Abstract
A quip by William Morris about the many things in the world that have come into existence through political defeats provides the point of departure for Johan Söderberg’s reflection on the hacker movement in his and Maxigas recent book, Resistance to the current: The dialectics of hacking (MIT Press, 2022). The utopian dreams of hackers can be studied as an early warning system of techniques for control and exploitation yet to come, once their emancipatory projects have been recuperated by the industry. The concept of “recuperation” prompts us to adopt a longer historical view on things and calls attention to developmental tendencies in the present that would otherwise have passed unnoticed. The case study method, provided that its tendency towards presentism is overcome, can be a means of training our reflective judgement to “sniff out” new recuperation attempts.
About Johan Söderberg
Johan Söderberg is professor of Theory of Science at Göteborg University, Sweden. His research spans many diverse fields, hackers, drug user communities, and the theoretical implications of post-truth, but always with a keen interest in the tenuous relation between scientific and ideological knowledge claims. Theoretical inspiration comes from various strands within Marxism and the sociology of knowledge-tradition. In addition to the book on hackers, he recently published Kritik av Underdog-metafysiken (Celander Förlag, 2022).
The seminar will be commented by Susanne Bauer, Professor at TIK.