Hacking Body Politics: Tackling the Technical Tropes

As the rationale and reason of the ‘internet of things’ progresses vigorously to encompass all things , organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, conscious or not – including all aspects of our increasingly connected bodies, an ‘internet of organisms’ (IoO) seems to be steadily transpiring. As socially fabricated organic subjects now turned artificially intelligent corporeal objects in the IoO – in the surveillance of information capitalism, our bodies and actions are mined, and on this base, patterns are fabricated, predictions concocted, and suggestions devised. But as posthuman bodies, can we not conspire with systems and things as allied artifice to hack back the larger apparatuses of power that we are immersed in? Rather than acting as the janitors of the machinery – can we be malfunctioning code, a screw loose in the contraptions of power? Exemplified by works from a design inquiry, this article argues that we must evolve as fluid negotiated un/common bodies with things, being precise with obscurity, transforming metadata into ‘betadata’, and DIY re-cyphering our entangled embedded bodies.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Michelle Christensen

Florian Conradi

Conference

Publication date: June 2019

Publication date (Print): June 2019

Pages: 98-104

Affiliations

[0001]Technische Universität Berlin /

Berlin University of the Arts

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM19.15

SO-VID: 1efb5e5b-f5ff-4b2e-9cae-e5fe7c37b0e9

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machine Beirut 2019

Conference acronym: POM2019

Conference number: 2

Conference location: Beirut, Lebanon

Conference date: 11-14 June 2019

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Politics of the Machine

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM19.15

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

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S. Zuboff 2019 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power New York Public Affairs

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Z. BaumanD. Lyon 2013 Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation Cambridge, UK Polity Press

[2] J. Bennett 2010 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things Durham, NC Duke University Press

[3] R. Braidotti 2017 Becoming-World Together: On the Crisis of Human Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine Weil am Rein Vitra Design Museum

[4] R. Braidotti 2013 The Posthuman Polity Press Cambridge

[5] R. Braidotti 2006 Posthuman, All Too Human Towards a New Process Ontology Theory, Culture & Society 23 7-8 197 208

[6] M. de Certeau 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley, CA University of California Press

[7] M. Foucault 1977 The Confession of the Flesh C. Gordon Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977 Pantheon Books New York

[8] D. GarciaG. Lovink 1997 The ABC of Tactical Media Manifesto

[9] S. Gibbs 2017 Google has been tracking Android users even with location services turned off, 22.11.2017 www.theguardian.com 04 12 2017

[10] C. GordonG. BurchellP. Miller 1991 The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality Chicago The University of Chicago Press

[11] E. Grosz 2004 The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely Durham, London Duke University Press

[12] D. Haraway 1985 A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s Socialist Review 5 2 65 107

[13] D. Haraway 1994 A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, Configurations

[14] D. Haraway 2006 When we have never been human, what is to be done? Theory, Culture & Society 23 7-8 135 58

[15] D. Hillis 2016 The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement Journal of Design and Science MIT Press

[16] D. Lupton 2014 Quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self-tracking using apps Culture, Health & Sexuality 17 4 440 453

[17] M. Ratto 2011 Critical Making B. van AbelL. EversR. KlaassenP. Troxler Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive Amsterdam BIS Publishers

[18] S. Zuboff 2019 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power New York Public Affairs

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