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.

Alex Dean Cybulski is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. Presently, he is writing a dissertation on capture the flag competitions, play and games in hacker culture and the information security industry.

In this session he will talk about the field he is studying – specifically Capture the flag (CTF). It is a competitive game in which players mimic the experience of discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in information systems, hacking into simulated software and/or networks to retrieve data known as a ‘flag.’ CTF participants, often drawn from the information security and IT industries utilize these games as a means of training to develop/apply offensive security knowledge in a legal way, so that they can better defend the software/systems they are entrusted with. 
 
This presentation will discuss preliminary findings of his research: ethnographic, semi-structured interviews with a team of players at an on-site CTF who also share the same workplace.  

Jérémy is a PhD student at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Namur in Belgium His work sits between computer science on the one hand and philosophy on the other. 

Jeremy’s talk today takes a deep dive into the daily practices of engineers (practices like implementations, experiments, publications). He says that these practices force engineers to complicate the separation between algorithms, on one side, and problems, on the other. His work focuses on a character named Robin, an engineer working on recommender systems, who he ethnographically observed in his research project. 

In today’s talk, he will focus on describing one bit of Robin’s work, in order to hopefully teach us something about what algorithms, as objects are, in between in between abstract mathematical objects and concrete material objects, and he will attempts to give us an insight into engineering endeavours. 

Referring to previous work done on hacker culture and free and open source software,  Stéphane's presentation will look at the cultures, practices, and power dynamics of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its sister and peripheral organization, the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). IETF is the main organization building Internet protocols, namely the formal specifications and standards that specify the rules and forms of computer communication on the Internet. He proposes to look at protocol development from the perspective of hacker cultures and practices described by authors such as Coleman and Kelty. Indeed, while the ‘protocol’ artifact is different than the software ‘code’ of hackers, many aspects of its development are reminiscent of hacker culture. 

Ola is a research associate at the University of Bristol and is interested in the 'making of' technology, science and policy, specifically about the Cybersecurity of Critical National Infrastructures

Facilities like power plants, water pipes and railway stations underpin contemporary living standards across the world. For decades, they have been operated by Operational Technologies (OT), basic (yet sturdy!) computers without Internet access. People working in OT facilities are traditionally manual workers or engineers with training in safety.

In this session, Ola presents the results of a qualitative study conducted between November 2019-January 2020, where her and her team interviewed 30 UK-based security practitioners with expertise in critical infrastructures. Their analysis is concerned with the following questions: How do security practitioners define (in)security? How do they evidence it? What capabilities make a good OT security worker?

In this session, we interview Sylvain Besençon a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Fribourg. 

In his presentation, he talks about internet standards, which are elementary and powerful bricks of the Internet infrastructure: they define how the Internet should work and help developers to code their pieces of software accordingly. However, regularly, there are some voices or hacks that destabilize them and open the door to radical uncertainties about the reliability of the software we use, especially when crucial information is at stake. Based on digital ethnography as well as interviews and observations at international conferences, his paper takes as departure point the disclosure process of a series of vulnerabilities that affects an end-to-end email encryption standard called OpenPGP, used mostly by computer engineers, activists and journalists.