For Zoom link to this session, contact Marie Stilling Hansen: m.s.hansen@tik.uio.no
Software’s fundamental appeal is that it has the power to illuminate the unknown; its separation of software from hardware, interface from infrastructure, provides a powerful metaphor for how the system works. Hacker-entrepreneurs construct new forms of mobility by traversing the bottom layers of new technologies, where they can observe how different elements are related, how things really work. My fieldwork takes place between 2013 and 2017, just before a newly formed leftist political party gained power after nearly a century of rule by Mexico’s revolutionary party. For disenchanted youth in Mexico, skeptical of the promises of social mobility by means of formal education, “hacking” emerged as a way to make sense of their futures in a precarious state and economy, and as a way to let their code work intervene in narratives that had only delivered false hopes. This code work promised developers the tools to think with the system, whether that system was the latest software infrastructure, socio-economic program, or political reform. In this talk I build on this fieldwork to propose the “ethnographic stack” as a methodological framework for thinking with research participants about how to re-imagine and re-arrange complex techno-political relationships.
Héctor Beltrán is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT, where he teaches “Cultures of Computing,” “Hacking from the South,” and “Latinx in the Age of Empire.”
His current book manuscript, Code Work: Hacking Across the US/MéxicoTechno-Borderlands, examines the political economy of knowledge work and manifestations of hacking between the United States and México.