My responses to Adam Greenfield’s door essay:

Last week when we were talking about virtual windows and how easily they’re movable, an example of such a thing implemented as a door came to mind: the portable hole, widely used in cartoons as a piece of fabric that you can just toss on a wall to walk through it. So if we’re talking about walls including things that are invisible and electronically mediated, how do we make doors in them? It seems metaphorically equivalent to me for Roger Rabbit to use an Acme Portable Hole to escape being pinned down and for a hacker to create a hole in an RFID security system that allows tags to pass through unnoticed. When I think about cutting a hole in virtual walls, rather than disabling them all together, different things bubble to the surface. For example, opening a door is less disruptive than destroying a wall, a fact which may be more or less desirable.

—

Alex’s comments about no door being permanently unlockable made me think of the infamous MIT Lockpicking Guide, which is just as important for its anarchist politics as the practical information it contains. This spirit is alive and well, only now it’s mostly embodied by hackers of all stripes. The guide was a proto-hacker manifesto of sorts, flattening the differential permissioning of the time, and providing equal access for those who knew where to look.

I think an individual physical lock is relatively secure only because a limited number of people will ever encounter it. When we start talking about virtual locks, networked locks, and widely deployed locks that use the same key (ie, those damned RFID security systems again), the audience of potential lockpickers is suddenly in the billions. If an electronic lock is protecting something worth having, it will be broken, the numbers virtually guarantee it. Data with moral implications against openness - personal financial information, say - may last longer, because some people will not try to break those locks.

I’m not sure we’ve seen the MIT Lockpicking Guide for the 21st century yet.

—

In regards to Mike’s painted-on doors and my post about virtual holes, it occurred to me that there’s a long tradition in mythology and fairy tales of using magic to draw a door on a wall (usually in chalk) and have it open. See Pan’s Labyrinth and Beetlejuice. It goes along with worm holes and teleportation in science ficti on.The notion of access to anyplace, anywhere we are is buried deeply in our culture.

—
From Joey Comeau’s excellent book Lockpick Pornography, chapter 4:

“Picking locks is a lot like being queer,” I say. I’m on my knees in front of the door. “Taking the world as you see it, and not how you’re told to see it. There’s no real difference between turning the knob and picking the lock.” I don’t intend for “turning the knob” to sound like a euphemism for being gay, but I kind of like the way it sounds. “Both are series of mechanical actions by which you gain access to the room beyond.”

By the end of the book that character begins to question this assumption, when he gets entangled with the people those doors were supposed to keep him away from. Comeau’s main argument is that lockpicking itself is morally neutral, but what you do on the other side of the door is not.