My talk "Solarpunk, cyberpunk and popculture: Technological narratives tl;dr" was accepted at the re:publica conference happening this May 6-8 in Berlin!

https://19.re-publica.com/en/session/solarpunk-cyberpunk-popculture-technological-narratives-tldr

#Solarpunk #technology #HackerNarratives #republica #rp19

https://alxd.org/hackers-in-popular-culture-the-curse-of-being-an-eternal-rebel.html

A new blogpost on #HackerNarratives

From my blogpost on hackers in popular culture:

Seeing "computeromancy" as an aesthetics makes the true hacking much more tame and hackers' criticism of our capitalist culture - toothless. They're dangerous because they're skilled / criminals / geniuses, not because they see more than us or raise valid points against how we use technology.

#HackerNarratives

Since the whole #HackerNarratives blogpost would be unseemly long, I decided to publish the first chapter - on popculture:

https://alxd.org/how-elon-musk-takes-wikipedias-place.html

"For years, we've been accepting the capitalistic and individualistic narratives on technology, painting an invention as a work of a single, exceptional individual - not years of work of the whole scientific community or a group of engineers."

#popculture #freesoftware

@stman thank you for sharing that! I will gladly read it :)

My own plan is to deal with the burnout, write my little #HackerNarratives manifesto and then go full out with Glider stories, and lots and lots of philosophy in them. I think you'll really like the first one!

#HackerNarratives :

"Thus the emergent tech industry’s definition of ‘hacking’ as quirky-but-edgy innovation by optimistic entrepreneurs with a love of getting things done. Nothing sinister about it: it’s just on-the-fly problem-solving for profit. This gentrified pitch is not just a cool personal narrative. It’s also a useful business construct, helping the tech industry to distinguish itself from the aggressive squares of Wall Street, competing for the same pool of new graduates."

A divinely good article on #HackerNarratives :

"In a sense, then, computers were the making of the hacker, at least as a popular cultural image. But they were also its undoing. If the popular imagination hadn’t chained the hacker figure so forcefully to IT, it’s hard to believe it ever would have been demonised in the way it has been, or that it could have been so effectively defanged."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos

"But I'd caution against a message of despair because that doesn't motivate anyone to do better. Also things may not be as hopeless as they appear and doomy stuff can be quite demoralizing."

https://blog.freedombone.net/unmotivated-by-doom

Some arguments for very real cases in #HackerNarratives

@skynebula @laemeur I shall :) Check out #GliderInk from time to time.

But first, the #HackerNarratives blogpost!

I love the fact that even Gaza has https://gazaskygeeks.com/ , but I'd love for it to be a community-driven hackerspace, not a startup accelerator.

Do we really want to promote "entrepreneurship" instead of sustainable infrastructures in Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Nepal? Places being already re-colonized by corporations taking over the universities and kicking out open source from the curriculums?

#HackerNarratives

Even making, a middle ground between the hackers and the general public is using very entrepreneur-ed language, leading people to think in terms of companies and growth hacking instead of communities and infrastructure. With the MakerFaires all over the world, how will they change the local cultures, which don't have tech independence traditions as strong as Germany? Will they have any other way to perceive modern technology than the startups, Blockchain and phone apps?

#HackerNarratives

@djsumdog that's a price of a non-curated timeline. We could create several mechanisms to counter that, but the simplest is to relay on tags. For each topics I want to talk about I create one. You can check my novel ideas at #GliderInk and calls for hacker culture narratives under #HackerNarratives . That helps a little.

Only by providing a counter-narrative, which also deals with the constant burning future shock people are feeling - we can make other perspectives and futures possible.

If you won't create a narrative explaining why you did something, someone else will supply theirs.

No matter how good the software created by the engineers is, no matter how much work the activists put in, the public needs storytellers to tell them why it's important as well.

#HackerNarratives

Some ideas from the #HackerNarratives blogpost I'm writing:

#cyberpunk doesn't describe a state of the world, but is a perspective which we can take to perceive the reality.

Cyberpunk and technical dystopias started out as warnings, but got embraced because of a constant future shock the society is feeling.

Now it's easier to accept huge megacorporations and surveillance because _we know them_ from the culture and stories, while we see no realistic alternatives.