Two overall framings of hackers’ engagement with the political have dominated discussion: “hacktivists” or activists who leverage instrumental uses of online technologies for direct political action such as protest and disruption (Jordan and Taylor, 2004), and geographically distributed communities of practice where principles of openness enable forms of political action (Coleman, 2004). Gabriella Coleman (2012a) argues that pragmatism enables action on issues related to informational freedoms and reflects liberal democratic tenets such as freedom of speech. According to Coleman (2004), explicit involvement in “politics” in a formalized sense is distasteful to free and open-source hackers, as it is viewed as “buggy, mediated, and tainted action clouded by ideology” (p. 513). Civic hacking represents a third mode of participation among a group that often explicitly engages with political causes through designing, critiquing, and manipulating software and data to improve community life and infrastructures of governance. Civic hackers therefore have distinct histories, con-tours, and conflicts from other genres of hackers, even as they share a certain family resemblance (Wittgenstein, 1953).

Interactions through things, and perceptions about their potential, were ways to negotiate between seemingly conflicting imperatives of the individualism and communalism (A. L. Toombs, Bardzell, & Bardzell). Members would deliberately design activities that were incomplete to encourage a playful material improvisation. In these ways, the “material sensibilities” of members were particularly important. Similarly, reading a history of craft into software hacking, Lingel and Regan (2014) found that software hackers identified their work with craft as process, embodiment, and community. These sensitive readings of interactions with stuff seemed to more accurately capture the genre of hackerspaces, more so than action was guided by culture.

If you are lucky, you have the conditions and abilities to work all this through in a long, non-linear process also known as bootstrapping, where you go through many iterations of hacking apart and hacking together, all the while creating fundamentally different ideas about what technologies should do, and could do, matched by a succession of devices and practices that help shape these ideas, and “demo” to yourself and others that some utopias might not be out of reach. This is what radical engineers do.

Jessica Helfand in her essay The Dematerialism of Screen Space (2001) critiques the phenomenon of design practise being led by developments in software engineering. She argues that designers should take the initiative: “design must submit to a series of commands and regulations as rigourous as those that once defined Swiss typography. Aesthetic innovation, if it indeed exists at all, occurs within ridiculously preordained parameters: a new plug-in, a modified code, the capacity to make picture and words ‘flash’ with a mouse in a non-sensical little dance. We are all little filmmakers, directing on a pathetically small screen – yet broadcasting to a potentially infinite audience. This in itself is conflicting (not to mention corrupting), but more importantly, what are we making? What are we inventing? What are we saying that has not been said before?” Helfand here is referring to the web, but her argument applies equally well to designing tablet publications. Designers of book and magazine apps should be asking themselves those last three questions. Since tablet publishing conventions are in the process of being formed (like child invention), we have a unique opportunity right now to influence their direction.

Each whale is a perceptive messenger of the state of its species, the state of the cetaceans, the state of the oceans as a whole, as close and determined observation by Mayo and many others has shown. Now each piece of baleen is making those animals into messengers from the past, as we are expanding our own range of perception to understand.

but scientists have found that biochemical traces of some of its experiences persist in its body, even long after death. Just as geologists decode the history of the Earth from rocky strata, or dendrochronologists interpret past climactic conditions from tree rings, so biologists are now learning to read a whale’s life history as inscribed in its baleen. This anatomical oddity, part of a class of animal tissues that are emerging as tenacious biological recordkeepers, could reveal a monthly, even weekly, historical record of a whale’s life events stretching back as long as two decades. Just how much it will tell us remains to be seen.

I’ve collected the following list of needs based on what I’ve noticed across projects. I’ve tried to roughly organize it from critical (bottom of Maslow’s pyramid) to legacy (higher on the pyramid).

Open source projects don’t start as communitiesMany would agree that open source projects don’t start out as Bazaars, but just in case, I’ll emphasize the point. Raymond himself wrote:It’s fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn’t try it. I didn’t either.Somebody has to be chiefly responsible for an open source project’s initial development. In Linux’s case, it was Linus. Somebody has to live and breathe the problem all day. Once that project is in a stable position, the community helps support it.

In open source, you can only have “my” in the associative sense. There is no possessive “my” in open source.”

Those in positions of power have always craved a mechanism with which to expose the inner beings of citizens, to reveal ‘the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us’, as Foucault described it. There are, or seem to be, rather dangerous and wild expanses within each individual. If we are to be controlled, that must be made known, and tamed. There is no better way to divide and subdue a people, and seduce them into self-regulation, than to expose their perversions but promise absolution.

Having a smartphone and access to the internet does not automatically equip us with the tools necessary for effective and respectful collaboration, negotiation and speech, such as democracy requires.

In the presence of ever-watchful witnesses, he said, physical coercion is no longer necessary. People police themselves. They do not know what the observers are registering at any given moment, what they are looking for, exactly, or what the punishments are for disobedience. But the imagination keeps them pliant. In these circumstances, Foucault claimed, the architecture of surveillances become perniciously subtle and seamless, so ‘light’ as to be scarcely noticeable.

Bazaars are rhetoric, not reality

As in any contract, there’s a balance of power. If the architecture of today’s web is any indication, that balance is skewed toward the designers. Unless we want to keep pinging around like Skinner’s pigeons (or like poor Michael S), it’s worth paying a little more attention to those whom our attention pays.

At first, if you want to make money, you sell whatever is in the room. Maybe it’s excellent journalism. Maybe it’s a game or a recipe. Maybe it’s an item that will get shipped to someone’s house. In this model, the internet offers a straightforward transactional experience in digital space.Over time, instead of making money from whatever is in each room, companies begin to monetise the doors. They equip them with sensors. Each time you go through one, someone gets paid. Immediately, some people will start adding a lot of new doors. Other people will build rooms that are largely empty, but that function as waystations, designed to get as many people as possible to enter and leave.

Avoid creating big decision hierarchies. Instead, invest in a broad, growing and empowered contributorship that can make progress without intervention. We need to view a constant need for intervention by a few people to make any and every tough decision as the biggest obstacle to healthy Open Source.

Sure, we get bad bugs, but we have a ton of contributors who can immediately work with people who log them to educate them on better practices and treat it as an opportunity to educate. This is why we have documentation on writing good bugs, in order to educate contributors, not as a barrier to entry.Creating barriers to entry just reduces the number of people there’s a chance to identify, educate and potentially grow into greater contributors.

This is what a healthy project should look like. As the demands on the project from increased users rise, so do the contributors, and as contributors increase more are converted into committers. As the committer base grows, more of them rise to the level of expertise where they should be involved in higher level decision making.If these groups don’t grow in proportion to each other they can’t carry the load imposed on them by outward growth. A project’s ability to convert people from each of these groups is the only way it can stay healthy if its user base is growing.

Empirically, I trace how civic hackathons in Los Angeles evolved in 2013 - 2015 from engineering exercises to spectacles where civic futures of technology were performed through communication, before turning to particular lessons drawn from civic hackathons. Civic hackathons’ emergence from technical cultures means they often produce conservative civic visions. I pay close attention to moments of failure – moments when possible technologies reproduced existing cultural divisions. Still, I resist describing them as completely co-opted and useless, as I found surprising moments of civic learning and exploration.

A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable. Rather, I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.

I strongly believe that if you’re scared of open peer review then we should be scared of your results.

I think the next generation of scientists who have grown up in the Internet era will have zero patience for the current system and because of that they will seek different outlets that make sense in light of the fact the Internet exists!  

Our utopian visions of the future, freed from present problems by human ingenuity and technical competence, might be possible on paper, but they are unlikely in reality. We have already made the biggest mistake, and spent 10,000 years perfecting a disastrous invention, then making ourselves ever more reliant on it. However, the archaeologists who give us glimpses of our ancestors, and the anthropologists who introduce us to our cousins, have been able to show us why we dream what we do. What we yearn for is not just our imagined future; it is our very real past.

Extreme efficiency of exchange, in other words, might come at the cost of developing new business contacts.

Perhaps we can tinker with the word ‘money’ itself. It’s a mass noun, like you’d use for some kind of tangible substance, and it makes money sound like a ‘thing-in-itself’. As a kind of mental discipline, I prefer to use a different word: COGAS. It stands for ‘claims on goods and services’, which is all money really is. And now I have a word that describes itself, as opposed to one that actively hides its own reality. It sounds trivial, but the linguistic process works a subtle psychological loop, referring money to the world outside itself. It’s a simple way to start peeling back the façade.

There’s an ecological dimension to this, of course, which is my overriding concern. Our ability to exchange without knowing where things come from blinds us to the real core of the economy: not money, but the physical things we must wrench from the ground by human effort, which is underpinned by agricultural systems, and energised by sunlight, water and soil.

GDP is supposed to reflect what is created in society, but if my grandad builds me a table in his workshop, it’s not included in GDP, and if I buy a table in Ikea, it is. The former is not considered valid production, whereas the latter is. That is arbitrary, and obviously something has gone wrong.

Similar network effects arise with social platforms such as Facebook — in theory, you can opt out, but only if you don’t mind the penalty of social exclusion. What’s more, when integrated into a national legal system and backed by the threat of violence, the sanctions for dissent become rather persuasive. At the unsubtle end of the spectrum, the monarch may simply throw you in jail for not using her preferred currency.

Gold reveals the basic tension in the textbook definition of money — the idea that it can be both a store of value and a means of exchange. For the most part, when something is truly valuable in itself, people are disinclined to part with it (why swap rum for something else when you can just drink it?).

It’s a reassuring myth, one that obscures the deep difference between barter and monetary exchange. In the former, nothing is left unresolved and no faith is required. It’s a closed circuit, a like-for-like swap. By contrast, money transactions are never closed; you pass on an abstract, faith-based claim in exchange for a tangible good.

but this still means that every monetary transaction is a leap of faith. And faith has to be carefully maintained.

The best guides in this half-lit territory turn out to be not economists, but rather the loose bands of monetary mystics and iconoclasts who are developing strange new exchange technologies. They are a scattered tribe, with elders including the likes of Bernard Lietaer, Ellen Brown and Thomas Greco, sages passing on tips on how to breach the Monetary Matrix.

The financial system exists, above all, to mediate flows of money, not to question what money is.

Weapons of the Weak is not just a political study, however; it is also an outstanding work of ethnography. Based on thorough research and careful, perceptive fieldwork, it manages to avoid some of the failings of traditional ethnography by its emphasis on the centrality of individual human beings in their particular situations. Whether or not it offers definitive answers to the questions it investigates, it certainly provides some solid ground to stand on in looking for them.

Unfortunately, this process rarely actually happens the right way, often because the business people ask their data people the wrong questions to being with, and since they think of their data people as little more than pieces of software – data in, magic out – they don’t get their data people sufficiently involved with working on something that data can address.

NS Taleb teaches that a system can be designed to be anti-fragile, to not only cope to small amount of stress but also become better and more resilient by it. And while this might be extremely difficult, Taleb also shows that small is truly beautiful thus for our discipline

That would mean the shift to an economic system where the fruits of the most powerful technologies humans have invented are shared more equally among us. If we embraced work-saving technologies rather than feared them, and organised our society around their potential, it could mean being able to live a good life with a ten-hour working week.

But we live in a world not of steam, but of silicon, solar and synthetic biology. Yes, technology challenges existing business models and maybe even capitalism as we know it. The solution isn't economically illiterate nostalgia or wringing your hands about inevitable social unrest. Rather seeing "structural unemployment" – as Rupert calls it – as a threat, we should take it as an opportunity to build a society where we can have much more and work much less.

While Rupert's vision is that of a dystopian, socially fragmented future, Osborne's ambition is to return to the economics of the Victorians. The former see a world whose politics are increasingly incapable of resolving the problems of its time, while the latter pines for the ways of the steam-age.

In that respect, the recent victory of anti-eviction activist and ex-squatter, Ada Colau, in the race to become the Mayor of Barcelona is a sign of things to come. It is politicians like Colau, the Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras and Pablo Iglesias, the leader of a radical-left party which could form Spain's next government, who are the leading edge of something which Rupert fears is much, much bigger.

If the state moved heaven and earth to create capitalism, what will stop it doing the same to ensure its survival and creating some kind of techno-fascism – less a transition motor and more a whack-a-mole game, bashing non-capitalist initiatives on the head as they emerge?

Abundance is already here – we have enough stuff but don't share it properly. Loads of people are already in bullshit jobs that don't need to happen – and technology hasn't changed that until now.

"The state has to be rethought as a transition motor," he says – meaning it needs to be reimagined as a vehicle for change rather than a defender of the status quo. "And transition's a long period – we're not talking about two years, we're talking about 50," says Paul.

The identity change is true closer to home as well as in the developing world, with traditional workplace identities evaporating.

Lastly, far from the claim of these initiatives to being novel and unprecedented, we need to recognize that these surveillance systems have their roots in colonial practices of identification of the colonized.

as our lives are dominated ever more completely by complex computer systems, it is a little disquieting to realise that perhaps our heroes must be as alien and inscrutable as our problems.

Where Otlet and Wells envisioned publicly funded, trans-national organizations, we now have an oligarchy of public corporations.

The culture stood in stark contrast to the orderly, institutional tendencies of Otlet and Wells. Where Europeans were turning to their institutions in a time of crisis, many Americans were growing up in a value system that emphasized individualism and personal liberation. It was in this milieu that Licklider, Engelbart, and others began laying the foundations for the web we know today.

As we know from public media, when products exist in the marketplace for reasons other than profit, it affects the whole market for the better. In other words, this kind of organization would be a public good as well as an academic one

software is created through a design thinking process, with iterative user research and testing performed with both educators and students. The result is likely to be software that better meets their needs, released with an understanding that it is never finished, and instead will be rapidly improved during its use.

This business model does not need, or even more it is prohibited, by an alternative Application Pattern, a pattern that it is Human centric, Human scale, that puts you in the center and does not see you as a data generation unit aggregated inside a giant swarm of people.

Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit.

the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets

This process of gentrification becomes a war over language

Here is where the second form of corruption begins to emerge. The construct of the ‘good hacker’ has paid off in unexpected ways, because in our computerised world we have also seen the emergence of a huge, aggressively competitive technology industry with a serious innovation obsession. This is the realm of startups, venture capitalists, and shiny corporate research and development departments. And, it is here, in subcultures such as Silicon Valley, that we find a rebel spirit succumbing to perhaps the only force that could destroy it: gentrification.

Despite the hive-mind connotations of faceless groups such as Anonymous, the archetype of ‘the hacker’ is essentially that of an individual attempting to live an empowered and unalienated life. It is outsider in spirit, seeking empowerment outside the terms set by the mainstream establishment.

I was attracted to the hacker archetype because, unlike the straightforward activist who defines himself in direct opposition to existing systems, hackers work obliquely. The hacker is ambiguous, specialising in deviance from established boundaries, including ideological battle lines. It’s a trickster spirit, subversive and hard to pin down. And, arguably, rather than aiming towards some specific reformist end, the hacker spirit is a ‘way of being’, an attitude towards the world.