May 31, 2021 | Reflections
Hacker genres are multiple. From the 1950s Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT to free software/open-source (FOSS) movement, cypherpunks, underground hackers, hacklabs and hackerspaces, these hackers build, work and inhabit information technologies that are an intrinsic part of their experiences, ethics and politics. They value forms of freedom, privacy, and access. Through programming, system administration and tinkering with information technologies artifacts, they embody an aesthetic in which craft (norms, traditions, and learning) and craftiness (creative practices of modifying, breaking and overcoming technological problems) converge. In their way, through reordering information technologies, they dispute the ordering of the world.
Although the hacker stereotype is that of the white young man, libertarian, technology savvy and immersed in a technomeritocratic ethos – usually connected to the North-American FOSS communities – hackers are known to engage in political actions. Antiauthoritarianism, the valorization of craftiness and extremely social/collective behavior are some of the subjectivities that engage hackers. In Latin America, hackers’ recursive publics (a group constructed around the shared technical and legal conditions that allow their association and) are built not only around freedom to create, distribute, transform and access technologies, but also around belonging to traditional peoples, being Latin-American, and living in a developing country. The colonial past, the violent dictatorships, the neoliberal reforms, the excluding modernization, the peripherical situation, the attacks on autonomy, and lack of affirmative policies are constantly brought up as reasons for engaging in hacking in Latin America.
Although multiple, the common element that permeates different hacker politics in Latin America is the construction of alternatives, both technopolitical – related to the governance of information technologies – and sociotechnical – as ways to dispute the construction of futures. The Zapatista uprising had a great impact on the imaginaries of what it is to be a hacker in Latin America and of the potential of hacker tactics in political engagement on informational capitalism. Under surveillance capitalism, connections between free technologies, autonomy and national sovereignty are highlighted, but they were present in Latin America since the 1960s and the developmentalism policies.
FOSS communities usually lean to libertarianism and other intersections with liberalism – the individual freedom to create, share, transform and access technologies and the fight against intellectual property laws that can constrain it. In Latin America, even when focusing in FOSS communities, free technologies and hacking were, at the beginning, ways to achieve autonomy and reduce the technological dependence in industry and government: the political movement was always bigger than the technical one[1].
The premises of freedom, autonomy, self-learning, and resistance and the tactics attributed to hackers have been appropriated by many other means (arts, music, and literature as ways to subvert genres), including government and education. Many times, there is an idea that enforcing hacking premises it will lead necessarily to self-learning, digital inclusion, and development. This perspective is not necessarily technologically neutral, but it resonates the emancipatory potential of information technologies that permeates Latin America – the idea that, comparing with developed countries, information technologies have not yet been fully explored here and access and self-learning would fill the gaps of more robust policies.
One of the most widespread recent trends that can be associated with hacker culture is bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Behind these digital currencies there is an active movement that seeks to disrupt the financial system. Blockchain technology allows the creation of a decentralized ledger system, which can be censorship-resistant and relatively unregulated. Enthusiasts point out that in the future banks will thus become unnecessary, as each user will be able to be the owner of his digital cash through cryptographic keys, without the need to trust a third party. Blockchain financial innovations of blockchain are complemented by the emergence of various decentralized finance (DeFi) initiatives in the cryptocurrency space. DeFi protocols like Aave or Compound offer services associated with traditional finance, such as interest-bearing deposits or loans.
The ideology behind these developments is strongly related to crypto-anarchism and libertarianism. It combines an individualistic and anti-state perspective with a utopian vision of the potential of information technologies to disrupt society for good. In this narrative, cryptocurrencies will give individuals back control over their money, provide them with greater autonomy and free them from banking and financial corporations.
Cryptocurrencies also appear to be linked in Latin America to alternative future imaginaries. However, they are not associated with developmentalist or minority political perspectives. On the contrary, this vision shares the technomeritocratic ethos of North-American hacker communities, especially those that aim to craft technological alternatives to societal problems and highlight the libertarian outlooks of individual autonomy and self-reliance. Cryptocurrencies have been more widely embraced in countries such as Venezuela and Argentina, where there is low confidence in the banking system, high inflation rates and significant restrictions on economic transactions. In this context, they offer a way to safeguard savings and put them out of the reach of states with authoritarian practices.
The promoters of these technologies have also emphasized their great capacity to generate financial inclusion. They argue that people in developing countries could especially benefit from these tools, as barriers to joining the digital payments economy are significantly lowered. It is no longer necessary to deal with long bureaucratic processes. A cell phone is enough. However, the results in this aspect are meager. Cryptocurrencies have a very steep learning curve and are only popular among the tech savvy and young who are literate in English, a profile similar to that involved in other manifestations of hacker culture. In addition, other fintech industry players not linked to cryptocurrencies have been much more effective in reaching the unbanked population with simple and well-adapted solutions.
We would like to conclude by observing that manifestations of hacker culture in the region are very diverse and potentially conflicting in political and ideological terms. In our view, this reinforces even more the importance of studying the expressions of hackerism in different geographical contexts and analyzing how they interrelate with the cultural imaginaries of each region.
[1] Rafael Evangelista (2010) and Agustín Zanotti (2014) thoroughly explore the Brazilian and the Argentinian FOSS communities, respectively.
About the authors:
Daniela Pinheiro is a researcher at University of Campinas (Unicamp, Brazil) within the Laboratory of Technology and Social Transformations (LABTTS). She holds a PhD in Science and Technology Policy from Unicamp. She is interested in hacker cultures, knowledge production on Latin American hackers, and information technologies policies.
Federico Vasen (@federicovasen) is a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET, and teaches courses on social aspects of engineering at the National Technological University, Buenos Aires. He holds a PhD in social sciences and an undergraduate degree in Philosophy. He is interested in science and technology policy and the regulation of emergent technologies.
References
COLEMAN, Gabriella. From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek. Current Anthropology, v. 58, n. 15, 2017.
COLEMAN, G.; GOLUB, A. Hacker practice: moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. Anthropological Theory, v. 8, n. 3, p. 255-277, 2008.
DONAS, Javier. B. Los nuevos derechos humanos: gobierno electrónico e informática comunitária. Enl@ce: Revista Venezolana de Información, Tecnología y Conocimiento, v. 4, n. 2, p. 13-27, 2007.
EVANGELISTA, Rafael Almeida. Traidores do movimento: política, cultura, ideologia e trabalho no software livre. Campinas, Unicamp, 2010. 240 p.
KELTY, Christopher. Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology, v. 20, n. 2, p. 185-214, 2005.
LEVY, Steven. Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, 2010 [1984].
MAXIGAS. Hacklabs and hackerspaces: tracing two genealogies. Journal of Peer Production, v. 2, 2012. Disponível em: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-2/peer-reviewed-papers/hacklabs-and-hackerspaces/. Acesso em: 31 ago. 2016.
MENDOZA, Jorge Lizama. Hackers: de piratas a defensores del software libre. Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, v. 45, n. 185, mai/ago, p. 91-108, 2002.
PINHEIRO, Daniela Albini. Hackers, políticas e América Latina: um estudo exploratório. Campinas, Unicamp, 2019. 199 p.
POPPER, Nathaniel. Digital Gold. New York: Penguin, 2015.
RUSSO, C. The Infinite Machine. Nueva York: Harper, 2020.
SIMIQUELI, Roberto R. A Política Nacional de Informática e o Nacionalismo Militar. e-premissas, n. 3, 2008.
ZANOTTI, Agustín. Comunidades de software libre en Argentina: motivaciones, participación, militancia. Perspectivas de la Comunicación, v. 7, n. 2, p. 55-74, 2014.
Published: 05/31/2021