Civic Hacking Redefining Hackers and Civic Participation (original) (raw)

Civic hacking: redefining hacking and civic participation

2018

Civic hacking movement, born at the times of Obama campaign, promotes trust in programming code as a new tool able to solve a large variety of public problems usually delegated to public services or dedicated private institutions. Based on a four-year STS-inspired ethnography of "civic hackathons" in France and Russia, the paper aims to draw a profile of a "civic hacker" and grasp the transformations of civic participation brought by this phenomenon. Beyond technoscepticism and solutionism, the author suggests to follow the actors in their work of "putting problems into code" and proposes a pragmatist approach to civic hacking. While recent studies have been critical of civic hacking as part of the broader neoliberal transformations of labor, the author argues that, in the context of distrust towards traditional political institutions and repertoires of contention, civic hacking can assist construction of public problems, and can also mean "hacking the civics".

For Code and Country: Civic Hackers in Con­temporary Rus­sia

From Russia with Code : Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times, 2019

The chapter is part of an edited volume "From Russia with Code : Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times". It explores the movement of "civic hackers" in Russia, and the development of civic apps for mobile and web, as responses to current public problems. It gives a portrait of a civic hacker and questions political engagement of these new actors of Russian public sphere. It questions their relations to the global "civic tech" movement, as well as to the free software culture.

Abstract Hacktivism: The making of a hacker culture

2006

In recent years, designers, activists and businesspeople have started to navigate their social worlds on the basis of concepts derived from the world of computers and new media technologies. According to Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås, this represents a fundamental cultural shift. The conceptual models of modern social thought, as well as the ones emanating from the 1968 revolts, are being usurped by a new worldview. Using thinkers such as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda as a point of departure, the authors expand upon the idea that everyday technologies are profoundly interconnected with dominant modes of thought. In the nineteenth century, the motor replaced the clockwork as the universal model of knowledge. In a similar vein, new media technologies are currently replacing the motor as the dominant 'conceptual technology' of contemporary social thought. This development, von Busch and Palmås argue, has yielded new ways of construing politics, activism and innovation. The authors embark on different routes to explore this shift. Otto von Busch relates the practice of hacking to phenomena such as shopdropping, craftivism, fan fiction, liberation theology, and Spanish social movement YOMANGO. Karl Palmås examines how publications like Adbusters Magazine, as well as business theorists, have adopted a computer-inspired worldview, linking this development to the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. Hence, the text is written for designers and activists, as well as for the general reader interested in cultural studies.

Movement Hacking: Hackerspaces and Social Movements

Perspective on the Status of Electronic Equipment in Montréal, 2013

This article considers the structure and mandate of the Foulab hackerspace in Montreal, as an extension of an emergent hackerspace social movement

HACKTIVISTS :REVOLUTIONARIES OR VANDALISTS

There has been a paradigm shift brought by the internet enabling people to accomplish a social change without having a physical attendance. Hacktivism is that phenomenon which has been established using the internet as a platform to address censuring issues of today.

Is There an App for Everything? Potentials and Limits of Civic Hacking

The present article analyzes potential and limits of crowdsourcing software (mobile and web applications) as tools for civic participation. Based on an empiric study of six Russian and French civic applications, developed in response to a particular public problem (corruption, electoral falsifications, police violence and urban problems), the article proposes to address the problem of digital asymmetry from the perspective of pragmatism, STS and software studies The author focuses on the phase of design, coding and testing, and analyzes the procedures of standardization and classification necessary for developing the interfaces. While standardization seems inevitable from the technical point of view, it produces a particular form of asymmetry between the lived experience of a " trouble " and the categorical grid. Developing a civic application, coders propose a certain definition of a public problem and rectify it in the interface. The article argues that an active participation of users in the improvement of the application may help to overcome the limits and asymmetries.

Hacktivism as a Model for Postanarchist Organizing

2014

hacktivism, then, can be understood as a theory rooted in praxis; a prefigurative framework for twenty-first century anarchist organizing which offers a rich potential for experimentation and the creation of socio-technological solutions out of the immanent, irreducible social space of postanarchism. McQuillan (2012b) builds on von Busch and Palmas’ early work and articulates a ‘critical hacktivism’ to account for the ways in which radical re-organizations of existing socio-technical values, cultures and infrastructure are used to ‘prototype[e] a new society in the shell of the old’. At the heart of McQuillan’s approach is ‘an active reassembling that draws on the unexpected affordances of technology for constructing socio-technical structures’ (ibid.). McQuillan traces the outline of such prototype structures in real-world examples, such as the People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF), a digital tool and process developed to locate missing people following 2005 Hurricane Katrina tha...

Hacker practice Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism

2008

Abstract Past literature tends towards dichotomous representations of computer hackers as either unhealthy young men engaged in bold tournaments of sinister hacking or visionaries whose utopian technological lifestyle has the potential to disrupt the pathologies of capitalism and modernity more generally. In contrast, this article examines the heterogeneous nature of hacker sociality in order to more adequately portray the complex topography of hacker morality and liberalism.