 Our next talk is going to be by Susanne Banknacht. She's a social scientist and she's doing research about hacking. And although she claims she's not a hacker, she's actually written a paper about GSM hacking. Yeah, so this is going to be very interesting. We also have translation available for this talk. You just dial 8014. So give a warm welcome to Susanne and enjoy. Thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be here. So by way of an introduction, this talk is about concepts. I'm a social scientist and I'm interested in concepts, words, ideas, vocabularies. Concepts matter because if you don't have a conceptual understanding of something, you can't really talk about it. You can't really work with it. You can't criticize it. That's why concepts are important tools. And this talk is about conceptual approaches to hacking. Hacking as a phenomenon, something that you can do. You can observe. You can talk about something that you might want to have a conceptual understanding of. So the question for this talk is, thank you. The question for this talk is, what is hacking? What's the concept of hacking? What should it be? What should be a concept of hacking like? Maybe that's a boring question for you. Maybe your impulse is to say, come on, open your eyes. It's just right in front of you. But for me as a social scientist, this is a crazy question. So what's hacking? That's sort of a really big question. And because this is a tiny little talk, I will be talking about something that is a little smaller. I will be talking about concepts of hacking in academic research. How does academic research conceive of hacking? Academic research is increasingly interested in hacking. Research fields that are interested in hacking are the social sciences generally, but also interdisciplinary fields that bridge between social sciences and technology design, engineering, informatics, and computer science. Fields such as human-computer interaction or short HCI. Now, if research seeks to study practices such as hacking, typically there's some form of exchange involved. Exchange between those who are doing the study, running the study, and those who are studied, who are observed, interviewed, and so on. However, Phaefa, probably many of you know him, a blogger of the German hacking community, warned hackers against collaborating with researchers. Here's a quote. I'll quickly translate the first part into English. So lately he writes there has been a lot of research about hacking, about hacking communities and hacker spaces, also about groups such as Occupy. If they, these researchers, knock on your door, don't tell them anything. Just because they are polite and nice, you don't have to cooperate. So, and he goes on suggesting that these nerdy scientists that knock on your door are sent by the bad guys. Think tanks, consulting companies, corporate and public agencies who are afraid of hackers and want to spy on them. So, the thing is, I don't know anything about that spying business. I'm sorry. I can't tell you about that. But what I can tell you is what academic research about hacking actually looks like, how academic research conceives of hacking and how it conceptually approaches hacking. But before I do that, before I give you an overview of academic approaches to hacking, I want to give you the backstory. I want to tell you why I'm doing this, actually. So hacking is not my main research business. Hacking is sort of a weird side interest of mine. And I've been twice at the Congress before, a couple of years ago in 2010 and 2011. And I liked it very much. And at the same time, I became increasingly interested in HCI, that is in human-computer interaction. And I realized that in this field HCI, there's a growing literature about hacking. So HCI is a research field, is about the ways in which humans interact with computers. It's part social, part technical. It's part observing and understanding users and part building and designing for users. So users, HCI is typically about users. What do users want? What do they do? How can they be triggered into doing the right thing? Research in human-computer interaction has recently become very, very interested in hacking, but also in hacker spaces, making and do-it-yourself practices. Hacking is interesting for HCI because it is seen as a model for somehow engaging more actively, more deeply with computers. There are a lot of funding applications written about hacking at the moment. But somehow I didn't like the way HCI research approaches hacking. I found it lacking, I found it a bit disappointing because I think this kind of research was, to my mind, blind, blind to hacking's infrastructural scope. Hacking is not just about modifying artifacts, it's about infrastructuring, reconfiguring infrastructures, as I see it. And perhaps even more importantly, this research was blind to the political messages of hacking. Hacking practices communicate a political sentiment, communicate political messages. And I didn't find that in that literature. So in the remainder of my talk, I want to introduce some of these research approaches that I find lacking. And I say lacking, sort of with academic diplomacy, because much of this research is good research, it's not bad research, it's just that it leaves out very important parts of the picture, the larger picture of what hacking aspires or can aspire to be. So, and I'll also introduce some research approaches that I really like, that are much better at grasping the larger picture and that are doing justice to the political messages that hacking practices can convey. So, a first approach, conceptual approach to hacking. Hacking as creative and ad hoc. For researchers in human computer interaction, hacking is interesting because it approaches things differently. It breaks things, it turns them upside down, it improvises. Hacking is interesting because it is creative and it is creative often in unplanned ad hoc manner. That's why Joseph Paradiso, and he's working with von Hippel, many of you probably know that guy, Paradiso and his collaborators characterize hacking as ad hoc clutching. So he has a quote, hacking is appropriating, modifying or clutching existing resources, devices, hardware, software or anything within reach to suit other purposes, often in an ingenious fashion. And hacking is also described in sort of the same manner as opportunistic practice with an ad hoc nature. And there's more researchers who follow that line of thinking. For example, the use of tools and the making of tools in hacker spaces is described as ad hoc activity, making the most of what is at hand. If you don't have a tool, you make it. And if you don't have the stuff to make a tool, you just make it anyway with different stuff. And that's a kind of creativity that many researchers in human computer interaction find so inspiring. And they want to tap into that source of inspiration too. And that's fine, but it offers a very narrow perspective on hacking, sort of lacking the larger frame, I believe. The tricky question is, what's the motivation? What are the interests behind this kind of research? Is it a pedagogical interest in learning, trying to adapt the forms of learning that you find in hacking communities for mainstream education at schools and universities? That's one line of research. And for researchers, it's very fascinating to see how very complicated, very technical knowledge, but also very hands-on knowledge, is disseminated in online communities. But often the motivation to research hacking is a different one. It's an interest in innovation and economic value. And the question then is, do these research interests align with the interests that people in the hacking community have? So, innovation, economic value, let me give you some examples for how research frames hacking as innovation. Research in the field of HCI has described hacking in these academic papers as innovative leisure practice. It has also described hacking as end-user innovation or a form of user-driven product development. Hacking has also been called a simple way to speed up prototype development. So, this is all about innovation, finding a new take on technology innovation. And innovation is an economic term. Innovation is something that possesses economic value, something that someone can make money with. And you find this line of thought also in the work of other researchers. For example, Sylvia Lindner and collaborators, they studied hackerspaces in China and the U.S. And they went to these hackerspaces, observed people, talked to them, interviewed them, participated. And when they wrote up their research and turned it into an academic paper, what they wrote was this, hackerspaces as sites of innovation. Here's a... Oh, that's this one. And here's a longer quote. Our research suggests that we need to see hackerspaces not just as a place that amortizes the cost of a laser cutter and a 3D printer across hundreds of people. It is a place where people are experimenting with new ideas about the relationships among corporations, designers, and consumers. And what they observe and are interested in observing is a shift, quote again, from hobby to entrepreneurial practice. And that's zooming in on economic value. And I have sort of a very ambivalent stance towards this perspective. I don't think hacking is essentially about business and product. Correct me if I'm wrong. But I can see that this economic perspective is doing a nice PR job for the hacking community, especially in the U.S. context. To say that hacking is about technological innovation is one way to decriminalize it. It's a way, and that may be a good thing, but it's also a way that completely leaves aside the political sentiment that much of hacking carries with itself. It leaves aside political sentiment, and that's why I say with this academic diplomacy, I find this approach a little lacking. So what do you do? As a researcher, if you don't like the research literature that you have, you'll look for more literature. And if human-computer interaction doesn't get it entirely right, maybe others do. Maybe social scientists, anthropologists, sociologists. And in fact, I found research approaches to hacking that I really like and that are really getting at something. One of them is this. Hacking means transgression. Transgression. What's transgression? Breaking a rule, violating a convention. But hacking and transgression in hacking practice can take so many forms. There is legal transgression. Breaking the law is legal transgression. But it doesn't have to be a law. You can break other things too. You can break economic conventions. You can break cultural conventions. Just because you are expected to use your phone in a certain way doesn't mean you have to do it. You can break social conventions. And perhaps most importantly, you can break programming conventions. Research in various fields has emphasized this point, particularly in sociology and of course in criminology. Kevin Steinmetz, an ethnographer publishing in criminology, describes hacking as transgressive craft. And for example, the sociologist Paul Taylor has described hacking as illicit. And I think that's getting at something. A lot of hacking is about transgression, transgressing conventions. That's a good thing. But another important sociological approach to hacking is this one. And here we are getting really to some conceptual stuff. Hacking as challenging technological determinism. So technological determinism is the view that technology completely determines the social. In this view, technology determines what we do, what we think, how we behave, how we form communities, how communities function, how societies function. And for Silicon Valley, this may be fine. For sociologists, this is a horror scenario. Absolutely horror. Now, some sociologists believe that hackers are actually their allies in fighting technological determinism. For example, the English sociologist Tim Jordan argues that hacking both demands and refutes technological determinism. Hackers presume that the technologies involved in computers and networks will determine certain actions, and they presume also it is possible for them to alter and recreate such determinations. So fighting technological determinism, I think we're getting a little closer to the scope and the political message of hacking. And we're getting closer to a research approach that I really admire, hacking as practiced liberalism. So that's another perspective in the social sciences, most prominently voiced by Gabriela Coleman, a U.S. anthropologist and her collaborators. Many of you probably know Gabriela Coleman. She just published a book about anonymous and how anonymous morphed into political activism. She's interested in the political dimension of hacking. And together with Alex Golub, she has argued that hacking is, in fact, practiced liberalism. What underlies hacking, so their argument, is the liberal ethos of freedom. Freedom from corporate and political surveillance, freedom to do stuff, to reclaim proprietary knowledge, create technology, and disseminate technological knowledge. And what about transgression here? Actually, Coleman and Golub described transgression too as a reflection of American liberalism. It reflects, they argue, the very liberal value of creative individuality, and individuality that expresses itself against the conventions of mainstream society. So what this work shows, in a way, is that hacking is true American liberalism. One message that I'll read here is, Hello, America. Don't be afraid of your hackers. Don't hate them. Oh, they are your true self. That's one of their messages. Here's a quote, Hacking, so of marginalized or misunderstood in popular culture as the practice of deviant subculture, in fact, reveals the continuing relevance, if also the contradictions of the liberal traditions to the digital present. The only thing to keep in mind here is that this is a very American story and that the European perspective might look a little differently. So now that I'm almost at the end of my talk, I want to get back to something that I told you at the beginning. I told you that it's important, for me at least, to have a conceptual understanding of hacking, to be able to say what it is, to be able to talk about it. But for me, that's only half of the story because once you have a conceptual understanding of hacking, you can start challenging rethinking and remodeling the other concepts that you have. And two concepts that seem to become ever more important are technology use and design, use and design. We talk about design all the time. We talk a little less about use because it's a profane in a way, but design and use are two sides of a conceptual coin. And the fascinating thing about hacking is hacking is challenging the standard story of first design than use. The standard story of first design than use is this. There's professional designers and then there's more or less experienced users that put more or less effort into appropriating a technology. The ordinary human being is a user. The user is supposed to use technology and then there's the designer. In the broad sense of the term, also including engineers and business stakeholders. The designer is a privileged, a very privileged professional. The designer is powerful and the designer changes the world. User designer. So usually there's nothing much in between or beyond that. And I find this kind of thinking terribly limiting. That's thinking in very neat squares. Hackers, in fact, are not really, they're neither really, they aren't really designers and they aren't really users. They mix it all up in a way. Hacking practices mix this up, this neat distinction. So what hacking shows is that this neat story of first design than use doesn't really work out and that it shouldn't work out. It shouldn't work out. This story needs to be challenged. Otherwise we end up in a world with a class of privileged designers and the large group of users who can use stuff, maybe choose not to use stuff, maybe change the color of the phone, but not much else. To wrap this talk up, a quick conclusion. I was basically talking about two questions. What is hacking? The short answer is it can be all kinds of things. There's a range of approaches, research approaches to hacking and it very much depends on the values and research interests that underlie research. That's the thing to get it, I think. How research conceives of hacking depends on interests. Sometimes it also depends on funding applications and on values. And then there was a second question. The question, faith erased, should hackers talk to researchers if they knock on their door? I'd say why not? Why not? But better first have an open conversation about interests and values. Thank you. Thank you for the talk and we have time for a couple of questions. If you have any questions, just line up in front of one of the microphones distributed all over the cell. Yeah, please. Hello. Thank you for the talk first thing. I think it was very well structured and I had fun following it. However, I kind of tuned in a little late and maybe you took something, said something in advance that I didn't get. You said something about the concept of innovation. Actually what I'm getting at is just a little detail. But the concept of innovation being economical and I wondered, is it often or is it predominantly interpreted that way because you could also innovate because you have a certain need? A certain what? A need or just playing around and something fun happens and say, whoa, accidental innovation. Yeah, but I think the term itself has a strong economic connotation. So if you talk about innovation, typically as a sort of a research term, then you talk about something that has a money value. And of course, there's also social innovation, organizational innovation, but this term has strong roots apart from our everyday use of the word maybe, has strong roots in an economic vocabulary. So if a researcher writes a paper about hacking as innovation, there is an underlying economic value. Okay, thanks. Interesting because I as a user of that language have a completely different understanding of it, like what you said or everyday perception of it. There is a difference between everyday language and what you write in a research paper. Okay, thanks. Okay, there's another question on the left microphone. Thank you. I actually have two questions if that's all right. You talked a lot about innovations and also about entrepreneurship and I kind of got reminded of Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction. But my first question is, do you see a problem that because hackers are decriminalized and are more seen as these innovators that actually the society is changing, the hackers that the hackers actually want to change? Okay, I'm not sure. I got the latter part but I don't see a problem in decriminalizing hackers, but I see a problem in reducing the phenomenon of hacking to an economic phenomenon. I think that that's not doing justice to the phenomenon. I mean that's sort of a very flat, very narrow picture of it and I don't think it serves the community. If we now portray in research, portraying hackers as the new entrepreneurs, I think that's very limited if not a detrimental way of approaching it. And my second question as a social scientist myself, I always feel like a social scientist and a computer scientist. Thank you. Speak two completely different languages at some points and my question is in how far do you think something is lost or gained if you do a translation into a social scientist language or the other way around? I mean that's a very good point. I've been struggling with this a lot. You can frame it as a problem of interdisciplinarity or just as a problem of two cultures or whatever, but there is sort of a deep gap between someone who's thinking in social scientists terms and computer science. There is sort of a gap between that. And I think the thing to keep in mind is that different cultures or different academic cultures are good at different things. So social scientists have a very refined vocabulary when talking about power, communities, societies and computer scientists have a very refined vocabulary when talking about programming languages and they may not have that defined vocabulary when they are talking about societies. So for a social scientist who hears computer scientists talking about societies, sometimes you are taking a bit back because you think, oh my god, where is the conceptual finesse here? But the thing to keep in mind is I think that social scientists are often observers and when you come here and you get into immerse into this hacking culture, this is a culture of sort of actually doing things and getting things done. And I find that very amazing and that's something I think social scientists have to remind themselves of. Thank you. Okay, we have a question from the internet. We take that first. I tried to treat this as a stack so I pop it off. The internet really thanks you for your talk and enjoyed your calm delivery. And the question is, do you think that hacking should be accessible to all? And how can we get those who do not understand what hacking is involved in it? Oh, these are two good questions. Yeah, I think hacking, I think it would be great if everyone had sort of the cultural, social and financial capital to get engaged with hacking. Unfortunately, I think this is not realistic for the near future because you have to remember that this is a practice that takes a lot of, it takes time, it takes money, but it also takes a certain mindset. Not everyone is ready for that. It takes what we call as social scientists, cultural capital to actually to take a phone apart if you purchase that phone for a lot of money and you really don't want to take it apart if it's the last kind of thing that you were able to purchase. So it takes a lot of capital, both in cultural and financial terms. But I think as sort of a societal vision, it's a nice and good and important vision to make hacking more widely available. And the second question, what was the second question? Can you repeat the second? The second part was, how can we get those who do not understand what hacking is involved in it? That's also a good question. I think that's a question of communication and dissemination. It's a question of, I think, decriminalizing hacking. I think that's important. Making hacking again one of those, getting hacking away from this gray zone periphery thingy, providing, giving hacking a more positive image in the eyes of a broader audience, in the eyes of a society. But I think to decriminalize hacking is, there are many ways to do that. And as I've said, I think refreshing hacking as the new entrepreneurship I think won't do. So that's a difficult task. Okay, so we should have time for two short questions. So that brings on the left. You waited. Hi, thanks a lot for your perspective. My question is kind of like, I was wondering for a clarification on your position and where you see yourself as a researcher and a clarification on your critique in your analysis of like the HCI research of Lidner or Hartman. It seems like you're conflating hacker, as one might see here in crypto analysis, with hacker as they see in maker spaces. And maker spaces are very much a commercialized space and it seems like you're kind of brushing together this wide gamut of lots of things that can be considered hacking as something that is being covered by them. And then you're criticizing the academy of researchers in this space, but at the same time it seems to be the same place where you're publishing. And so how do you see your position in bettering that? And how do you see yourself as a social scientist or as a hacker or as a hacker encourager or as someone who is a part or within it? Yeah, thank you. That's an interesting, I think two questions. First is question about there's a diversity, certainly. There's making, do it yourself and hacking. And I don't think I'm conflating these things. Actually, I think I have a problem of putting them all into one bucket because if you put it, and that's often done in the literature, there's often this phrase, hacking and making practices. And I don't like that because if you put hacking and making together and then you'll often end up with this image of hacking is like making and making is this commercialized inventor thingy very close to Silicon Valley thinking and stuff. And I don't like that. I think there should be more diversity in the literature actually acknowledging these differences, that there is a difference between rather apolitical making practices and practices that concern something like security research. So I think we should keep these things a little more apart. Making is apolitical. Sorry. Not all of it, but there are some. So if you're talking about research papers here in terms of research, making is often portrayed as apolitical and the cases that they refer to are often sort of, I think, compared to hacking rather apolitical cases. And I don't think these things should be all put into one bucket. I think there should be more of a sensibility for the diversity of that. And your second question, how I see myself as a researcher and that I'm actually publishing in this field, I'm about to publish one paper in this field. It's not my main sort of research area. And I'm actually publishing in this field because I think there is a need for this field, HCI, to get more of this perspective that recognizes political sentiment. I think there is a lack of research on that. I think the research perspective so far is somewhat too narrow. Okay, unfortunately we're out of time and we need some time to prepare for the next talk. So thank you for being here and enjoy the rest of the Congress. Thanks again.