5 ‘Hacking’ Life Itself – In Pursuit of a Definition

Abstract

Type ‘hacker’ into the Google image search and the first hits show a shady figure in a black hoodie, faceless, anonymous, crouched over a computer, with streams of digits in the background. The figure of the hacker – a prominent one in our digital, data-based societies – carries with it a dark connotation: secretive, unofficial, invisible, avantgarde. Type in ‘life’ and you find images of sunrises and scenery, success, happiness, people and plants. Life is inherently positive. The term ‘biohacking’ often used for activities that ‘hack’ life itself, is a perfect amalgamation of these contradictions: the Greek bíos, meaning life, becomes a prefix for the hack: ‘biohacking,’ it seems, is also ‘lifehacking.’ So how can this ‘dark’ activity be applied to something connotated so positively? As the previous discussions have shown, this culturally pervasive image of the hacker only carries with it the shady connotations of the (illegal) ‘hack:’ breaking rules and laws, posing a danger to safety and society, stealing (intellectual) property, entering digital systems uninvited and undetected with malicious intents. But hacking as an approach is much more diverse: As I have pointed out in the previous chapter, it ranges from these illicit activities, to the coding of free and accessible software, activism for more access to computers and technology or simply an ideology of openness, inclusion, innovation and transparency. In their essence, hacks, according to Delgado and Callen, are experiments that “show that problems can be solved and that things could be done otherwise.”They are an “experimental mode of inquiry” in which not the success of making them work counts but the process of trying (189). Today, the object that is hacked does not have to be code: technology, bodies, materials, feelings, lifestyles can be subject to this type of experimental inquiry and transformation. Hacking has left the realm of the virtual, digits and code and instead entered the physical world. In fact, in DIY biology