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 EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. 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.

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 Tor network. Nowadays widely known for darknet marketplaces, it is also used by journalists, human rights and digital activists, spies, hackers, and ordinary people to circumvent state surveillance, internet blockades and to stay anonymous.

Originating from military research, the Tor Project is non-profit and open source after being taken over by hacktivists in the in the early 00s. Today the network has 6,000+ volunteer-run nodes called "relays." When the network began, relay operators were friends, colleagues, and collaborators of the original Tor developers. Over the years, grown beyond trusted/known collaborators to thousands of people and organizations, many of whom the Tor Project does not know. This has led both to a more diverse and hence resilient network, but it also made it easier for malicious actors to join.

Who are the volunteers behind the network and what motivates them? Very little research has been conducted so far focusing on Tor relay operators. We conducted two surveys and 20 interviews to find out more about demographics, privacy values, trust, network health and community.

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 EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. 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 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 paper deconstructs what I call the “warlike crypto imaginary” that often represents cryptography as a fascinating totem pole in the form of a blue lock. This paper tackles the rhetoric of war and violence that shapes our binary understanding of information security and proposes the work of making and unmaking security as a question of care, collaboration and negotiations. In other words, rather than portraying hackers and security experts as lonely teenagers wearing hoodies and deemed to break things, brute force passwords, and penetrate systems, this paper looks at how security people keep collaborating one with another to fixing things that never cease to break.

Inspired by the feminist STS field, I look for a “different voice” (Gilligan, 1982) through an ethnographic case study focused on the maintenance of an old crypto protocol called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). PGP was developed in 1991 by an antinuclear activist to protect emails from being spied on. Since then, and despite many controversies, different generations of coders have been maintaining this piece of technology for more than three decades. Their persistent, engaged and humble tinkering let me identify values that steer the community towards careful and dedicated practices of maintenance, long-term collaborations, negotiations of compromises, and affective attachment to the technology.

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 EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. 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.

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 subversive practices together with them.

This episode is about hacking the ways in which Making is usually imagined to be performed. It offers reflections on the “Empowering Hacks” project, my long-term collaboration with two men with disabilities on fabricating their own ideas. Our project began with the mission “to produce disabled tools at a cheaper rate but with a more customisable outcome” and so we collaborated on designing, modelling and 3D-printing “wheelchair golfballs” and other assistive gadgets. Externally, “Empowering Hacks” was motivated by creating positive change for others. Internally, our processes of mentoring and production were configured around the interests and social roles of my collaborators. Disability was not perceived as an impediment but as an opportunity to reimagining Making practices.

My reflections are rooted in a key distinction between “Hacking” and “Making”. While Making encompasses a wide range of practices using digital fabrication tools, Hacking denotes self-directed technological action for chosen purposes. In “Empowering Hacks”, my collaborators did not identify as makers, however as makers-in-the-making they had freedom to figure out their own ways to make. Their hacking became a performative and material challenge to ableist assumptions about disabled people not being able to be designers or creators. The dialectic podcast is an opportunity to further unpack the subversive capacities of reimagining making through hacking.

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 EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. 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 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 understanding of the regularities in a particular system or situation facilitates acts of subversive cleverness. After all, it was Odysseus who devised the Trojan Horse, perhaps the first hack recorded in Western literature, and later the namesake of an actual variety of malware. This is a revealing affinity, and the connections between metis and hacking run deep. Metis is an especially useful concept for understanding hackers because it is a form of practical knowledge distinct from episteme and techne. Whereas episteme denotes the pursuit of factual regularities in the natural world, and techne implies the application of episteme for engineering, craft, and material production, both episteme and techne are inherently systematic. In contrast, the essential characteristic of metis is its subversion of systems and regularities, finding surprising sources of flexibility where others see only patterns and rigidity. To view hackers through the lens of metis also helps explain why hacking thrives in settings characterized by what James C. Scott calls "seeing like a state," that is, where an excessively schematic reduction of a system's natural complexity leads to the concealment of idiosyncrasies that become ideal sites for a hacker's exploitation. Developing an account of metis offers a new framework to explain why hackers thrive in infrapolitical practices that are inherently opposed to seeing like a state.

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 EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. 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 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.