Hacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast

We have the pleasure to chat with Ola Michalec, a Senior Research Associate at University of Bristol. Don't miss on our discussion with Ola in 2020.

For decades, nuclear plants, power stations, or wastewater facilities were safe from the hype of digital innovations. These industries have traditionally been operated by industrial control systems fairly simple computers using binary logics to enable the movement and sensing of engineering machinery. Such technologies were disconnected from the internet and operated on-site by manual workers. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schilin, 2020) engineering processes are about to gain sophisticated computing capabilities, from remote control enabled by the cloud or predictive maintenance thanks to ML algorithms. Moreover, industry experts (Cisco, 2018) have already announced that modern computing is blending with legacy engineering technologies. But who is doing the blending and revolutionising? Drawing from the approaches in STS and Computer-Supported-Cooperative Work (Slayton and Clark-Ginsberg, 2018; Jenkins et al., 2020), our research looks at the collaborative practices between engineers and software workers (Michalec et al., 2020; Michalec et al, 2021). Based on the case study of the implementation of cyber security regulations in critical infrastructures, we investigate how practitioners navigate tensions between the priorities of modern computing (security, connectivity, innovations, interoperability) and traditional engineering (safety, reliability, availability). Ultimately, we argue that digital innovations entering the world of critical infrastructures will reconfigure the responsibilities and training needs for engineers to come. This, in turn, creates novel ethical and political considerations for the profession, which should inform the future STS research agenda.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

We speak with Annika Richterich from Maastricht University where she works as an Assistant Professor in Digital Cultures at the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Annika was with us earlier in 2020, check out that episode too.

This paper discusses how the Chaos Computer Club, a German hacker association, engaged in health data activism during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021).[1] Hackers technopolitical activism tends to be neglected in public debate, partly since hacking is often equated with cybercrime. Yet, civic hacking communities have shown a longstanding dedication to activism relevant to public interests and technopolitics. In early 2020, hacker communities therefore also started scrutinising technology meant to tackle issues emerging during the COVID pandemic, often by collecting health-related data. The paper methodologically draws on a case study approach: it focuses on the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), analysing public statements, open letters, and reports. Conceptually, it frames the CCCs practices as data activism, specifically health data activism. It notably expands on Milan and van der Veldens (2016) continuum of proactive and reactive data activism. Within the proactive/reactive continuum, it stresses the CCCs interventional-regulative activism. The latter notion refers to practices of data activism involving interventional, technical assessments of data-intensive technology, using these to critically yet constructively articulate regulative requirements and demands. I argue that the CCCs health data activism oscillates between reactive and proactive data activism, by engaging in interventional-regulative practices: the association intervenes in public debate concerning the politics of covid-technology, while also directly interacting with and holding policy makers as well as technology corporations accountable. Thereby, this paper lends further weight to the importance of civic technology expertise and engagement - especially during public health crises, when tech-solutionist approaches are being promoted by appealing to the hope of them contributing to the greater good.

[1]Formally, the CCC is an association registered in Germany (eingetragener Verein). However, while its central office is in Hamburg, there are also 25 regional chapters plus multiple local groups (Chaos-Treffs) in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

This episode brings us Maja Urbanczyk who is a PhD Candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

On more and more occasions, political decision-makers decide over software that is to be used by the public. In these situations, decision-makers rely on expert knowledge and risk assessment, in order to make informed decisions. For software decisions, the needed expertise comes from IT and IT-security experts and software developers also known as: hackers. The degree of trust that IT expertise receives from political decision makers is highly dependent on the contextual framing of the people holding the expertise: IT-experts are regarded as significantly more trustworthy than hackers by the public as well as politics. At the same time, political decision-makers need to acquire trust from the public. This is likely to be more complex when more information and opinions on a topic are available. With knowledgeable lay-persons posing themselves as experts within the discussions, acknowledged experts being vilified as so called black-hats (hackers with little ethics) and decision-makers walking on a thin line between technocracy/scientism, the greater good and their own interests. It is complex for anyone to decide, which expertise to follow and whom to trust. In some cases this even ends in expertise being disregarded or even discarded by decision makers. Interestingly, it happens that they frame it afterwards as not having known about a technologys downsides. In order to understand the many layers of construction and attribution of non-knowledge and ignorance, I deconstruct these kinds of situations and what I call the network of trust in a qualitative, discursive study. Deconstructing and analyzing decision-making processes with a focus on the role of non-knowledge and ignorance will help to shed more light on the complexity of technological governance. Additionally, this novel approach shows how ignorance is not only a reason for subordination, but also potentially a source of power.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

We hear from research by PhD Candidate Jan Schmutzler and Professor Estrid Sørensen, both from Ruhr University Bochum.

Data anonymisation has long been the central measure for social scientist to protect the privacy of the subjects from whom they collect data. Recent years computational methods have made it increasingly easy to combine data sets, which also makes it easier to re-identify individuals in anonymised datasets (Rocher et al, 2019). No standard procedure exists for testing if anonymised datasets are sufficiently protected against re-identification (Emam et al, 2015). In practice the method is re-identification attacks.

We report from a white-hat re-identification hack conducted in collaboration with an organisation with a long tradition for hosting social science data, which provided it with good reasons to be confident that its data are sufficiently protected against re-identification. The hack was seen as a young students innocent exercise. But then the in hindsight foreseeable moment materialised, when his algorithm appeared to be able to de-anonymise the data.

Our contribution discusses the repercussions of the re-identification hack. Both the organisation, the student and the ethnographer had been naïve about the hack. They had been playing with fire and ignited mutual disbelieve and mistrust. The student and the ethnographer were now approached as potential criminals with one foot in jail. The organisation found measures to secure its data sets, yet the ethnographer remained disconcerted about the already published data.

Based on the empirical analysis, we address hacking and attacking more generally as methods for testing re-identification protection. Although the method seems technically and ethically sound, it has side-effects that are severely aggressive to social and organisational relations (cf. Schmitz-Berndt & Schiffner, 2020). In the case in question, we sought to mobilise careful practices to remedy the damages done, and we discuss if careful hacking has potentials for developing less harmful re-identification testing, or if it is indeed an oxymoron.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

We speak with Tim Cowlishaw, BAU, Doctoral Candidate at College of Arts & Design Barcelona.

Whether as part of giant technology corporations or open-source software projects, software developers are increasingly responsible for defining, building, and maintaining the infrastructure of our social world, and much critical and anthropological attention has been paid to the ways in which the cultures and practices of software development influence the materiality and embedded politics of these infrastructures. However, less critical attention has been paid to software development deployed to less instrumental ends, in particular, creative and artistic practices that use software as a medium. We claim, building on Nick Seaver (2021)s work on care and scale as contrasting values in the development of software systems, that paying attention to such personal, creative software practices provides a valuable opportunity for a deepened understanding of cultures of software development in general, by articulating and making visible the differences between the development of aesthetic and instrumental software objects - a distinction which is elided when software development is studied in more general undifferentiated terms. In addition, we argue that software art and the creative practice of software development offer a useful means of interrogating the ontology of software and digital artefacts, arguing that such practices are a form of ontological designing (Willis 2006) producing digital objects (Hui 2016) which serve to expose the ontology and embedded politics of software artefacts and systems more generally. Finally, we argue that such creative practices constitute a care-ful (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) approach to software development, building on the Critical Technical Practice of Philip Agre (1997), offering one example of how critical and ethical considerations might be usefully incorporated into professional software development practices.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

This episode is with Doctoral Candidate Cansu Güner from School of Social Sciences and Technology at Technical University of Münich.

This podcast is about hacking houses. Entrepreneurs with engineering backgrounds who live in co-living spaces tend to hack their houses either as part of a hackathon or via self-initiated hacking practices. Drawing from a one-year-long ethnography on hacking practices in co-living spaces in the Bay Area and Munich, I aim to answer the following questions: what would happen if the subjects of domestic work would also be equipped with the technological know-how and expertise that would potentially reconfigure the domestic ideology? Would then they position domesticity as their domain of innovation and intervention? What kind of domestic ideal would they have? What kind of technological interventions would they make or not make?

Specifically, I would like to compare two home automation systems, namely the Weekly Task Planner (WTP) and the Hidden Camera, which had been created as a result of hacking practices in co-living spaces. In Munich, the WTP was created to help residents to keep track of predefined domestic tasks, e. g., cleaning, by automatically assigning them to people every week. In the Bay Area, one of the residents hacked the problem of dirty dishes by installing a hidden camera in the kitchen to surveil and shame the irresponsible residents who fail to fulfill their chores not for accustomed reasons such as safety and security purposes.

Drawing on feminist STS (Schwartz-Cowan 1976; Cockburn 1997; Naulin and Jourdain, 2020; Fraiman 2017; Kleif and Faulkner, 2003; Suchmann 2007), I would like to shed light on how hackathons and hacking practices have been utilized as ways of remaking domestic culture(s). I argue that co-living as a technosocial project is subjected to the entreprenurialization of domesticity in which the domestic activities become dominated by entrepreneurial ambitions like hacking. Situational analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnography are employed as the main methods.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

In this episode we are joined by Maja-Lee Voigt, a Research Associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.

To this day it remains a question of power who is granted the right to visibly take up and claim urban space; both physically and virtually. A societal and literal Room of One's Own" (Woolf 1929) is still not a given for people who define as women and/or queer. Rather, it is not only floor plans and cityscapes in which gendered bodies hardly find unconfined spaces or representation; discursive and online realms often turn out to be equally restrictive, patriarchally dominated, and misogynic. Additionally, as urban automation advances in an increasingly 'smarter' city, everyday processes are more and more controlled by privatized algorithmic architectures of oppression.

Yet feminist hackspaces resist these heteronormatively programed technologies. Following five months of ethnographic research on cyberfeminist collectives and their resistive practices in Germany and Austria in 2021, my contribution askes how digitized cities become technologically, culturally, and spatially hacked toward representing more diverse realities. My analysis shows how feminist hackspaces attempt to increase accessibility to interfaces, (digital) spaces, and decision-making processes by sharing their tech-knowledge through open source solutions, educative illustrations, and visions of otherwise urban futures. Their activism demonstrates how (urban) hacking is a crucial practice to break with non-democratically controlled digitalization processes: playing with the uncertainty, incalculable openness, and scope for design of possible futures within software spaces makes hackfeminists essential actors in imagining cities to come. Often unnoticed and underestimated, their trial-and-error approach and understanding of hacking as a glitching cultural technique as well as refusal of pre-programmed patriarchal orders embodies the radical presence of potential tomorrows: a future filled with literally uncoded uncertainties and heterogenous hopes in favor of a hackable, thus accessible algorithmic anarchitecture in a cyber_feminist_city for all.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

          This session's guest is Morgan G. Ames, who joins us from UC Berkely. There she is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. 

The maintenance of ‘hacker’ identities often involves the discussion of one’s origin story—the nostalgic rendering of the path that one took into programming and technical tinkering, involving the technologies and media of hackers’ childhoods. In her  paper she explores the ways in which these memories are mobilized to do cultural work in contemporary technology worlds, especially among those creating computational devices and software for children. Origin stories can serve as gatekeepers within hacker circles, delimiting who is a good “culture fit.” It can moreover shape the design process by influencing who hackers view as their primary audience and what they think this audience will find captivating.

Minna Saariketo is a postdoc at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. Mareike Glöss is a lecturer Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University.

In their research, they address the ‘grey zone of hacking’: end users subverting software and hardware controls imposed by manufacturers. We discuss one empirical case in particular: farmers claiming the ‘right to repair’ of agricultural equipment. The ‘Right to Repair’ movement has brought together users and developers to circumvent products that cannot be repaired or modified freely. Manufactures have responded by ‘lock-ins’ by not supplying spare parts, service manuals, disassembly and diagnostic tools, as well as forbidding modification of software in their licenses. Hackers have worked around these lock-ins, creating parallel networks of software and hardware distribution, supplying hacking tools to end users. So in their session, they will talk about the political economy of software: how the control of technical artefacts is achieved both legally and economically. Second is the issue of agency, expertise, and technological literacy. 

Annika Richterich is an assistant professor in Digital Culture at Maastricht University (NL). Her research focuses on practices of collaboration, learning and innovation in hacking communities.

Annika explains that hackers and makers are curious people. They tinker, try, and team up − driven by tech-political motives, entrepreneurial interests, or just for the fun of it. Their curiosity about digital technology and crafts makes them self-driven learners in these domains. To share their enthusiasm as well as required machines, hackers and makers worldwide have formed communities called hack-/hackerspaces and makerspaces. These are physical places where members engage in creative DIY activities involving software and electronics. Learning is key to the social tech and craft practices cultivated in hacker-/makerspaces (HMS). Yet, the educational value of these DIY communities has been rarely acknowledged. Drawing on a mixed-methods study, her paper explores how (digital) creativity and expertise are interrelated in HMS.