Hacking and Non-Use: Infrastructural Modifications and Epistemic Engagement

• In Event: Beyond Non-Use: Infrastructuralism and Interruption

Abstract

Hacking and Non-use: infrastructural modifications and epistemic engagement
My paper aims to analyze certain practices of hacking that engage standardized technological artifacts as epistemic objects in order to subvert their functional principles. Members of the hacking community generally refuse to use proprietary technology, which is of course not always possible, given the ubiquitous nature of telecommunication standards and software protocols.
I argue that members of the hacking community go beyond non-use by developing alternative standards that are nonetheless able to operate within hegemonic infrastructures. They do so by 1) modifying standardized technical artifacts so that they fit their needs and 2) by developing and maintaining alternative infrastructures for communication and work practice.
By drawing upon materials from my ethnographic fieldwork in several German hackerspaces, I am going to examine how such modification practices are accomplished by an epistemic engagement with the refused technology. In order to modify them, hackers need to ‘explore’ artifacts in order to understand their functional principles. Non-use in this sense means an adaption of technology via a negotiation between existing standards and preferred forms of technology use. This results in counter-innovations that ‘repair’ the shortcomings of existing infrastructural technologies.
I am mainly interested in the situated and material efforts that are necessary in order to avoid standardized infrastructures, while at the same time being able either to provide functional equivalents, or to remove functionalities that are deemed problematic. This approach could shed light on the relationship between epistemologies, repair work and infrastructures.

Author

• Sebastian Dahm, TU Berlin