Hacking (for Creating and Severing) Ties

“Hacking” has been at the forefront of contemporary debates about the present and future governance of digital systems. Depicted ambiguosly as a criminal and virtuous practice, the moral valence of computer hacking has oscillated constantly from the 1960s to the present. In this presentation I will discuss the core components of a book project on the nature of the social and technical ties among computer technologists who identify (and are identified by their peers) as hackers. Based on the ethnographic study of community spaces called “hackerspaces” in the Pacific Rim, I describe three interconnected processes that organize their contemporary experiences: spatialization, personification, and politicization of computing expertise. The goal is to offer an anthropological account of the practices of /commoning/ that support the “alterglobalization of hacking” through the circulation of technologists and technologies.