Breaking is Making: Hacker Histories, Hacking Cultures

3 units

Ransomware, malware, viruses, trojans, key loggers. Hoodies and laptops. Red Team blue team. Popular figurations of hackers are coded in lexicons that promote both obscurity and prowess, tending to portray them as unseen manipulators of invisible infrastructures. Such mythologies often analogize these practitioners as frontiersmen operating beyond law and control between unstable tropes of antiheros and bandits. We're taught these bad actors operate in silence to commit bad acts, leveraging our dependency on the convenience of technology (and weak passwords) to do hopelessly complicated things. Our goal this term is to see past the mythic articulations to understand the origins and practices of hacking cultures so we better understand how our digital commonality is engineered as a robust and enduring 'thing' where vulnerability is both feature and bug. Doing so makes visible the politics of making and unmaking, iterative engineering, and the cultural dimensions of criminality. We'll interrogate the hacker narrative construct in media to understand how we know so little about the ecosystem we depend upon. We'll also investigate how it all works from a design and engineering perspective to see how form and function frame our social habits of consumption, our political expectations, and our definitions of comfort, safety, and anxiety.