dot0 dot0@gutenm.org

What is critical technology appropriation?
https://camp.hsbp.org/2016/pp7e0/fahrplan/events/20.html

Little bit of history of IRC. Hackers as luddites -- sophisticated users of technology that use certain old technologies in favor of certain new technologies in part because they reject changes to life the new ones would bring.

Related text https://relay70.metatron.ai/writing-against-the-grain-keep-empirical-political/

Combining ethnographic and historiographic methods is also a way to perform a somewhat traditional function of intellectuals, which is to build solidarity through narratives between different people, not just conceptually and geographically. Historiography can help to build solidarity between people and struggles across time, and give a sense that things can and will change. This is very important in an apathetic moment such as ours, when the future is uncertain, yet old social structures seem to persist with depressing persistence. At this point it is always tempting to make predictions and programs about what will happen next. However, as you can see from this lecture, I am more keen on looking at what people actually do and what they did before, rather than extrapolate big visions and speculate about possibilities for the future. I think there is a historical window of opportunity for hacker studies to make an intervention not just in various domains of scholarship, but also in various scenes of practitioners. In fact the current needs of scholars and practitioners are not very far from each other, because in scholarship all the hopeful and positive things have already been said about hackers – and likewise, the activist discourse of practitioners has exhausted itself in repeating the same few visionary claims. So to echo this quote from Biella I have put up a moment before, what is needed now is a more nuanced view of technological politics and political technology, which can generate a collective awareness to the problems of articulation, critique and recuperation. There is perhaps an opportunity to make such an intervention because hackerdom is going mainstream, incorporating new areas of technology such as biohacking, and reaching new audiences such as women. There is a general sense in which everybody feels that “this hacker thing” is becoming important, yet the currently available narratives are not adequate to capture the complexities of the situation. Therefore, many individual practitioners – and some significant scenes as well – are going through an identity crisis which a more nuanced and rigorous scholarship could help to resolve. That is why I believe that there is a historical window of opportunity for critical interventions not just in scholarship but also within practitioners.