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Access All Areas In 1861, Walt Whitman, then a writer for the Brooklyn Standard, visited the recently-obsolete Atlantic Avenue subway tunnel in Brooklyn. He was entranced by what he saw: “a passage of Acheron-like solemnity and darkness, now all closed and filled up, and soon to be utterly forgotten, with all its reminiscences.” While Acheron, one of the five rivers of Hades, might not strike many as a tourist destination, the lingering imprint of history lent the tunnel, in Whitman's mind, its own peculiar charm. After his visit, the tunnel was promptly filled in and forgotten; in his appreciation of abandonment, Whitman was characteristically ahead of his time. A century and a half later, scores of online enthusiasts from Bermuda to Berlin trade advice on where to find the most interesting derelict industrial compounds, how to sneak past security guards into active construction sites, and various other means of discovering their own underworlds. Ninjalicious’s book Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration, self-published late last year, is a homebrew bible for the nascent urban exploration (“UE” to its practitioners) community. Ninjalicious, or “Ninj,” is best known to UE devotees as the founder of Infiltration, a Toronto-based fanzine devoted to, as its motto proclaims, “going where you’re not supposed to go.” Debuting in 1996, Infiltration wasn’t the first zine devoted to UE culture; Melbourne, Australia’s Cave Clan published the widely-admired Il Draino newsletter in 1989. But while the Australians looked mostly to stormwater drains and other tunnels, in his zine and this book (sold only through the Infiltration website) Ninj seeks to broaden the definition of urban exploration into an active appreciation of all manner of structures, from working hotels to abandoned military compounds. He describes his frustration with explorers who claim that their area lacks “UE sites,” claiming that these people “need to expand their definitions of suitable targets." In a delightfully enthusiastic passage, Ninj enumerates the dizzying range of opportunities afforded by just one block of downtown Toronto, from subterranean wastewater drains to a barely-accessible skyscraper rooftop. While proving the potential of this “dull-looking corner,” he takes particular pleasure in the tower’s elevator shafts and the “abandoned nightclub” in the basement, before concluding convincingly that being at street level truly the “least interesting” option for the urban explorer. Unlike similarly esoteric urban pastimes like parkour, geocaching, or the worryingly-titled “elevator surfing,” activities which he defines as “urban adventure,” Ninj’s ideal is not stunt or competition-oriented, but an abstract “art of urban exploration.” The back cover of the book carries the tag “Adventure Travel,” but the tagline below reveals that its focus is on discovering “a hidden world in your own city,” recalling the travel philosophy of “Self-Reliance” author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who famously declared that “though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” In developing this internalized sensibility of curious appreciation, Access All Areas draws consciously on both Guy Debord’s Situationist ideology and early hacker culture. Ninj consciously ties his practice to several groups of European intellectuals, dedicating one of the first entries in the “Urban Exploration Timeline” to a 1921 group of Dadaists (including Andre Breton and Francis Picabia) who organized trips to sites around Paris that they felt “really have no reason for existing.” After giving the Dadaists their due, Ninj reveals a more important ideological debt in his next entry. In it, he describes Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI), a movement started in Paris in the 1950s, as believing that “society consists largely of passive spectators and consumers of packaged experience,” or “spectacle” in SI parlance. Ninj carries this vocabulary into his critique of modern consumer culture, echoing Debord’s practices in his description of how the urban explorer can transcend modern society’s “meaningless spectacle” through his subversive wanderings. Debord first critiqued the stifling “work-shopping-home” triangle of movement that Ninj decries in the book, inventing the practice of “dérive” in his 1955 Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography as a way to break away from routes predetermined by consumption and production. In 1953, he and his SI companions used their experience of the dérive in various parts of Paris to produce the notorious artwork The Naked City, a “psychogeographical” map of the city. While Debord’s original conception consisted of random urban perambulation in a receptive frame of mind, Access All Areas is similarly devoted to a cultivating a pervasive attitude of exploration. Ninj agrees with Debord that individuals can “shake up the state of affairs” by engaging in “creative play,” and links the dérive to his own brand of psychogeographical practice. Sadie Plant, author of a 1992 book on SI, describes dérive’s essence as “using an environment for one’s own ends,” a meaning that sits well with Ninj’s exhortations to his readers to take control of their urban environment. But while his critique of “prepackaged entertainment” experiences may be informed by SI’s anticonsumerist tendencies, Ninj, a self-professed computer nerd, focuses more specifically on the prefabricated worlds of video gaming. Frequently using video game terminology as metaphors, most notably in referring to “attributes,” “leveling up,” “missions” and the like), Ninj declares that exploring the real world uses similar skills and methods as that of virtual ones, but is ultimately more fulfilling. In an era when the video game industry makes more money than Hollywood, it seems almost inevitable that devotees of the early hacker ethic would seek a new channel. Ninj’s repeated references to computing culture acknowledge the inextricable links between the subcultures of hacking, computer gaming, and urban exploration. The current sense of the term “hacker” developed both from the jargon of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (TRMC) and the yearly pranks, or “hacks,” which were often elaborate productions requiring access to forbidden areas; in 1994 students built a realistic replica of an MIT police cruiser on the roof of the school’s Great Dome. With the growing prominence of sophisticated computers at the university in the 1960s, “hacking” began to refer to modifying programs in a creative, useful manner. This tinkering impulse, not corporate funding, was behind the birth of interactive entertainment. Partly as a diagnostic test for the new PDP-1 computer, TMRC member Steve “Slug” Russell created the first computer game, “Space War,” at MIT in 1962, starting a long interrelationship between hacking and gaming culture. One of the early text-based computer games, ADVENT (short for “Adventure”), was based on the exploration of subterranean passages. In a tribute to the game’s popularity on campus, the established MIT practice of exploring the school’s steam tunnels and mechanical rooms became known as “vadding,” and later “reality hacking.” This early resonance between urban exploration and computer culture is no mere coincidence; Ninj mentions the MIT “roof and tunnel” hackers in his timeline of UE precursors, and his attitude towards information and power borrows heavily from early hacker ideology. Prior to the 1960s, computer technology had been dominated by the bureaucratic order of firms like IBM, but the MIT hackers and their peers had little patience for centralized authority. In Steven Levy’s 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, he describes the “hacker ethic” as a series of shared iconoclastic beliefs, including “all information should be free,” “mistrust authority” and “access to computers-and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works-should be unlimited and total.” Unsurprisingly given this creed, attitudes towards governmental control in the hacking community have been adversarial from the start. Early phone hackers (or “phreakers”), including current Apple Computer guru Steve Jobs, learned ways to use technology to steal service from phone lines, among other tricks. The spread of affordable microcomputer technology by the early 1980s led to an explosion in the underground technology subculture. In his legendary 1986 essay “The Hacker Manifesto,” a hacker identifying himself only as “the Mentor” declares war on “three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain,” asserting that if he is a criminal, “my crime is curiosity,” and, more fundamentally, “outsmarting” the dominant society, “something you will never forgive me for.” Due to the often-dubious legality of both computer hacking and urban exploration, a pseudonym (or “handle”) isn’t just an indulgent gesture, but allows for a measure of security from the prying eyes of institutional authority. Taking a cue from the Mentor and his peers, Ninj defines the worldview of his archetypal urban explorer against the pervasive numbing of spectacle-based consumerism, and the coercive “powers that be” who enforce this status quo. In a conscious, if somewhat juvenile, gesture, throughout the text Ninj refers to anti-UE forces as the “powers that be” instead of “authorities” or “security guards,” refusing to acknowledge both their claim to authority and security. Such a forceful redefinition of terms betrays the occasionally overenthusiasm of his anti-authoritarian ideology, and fits well with an extensive hacker tradition of neologism. The New Hacker Dictionary (which grew out of the early MIT groups) defines “samurai” as a group of elite hackers who “disdain the vandalism and theft practiced by criminal crackers as beneath them and contrary to the hacker ethic.” Just as the hardcore hacking community has always sought to distance itself from juvenile pranks and malicious sociopaths, the appropriately-named Ninjalicious, like the computer samurai before him, advocates an approach that implicitly encourages secrecy and selectivity while professing a love for free information and decentralized power. While many practitioners will go out of their way to assist newcomers, the necessity for security, and the desire to preserve the personalized nature of the hobby, keep most specific information out of the hands of untrusted sources. The most extensive UE message board online, the globally-minded but Canada-based Urban Exploration Resource, allocates its members three different levels of access to its treasury of UE sites and stories, gained through posting accounts, befriending members, and some measure of luck. As Ninj puts it, such a system “keeps lazy, careless and uncreative people” from spoiling the hobby “for those of us who are more determined.” The most interesting information about UE sites is reserved for trusted elite members, who have proven themselves over many posts not to be vandals, thieves, or informers. This byzantine system of trust, often criticized by alienated greenhorn explorers, has been adopted partly as a defense mechanism against accusations of vandalism and theft, echoes of the stigma associated by the mainstream media to the word “hacker” by the actions of computer-based criminals. The hierarchical organization has been designed to disseminate a specific ethical code to the UE community. Explicitly borrowing the “leave no trace” philosophy from the Sierra Club, Ninj urges his readers to decondition their consumerist “souvenir impulse,” and to take nothing but pictures from the sites they explore. This is not just an ethical concern, since a lifted old magazine from a building can be the difference between a misdemeanor charge of “trespassing” and the more serious offense of “burglary,” a felony. Ninj’s attention to the law extends beyond the merely practical. In a passage about the philosophical grounding for the urban explorer’s “trespassing,” Ninj defines “usufruct” as a legal concept originating from an idealized time “before all property on earth came under the control of corporations:” the “right to use and enjoy the property of another, provided it is not changed or damaged in any way.” He doesn’t delve into a detailed historical analysis of the term, but presents it as his communitarian alternative to the present legal system, perfectly in line with hacker tradition. While laws are habitually bent or broken during the course of discovery, to call his exploration “recreational trespassing” completely misses his point. In outlining his vision of the urban explorer’s ethic, Ninj distinguishes between a facile “respect for law” and an internalized “moral compass” of exploration. In justifying this dichotomy, he argues that explorers who blindly obey societal laws and expectations are more likely to “start breaking windows and urinating on the floor” in situations where law and power are remote than those who have their own developed sense of morality. While this preference is theoretically sound (almost tautologically so, since urban explorers break laws and rules almost by definition), the implications of Ninj’s particular ethical theory to real people and situations are troubling, to say the least. Ninj devotes a whole section of the book to the art of “social engineering,” a carryover from hardcore hack/phreak culture devoted to the manipulation of human agents. These practices involve the programming of human beings, through an analysis of which “inputs” (cover stories, white lies, demeanors) lead to the desired outcome, in this case entry to the UE site. Ninj draws a fine distinction between "lying" to the "powers that be," which he emphatically denounces (mostly for legal reasons) and simply "misleading" them through ambiguous phrases and subtle camouflage. Carrying a briefcase apparently goes a long way towards exploring almost any active site. Their position as enemy combatants in the UE gameworld strips the explorer’s opponents of entitlement to treatment as more than obstacles; the assumption is that, if informed of the explorer’s goals and motives, they would invariably obstruct them. This brutally utilitarian approach is one of the consequences of viewing real-life situations in video game terms. Human beings are only valuable insofar as they help you progress in the “mission,” a strained ethical position Ninj never directly confronts. While he enthusiastically cites Dale Carnegie’s legendary self-help tract “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Ninj neglects to mention social engineering’s proud legacy of identity theft, credit-card fraud and electronic vandalism. The outlined techniques of stealth and deception may serve a practical purpose for the urban explorer, but in a community plagued by fringe contingents of adolescent thrillseekers and vandals, there’s no guarantee that every reader shares even Ninj’s flexible ethical code. Ninj’s marriage of hacker culture and unitary urbanism may lack academic rigor, but it has brought the spirit of creative rebellion to a new generation, one scarcely permeated by obscure European critiques. His pervasive enthusiasm for the active practice of exploration redeems his occasional excesses; unlike Debord and his followers, Ninj’s jargon-free prose is addressed to as wide an audience he can pry away from television screens and joysticks. The style is uneven, anti-consumerist sermons, technical primers and nerdy puns bleeding into each other with scant notice. An overall impression of the author emerges from the stories, tips and theories of Access All Areas, one characterized by creative contradiction. A highly literate author writing under a juvenile pseudonym, a self-pronounced geek using the language of gamer culture against digital entertainment, an anti-authoritarian community with its own harshly hierarchical lines of communication. Unfortunately, Ninj died of terminal illness shortly after the publication of this book, but in it he has left behind a legacy of creative curiosity worthy of Whitman’s example.
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