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Episode 5 (2022) Maja Urbanczyk - Hacking decision-making

Episode 5 (2022) Maja Urbanczyk - Hacking decision-making

FromHacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast


Episode 5 (2022) Maja Urbanczyk - Hacking decision-making

FromHacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast

ratings:
Length:
15 minutes
Released:
Oct 4, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

This episode brings us Maja Urbanczyk who is a PhD Candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.On more and more occasions, political decision-makers decide over software that is to be used by the public. In these situations, decision-makers rely on expert knowledge and risk assessment, in order to make informed decisions. For software decisions, the needed expertise comes from IT and IT-security experts and software developers also known as: hackers. The degree of trust that IT expertise receives from political decision makers is highly dependent on the contextual framing of the people holding the expertise: IT-experts are regarded as significantly more trustworthy than hackers by the public as well as politics. At the same time, political decision-makers need to acquire trust from the public. This is likely to be more complex when more information and opinions on a topic are available. With knowledgeable lay-persons posing themselves as experts within the discussions, acknowledged experts being vilified as so called black-hats (hackers with little ethics) and decision-makers walking on a thin line between technocracy/scientism, the greater good and their own interests. It is complex for anyone to decide, which expertise to follow and whom to trust. In some cases this even ends in expertise being disregarded or even discarded by decision makers. Interestingly, it happens that they frame it afterwards as not having known about a technologys downsides. In order to understand the many layers of construction and attribution of non-knowledge and ignorance, I deconstruct these kinds of situations and what I call the network of trust in a qualitative, discursive study. Deconstructing and analyzing decision-making processes with a focus on the role of non-knowledge and ignorance will help to shed more light on the complexity of technological governance. Additionally, this novel approach shows how ignorance is not only a reason for subordination, but also potentially a source of power.This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.
Released:
Oct 4, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (16)

As Covid-19 turned most conferences virtual, so to combat Zoom-fatigue, at 4S/EASST 2020 we decided to try another format and turn a conference session into a podcast. Among hundreds of panels, papers and sessions, our panels rounded up all sorts of researchers who study what it is to be a hacker, and what hacking, programming, tinkering and working with computers is all about. The first series comes to you from the 2020 joint Society for Social Studies of Science/European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference (4S/EASST), titled "Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds" which took place in "virtual Prague" from August 18th-21st. The second series comes to you from EASST 2022 titled "The Politics of Technoscientific Futures" and held in Madrid 2022-07-06 to 2022-07-09. Our panel was titled "Hacking Everything. The cultures and politics of hackers and software workers". The hosts are Paula Bialski, who is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Gallen, Andreas Bischof who is a Research Group Leader at Chemnitz University of Technology, and Mace Ojala, a lecturer at the IT University of Copenhagen. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records. The theme track of first series is "Rocky" by Paula & Karol. Heights Beats produced the theme track of the second series. Funding for the editing of this first series comes from University of St. Gallen, the second from Chemnitz University of Technology.