Hacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast

In this episode we hear Charles Berret from Linköping University characterize the cunning and craftiness via a concept from ancient Greek. The concept of 'metis' offers an especially effective means of characterizing the intelligence and technical practice of hackers. Metis, for the ancient Greeks, denoted the improvisational craftiness of a figure like Odysseus, whose intuitive understa...

Janis Lena Meißner from The Vienna University of Technology shares stories and insights from practical work with people who are usually not included in the Maker movement. Despite its promises of technology democratization, the Maker Movement still lacks diversity. To address this disparity, we might deliberately turn to „unexpected users“ of maker tools and reimagine core hacker values for subver...

We are happy to hear back from Sylvain Besençon from University of Fribourg, who wraps up research we learned about in 2020 about caring for open source cryptography. This paper suggests a shift from information security as a matter of war to security as matter of care. Based on my 6-year long PhD research among a community of open source hackers and developers maintaining a crypto protocol, this...

Who is operating the Tor network, and why? Victoria Neumann from Lancaster University tells us. Tor (acronym for The Onion Router) is one of the most famous projects focusing on online privacy and anonymity. Using the Tor Browser, one can access clear net websites without being tracked or traced or so-called "onion services (formerly hidden services)," which can only be accessed via the...

Your hosts Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala look back on three seasons of this podcast panel format. How did this get started, how does it work, and what has been fun so far? This episode is a live recording from Hacker Cultures! The Podcast Panel Season 3 panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology and Society for Social Studies of Science EASS...

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...

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...

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...

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 individua...

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 cultu...

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 practice...

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 a...

          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...

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

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 digi...

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 exper...

Stéphane Couture is a Professor at the Faculté des arts et des sciences - Département de communication at the University of Montreal.  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...

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 algor...

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),...

R. Stuart Geiger calls himself an Ethnographer of computation and computational ethnographer, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Communication and the Haligiolu Data science Institute. Dorothy Howard is a Ph. D. student in Communication at UC San Diego, and her interests broadly span across the psychosocial and material effects of sociotec...

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...