Abstract: The freedom of research is a cornerstone of our civilisation; in many ways it can even be seen as a human right. However, freedom of research does not mean the liberty to cheat. Cheating in science – deliberate falsification of evidence to support a hypothesis – is not only academic misconduct; it is also a crime against society and the…[Read more]

Short description (video lecture) of what you can do, when you “do chresiology”, part 2 (slides).

Book review of Low Power to the People

Review of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism

The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. In Low Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the…[Read more]

Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates…[Read more]

This chapter examines how activist ideals manifest in the realm of practice, emphasizing the reality of technical expertise running afoul of participatory goals in the practice of radio activism. A major plank of the radio activists’ work was the promotion of technical participation to novices through various activities such as radio s…[Read more]

Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy…[Read more]

This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article arg…[Read more]

This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and e…[Read more]

This paper examines imaginaries of work and labor in “open technology” projects (especially open source software and hackerspaces), based on ethnographic research in North America. It zeroes in on “diversity initiatives” within open technology projects. These initiatives are important because they expose many of the assumptions and tension…[Read more]