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Hacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast
As Covid-19 turned most conferences virtual, so to combat Zoom-fatigue, at 4S/EASST 2020 we decided to try another format and turn a conference session into a podcast. Among hundreds of panels, papers and sessions, our panels rounded up all sorts of researchers who study what it is to be a hacker, and what hacking, programming, tinkering and working with computers is all about. We have continued biennally for full three seasons.
The newest season comes to you from the 2024 join Society for Social Studies of Science/European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference (4S/EASST) in Amsterdam, titled "Making and Doing Transformations".
The second series was from EASST 2022 titled "The Politics of Technoscientific Futures" held in Madrid in July 2022. Our panel was titled "Hacking Everything. The cultures and politics of hackers and software workers". The first series was from 4S/EASST in "virtual Prague" in August 2020, titled "Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds".
We the hosts are Paula Bialski, who is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Gallen, Andreas Bischof who is a Research Group Leader at Chemnitz University of Technology, and Mace Ojala, a PhD scholar at Ruhr-University Bochum. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records. The theme track of first series is "Rocky" by Paula & Karol. Heights Beats produced the theme track of the second series. Funding for the editing of this first series comes from University of St. Gallen, the second from Chemnitz University of Technology.
Hacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast
Episode 3 (2024) Sylvain Besençon: Information security and the care of open cryptography technology
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.