Or How I Was Hacked by an Ideologue
by Jason Booker
At one point in Sky Gilbert’s latest, Hackerlove, a character comments about how government regulation of the internet proves that the interweb’s purpose has changed. Instead of being about the free-flow sharing of information that it once was, the World Wide Web has been taken over by e-commerce. While some legalities need to be enforced – like unauthorized use of a person’s work or the plotting of a real-life crime – does society need to regulate permissible web-content, including contentious subjects like secretive and graphic depictions of war, bestiality (as suggested in Gilbert’s dialogue) or child pornography? Or do we permit the modus operandi of our interconnectivity to shift?
Shifting: that’s what Gilbert’s play does best. It fantasizes a relationship between Bradley Manning, famous for leaking numerous classified American military documents in 2010, and Adrian Lamo, the man who reported him to officials.
