Weusecookiestoprovideyouwithabetterservice.Carryonbrowsingifyou’rehappywiththis,orfindouthowtomanagecookies.’

Inthisinstance,criticsprotestedthatTwitterwasinvolvedincensoringpoliticalcontent,butothershaveshownthatthecomplexalgorithmsoftheplatformorganizeandfiltercontentinwaysoftenbeyondtheintentionsoftheirdesigners.Ratherthanasimplemeasureofpopularity,thealgorithmisbasedonacombinationoffactors,andthosethatTwitterhasrevealedincludeidentifyingtopicsthatareenjoyingasurgeinaparticularway,suchaswhethertheuseofatermisspiking(acceleratingrapidlyratherthangradually),whetherusersofatermformatightsingleclusterorcutacrossmultipleclusters,whethertweetsareuniqueormostlyretweetsofthesamepost,andwhetherthetermhaspreviouslytrended

InthedocumentaryfilmNoMapsforTheseTerritoriesherecounts,‘[A]llIknewabouttheword“cyberspace”whenIcoinedit,wasthatitseemedlikeaneffectivebuzzword.Itseemedevocativeandessentiallymeaningless.’[31]ThisisreminiscentofNietzsche’sgenealogicalprinciplethatjustbecausesomethingcomesintobeingforonepurposedoesnotmeanthatitwillservethatpurposeforever.

Matt Ratto (2011) defines "critical making" as a combination of critical thinking and material production. His contribution for the current discussion is: if critical makers can "reintegrate technical and social work and thereby innovate both" (p. 258). Design appears a fertile inroad for thinking about empowerment and politics, as particular genres of technology are created through complex social, economic, and cultural processes, leading to literacies that can be drawn on and reconfigured (Balsamo, 2011 ). DiSalvo's (2009) notion of critical making involves users in the design process through practices such as tracing and projection, resulting in the creation of new publics. This was later developed into "adversarial design" (DiSalvo, 2012), which confronts the politics of technologies of objects with an intent to encourage participation. Rafi Santo's (2011, 2013) "hacker literacies" similarly positions hacking as enabling critical thinking within a framework of media literacies.

In addition to moments of the expression of civic imagination, I am attentive to failure — times where conceptual roadblocks were encountered, spectacles failed, and cultural reproduction turned ugly. Being attentive to failure is necessary because civic hackathons tend to be universally celebrated as successes in popular literature. As Anne Balsamo noted in the case of Xerox PARC (p. 55), sites of technological production tend to also be involved in their own hype and myth-making (Also see: Balsamo, 1996). It is necessary to see what is entangled with the fiction.