Whatever happened to monkeywrenching?

I admire and shake my head at the brass-balled hackery of LulzSec and Anonymous. I think these guys are gloriously crazy and that they’re either going to save the world or get their asses ignominiously whupped. Or both.

For sure, they’re getting into the pit with the biggest and most ruthless of Big Dogs, breezily unaware that they’re likely to get their throats torn out.

The world needs people like that. It’s so good not to be one of them.

Watching them got me wondering: Whatever happened to the glorious and not-so-grand tradition of monkeywrenching? Sure, those guys of LulzSec are champion monkeywrenchers — high tech in choice of weapons, but traditionalists in spirit. Still … with governments at war with individuals all over the world, wouldn’t you expect all manner of monkeywrenches to be tossed into all manner of works in all manner of ways?

After all, the monkeywrench is the little guy’s weapon of personal guerrilla warfare. It doesn’t require an army or even a gun. You don’t have to have a team or expensive equipment. Just opportunity, will, and whatever tool might be at hand. You can monkeywrench on as small or large a scale as you wish, as violently or non-violently, with humor or with deadly seriousness. It’s been this way since the word “sabotage” was coined hundreds of years ago. While nobody’s quite sure of the etymology of that term, everybody agrees it has something to do with those very humble objects of very humble people — a peasant’s wooden shoes.

Similarly with the monkeywrench, which replaced the sabot as a tool for screwing up the works. What could be more commonplace?

Yet these days when you Google (or when you more privately StartingPage) “monkeywrenching,” what you find is pretty feeble.

There’s plenty about “ecotage” (with which monkeywrenching has been identified since the days of Edward Abbey and EarthFirst!). But even that info is getting pretty hoary, dating back decades. More commonly you’ll find flat-out misuses of the term. Like this account and this one — which are both perfectly charming tales but don’t have a lot to do with real monkeywrenching.

Wussy misuses. C’mon, guys. LulzSec and EarthFirst! (love ’em or hate ’em) mastered the monkeywrench. But a senator “monkeywrenching” Obama’s plans? Ohgimmeabreak.

The Web, bless its useless little soul, is also rife with pompous and humorless definitions of monkeywrenching. But seriously now, let’s not be so serious! Monkeywrenching at its best is neither pompous (being the tool of the little guy) nor humorless (requiring Outlaw panache, style, and flair).

And while every monkeywrencher will pick his own target or for her own reasons, there is no more diabolical machinery, no Rube Goldberg device more in need of sabotaging than the machinery of Authoritah. The machinery of domination. The machinery of “shut up peasants and let your betters do what’s best for you.”

And wow, is there a lot of that machinery around.

So … it’s time for some good, old-fashioned monkeywrench appreciation. Time to put the shoes, the wrenches, the superglue, and the Attitude back into the works. We don’t have to throw ourselves bodily into the Big Dog pit with the LulzSec guys, bless ’em. It can be done on the quiet and on any scale.

For inspiration, some of the wicked and humorous old Loompanics books are still around, along with their Paladin-published cousins on the related topic of getting even. (Which of course isn’t monkeywrenching. But in these days when people are too terrified to put real monkeywrenching ideas into print, you might have to come at these things indirectly.) There’s inspiration in culture jamming (of which cop jamming is a notable sub-field. Hey, politicians do it. TV stars do it. Politicians do it. Samual Adams and rowdy rebels did it Politicians … but I repeat myself.

The main thing is that, though all modern history, plenty of angry individuals have tossed their monkeywrenches — physical, verbal, electronic, and above all Attitudinal, into the works of those who would be their masters. I say let’s be traditionalists.