The politics of hacking
Associate Professor Dunbar-Hester discusses the cultures and the communities of the digital era, with a focus on media and tech activists
Published 20 January 2021
“I tend to focus on communities of people and how they mobilise around and interpret technologies,” says Associate Professor Dunbar-Hester, from the School of Communication at the University of Southern California.
Her writing and research centres on the politics of technology in culture, especially media and technology activism.
“If we take a fairly conventional view that hacking has to do with computers, programming and hardware, the longer trajectory in North America and Europe was that actually women were some of the earliest professional programmers during the war effort in World War II. And when programming was a new occupation, it wasn’t gendered and computers weren’t gendered,” Professor Dunbar-Hester says.
She says another of the really interesting things that came up during her research was that if you’re teaching people to program and hack because it’s fun, where does that lead?
“I had spoken to people who were saying, well, you can wind up working for Silicon Valley,” Professor Dunbar-Hester says. “And a lot of their contracting work, as we know, not all of it, but a lot of it might have surveillance or military implications. Where does the line get drawn between when you’re really enjoying solving this technical problem and your responsibility for an application for it?”
Professor Dunbar-Hester says an important thing to note is that we tend to grant technology and technologists so much power and special status in society that if we want to change society, we need to change who the technologists are, or we need to open that seat up to new kinds of people.
“And that may well be true and I have nothing against it, but the other thing that I would ask us to maybe step back and think about, is how did that segment of society come to be so powerful in the first place and is that really what we want?”
Episode recorded: November 17, 2020.
Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.
Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.
Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.
Banner: Getty Images
