Conclusions
This paper has focused on crises of communication caused by current forms of DDoS attacks and has highlighted the need to reflect upon the different temporal dimensions of such attacks. In a more immediate sense, a successful DDoS attack disrupts the exchange of data between clients and servers, thus rendering content inaccessible. Depending on the political constellations involved, this can have a revealing impetus, in the sense that it focuses attention on specific political questions. It can also create a sense of technicity, i.e. bringing the openness and negotiability of technical constellations to the fore. However, when these kinds of breakdown become ordinary, they rather appear as detrimental to visibility, elevating protection providers into an intermediary position where they decide about the accessibility of content, thus introducing opaque mechanisms of traffic management.
Acknowledging these long-term effects of DDoS attacks allows for a more comprehensive understanding of their role, both in terms of hacktivist tactics and in terms of infrastructural developments. Hacktivism research that focuses on DDoS as a political tactic seems preoccupied with the immediate political impact of specific attacks. This comes at the expense of their more systemic infrastructural consequences. Integrating further temporal perspectives could help to better understand the interrelationship between specific, situated attacks and the broader economic and technological structures that they bring about. Broadening the horizon in this way seems especially important when discussing the legitimacy of DDoS attacks. To put it bluntly: How relevant is the immediately perceivable effect of current DDoS attacks compared to the behind-the-scenes infrastructural adjustments that they trigger? Depending on the (empirical) answer to this question, many arguments that have been brought forward in favour of DDoS as a political tactic might have to be re-evaluated.
On a more abstract level, the paper has highlighted the need to reflect upon different forms of temporality when theorising the relationship between breakdown and infrastructure. As a kind of communication crisis, DDoS points to the fact that certain kinds of persistent breakdown render infrastructure opaque, rather than allowing revealing insights. Focusing on the way that repetitive patterns of interference contribute to long-term infrastructural transformations holds the potential of broadening analyses of power relations in current media environments. Programmatically speaking, it is also a call to explore a greater variety of temporal relationships between crises of communication and infrastructures of communication.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- DDoS – Technical Developments
- Phases of Hacktivism
- Phases of DDoS: Technological developments
- Effectivity and Legitimacy of DDoS
- Breakdown and visibility
- DDoS as breakdown
- DDoS becomes ordinary
- The politics of infrastructuring
- Conclusions
- Bibliography