Zorro. Get to know Michael Jackson and David Bowie, Guy Fawkes and the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya-K’iche’, through this fulminant essay on old and new strategies for resisting superpowers. If you don’t yet know that the fox and the coyote can be read as symbols for destructive but simultaneously liberating deeds, if you haven't yet learned to see them as transcultural trickster-hipsters, reading this poetic, associative and witty panorama will open your eyes. Or, in the author's own words: “This open-source codex seeks to unite the contemporary traffickers of information with the smoke signals of their totemic animal.” Mills currently lives in Berlin and Vienna.

Hacking Coyote

Imprint

Summary

Title page

Quote

Coyote wanders through cyberspace

OK, but who the f**k is Coyote?

Hacking the Empire: digital colonialism vs. enlightened coyote-ism

Why should we listen to Coyote?

San Coyote: drug dealer and spiritual hacker

Coyote: shape shifter

Guy: Fox

Magical Mystery Tour

Operation: Rabbit

Little Jack wanders through Neverland

Decoding Coyote: further reading

Spread the word

About the author

About mikrotext

Catalogue

Alan Mills: Subkultur der Träume (Leseprobe)

Sebastian Christ: Brief an die NSA (Leseprobe)

Alan Mills

Hacking Coyote

Tricks for Digital Resistance

Quote

Wile E. [Coyote] is my reality.

Bugs Bunny is my goal.

Chuck Jones

Coyote wanders through cyberspace

Liminal fox at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Tiergarten.

We live in predatory times. We web users try to survive in the middle of a jungle, at times not so virtual, where hunters have intensified the stalking. Predators wearing the most varied cybernetic fur establish their monitoring circuits and extend their traps.

In both realms, the online world as well as in this outer space we call “reality”, it seems that the hunting ground of the most powerful has widened to a frenetic rhythm, inversely proportional to the reduction of not a few of our prerogatives as citizens.

Hunting plus virtual stockbreeding: we are read, mapped, monitored, reviewed, controlled, programmed, directed like numbered cattle that will go to the slaughterhouse when the time comes; we are herded like electrical sheep unable to perceive the presence of danger.

We are jumping inside a mental barn. At times it seems that we wear an electronic tag that prevents us from moving without supervision or without allowing our creativity, our cyber navigations and our searches to be milked by hungry economic and political powers.

Our private data, our content on social media, our moribund ability to get free access to information, our clicks, our virtual identities and, ultimately, the different interconnected regions of our lives, have been in recent years under the siege of mercenaries acting with military efficiency. Oriented towards a portentous profitability in dollars or euros, their huge jaws swallow our freedoms and our rights as if they were just a bunch of emoticons or small Pokémon.

Anyone can see that we wander blindly while we pick the most poisonous flowers in the garden of calamities. We have become the stuffed turkey of a dinner to which they pretend to have invited us. We thank them because we are getting polished like a cannon ball meant for a weapon pointing against ourselves.

We feel like we are selling ourselves down the raging river that flows into La Chingada. But something inside us whispers that not everything is lost yet. It’s getting down to the wire, folks, and yet we still have some small but vibrant hope, the cloud-figures in the sky indicate that a mischievous ancestral spirit wants to help us and hack the entangled network of this cyber war, the war for control of the Internet.

It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it’s the spirit of Coyote! 

The spectral beast has sunk its claws into the World Wide Web and has been digging a system of tunnels between the parallel dimensions of reality, virtuality, fiction and myth, in order to dismantle—and at the same time, celebrate—the farce of a Cyberspace that in its best days could have become truly democratic. In these fateful moments an old master of knowledge has reappeared among us: one that is part animal, part human, a little like a ghost and, equally, a code that enlightens us, inspires us, guides us and advises us during this debacle. This mutant messenger offers its knowledge to address the distorted virtual mirror of a terrible material catastrophe.

Coyote wanders decoding, taunting, challenging the sinister cyber totalitarianism of our time, while simultaneously blowing into our faces, shamelessly enough, a gentle caress of smoke from his fine Cuban cigar.

OK, but who the f**k is Coyote?

Coyote is the master of chaos that makes his point by playing tricks, or through deception.

The teachings of this character are always as dubious as they are certain, as logical as illogical, as wise as ridiculous, as accurate as random. For some they come off as very clever, for others they seem very foolish. His speech is usually oriented towards paradox or looks toward disorder or entropy, since his purpose is to remind us that any situation can always be turned on its head, or that for every immanent system there exists a corresponding constant potential to be subverted.

This anti-hero bursts onto the scene when the Apollonian, rational, orderly, balanced and fair appearance of the world crumbles. He makes his bizarre triumphal entry precisely where the established order would have least expected him.

Some of his most powerful tricks are those that allow him to transform his identity, or to move fluidly between his equally animal, human, digital, spectral or holographic nature. Coyote has, for instance, the ability to snatch a hen from our coops before sliding out to make a cameo in the evening news. He can sneak just like a celebrity among the trending topics of social media, breaking with ease into the most commonly retold fairy tales, or shine in a television series with the highest rating of all time.

To confirm the latter we need only to recall—or to consult on YouTube, if we so desire—the episode of The Simpsons in which an incorrigible Homer Simpson is sent into a hallucinatory state after eating some red-hot Guatemalan Insanity Peppers in his chili.

The story goes that Homer has accepted the challenge of the Springfield’s representative of order, Police Chief Wiggum, to eat a lot of Insanity Peppers brought from Quetzalacatenango. The result of this recklessness is a Homer Simpson with a burning mouth who enters a journey through other dimensions that will bring him out of reality, lead him to a psychedelic desert and position him temporarily on top of a pyramid of consciousness, a place where he will encounter a cosmic Coyote that speaks with the voice of Johnny Cash.

Coyote will tell Homer that his journey is a quest for knowledge, while at the same time motivating Homer to acquire a computer and find inner peace. Shortly after presenting him with a mysterious riddle, the fabulous little red animal simply disappears.

Coyote boldly moves between the dimensions of reality, fiction, dream, hallucination, and virtuality. He is one of the most popular sacred trickster transcultural avatars, analogous to characters in mythologies or various literatures known as Hermes, Legba, Pedro Urdemales, Inari or Puck.

He is the magician but also the clown of the party. He is a wicked alchemist. He is a playful elf. If he wishes, he can manifest as a poltergeist or as a smartphone that suddenly howls. When Siri makes a bad joke, take it easy—it may be that Coyote has taken possession of her voice.

This is the same little voice that advises the whistleblower that, on many occasions, the best way to survive is to play dumb. He knows that the combination of being aware of one’s own foolishness and playing the fool is a form of superior intelligence. Coyote uses the same net(work) to fish for his food and to entangle his own legs. He mounts a Facebook profile to waste his invaluable time, but there it is, without even looking for it he finds the precious solution to a matter of life or death. Like the great Houdini, he prepares mortal traps for himself so that he can learn how to escape them alive.

We are facing the moralless moralist. The stories Canis latrans tells us may sound pompous or absurd until we begin to listen with ears free of any kind of prejudice or moralizing.

This same animal—often anthropomorphized, or wrapped in a jester’s clothes—may appear as the protagonist or antagonist in the stories of the Navajo or the Sioux Indians: his role in these stories is always ambiguous as its fundamental mission is to communicate, for those who are reading or listening, certain vital pieces of knowledge not transmittable in any other way. The coyote is a trafficker of ancient secrets or very important conundrums.

His species is an Olympic medalist in the sport of survival. Coyote’s fearsome ferocity allows him to hunt alone or in groups and he never shies away from fighting other vermin, including those who pose great danger. Yet he understands very well when to retreat.

Some even say that some coyotes know how to play dead by copying the classic trick of the opossum, and some say that he knows how to hack the operating system of the enemy, to encrypt his data, to use a false identity, to maintain anonymity, to downsize, or to cross-dress in accordance with the conditions of a system, or according to the needs of the historical moment.

This restless canid represents the genius of transformations.

As already mentioned, Coyote embodies one hypostasis of the trickster archetype, the divine trickster, the transhistoric rogue. It is one of the many faces of the global shape shifter, the same being who assumes various identities, various bodies or interfaces, particular characteristics and different names according to each tradition where it is taken into account, becoming Loki, Leprechaun, Reynard the Fox, or San Simon.

This transcultural little avatar does not care to be considered hero or villain, saint or devil.

It is said that although he likes luxury, he often sympathizes with the needy.

It is also known that the energy of Coyote can sometimes manifest as Donnie Darko’s grisly rabbit Frank, or the Joker, or the fiery hero Gokú throwing dragon spheres.

Open secret: Gokú is a pop upgrade from Monkey King, the ancient Chinese trickster reloaded for the masses.

Our dear shape shifter can equally take the form of a fox turning up its nose at the bait in some Chinese forest, or the disturbing raven that whispers Nevermore at the window of the romantic poet, or the fake fox—for actually is a red panda—of Mozilla Firefox’s logo. Gossips say Coyote can even take, even if for short dreamlike moments, the form of the artist formerly known as Prince or the face of some iconic founder of Tor.

It is not to say that all these characters are one and the same, but rather that they all act or behave in similar ways within the most diverse range of cultural frameworks. You could say that each character develops more strongly one or more of the many defining aspects of the ancestral operator of the tricks, the cherished archetypical trickster.