Alienation by Design

Who controls our data and why does it matter? Longstanding concerns from hacker culture and activist communities are gaining renewed urgency. From governmental dependency on Microsoft systems and our university’s reliance on Google, to data breaches in medical information: there seems to be a breaking point in our concerns with the issues of data safety, privacy and trust. 
Over the past two decades, decisions about our digital reality, such as the centralization of services, proprietary standards, and opaque data flows, have materialized ideological assumptions about efficiency, scale, and trust into the architecture of our digital infrastructures. Today, these assumptions are increasingly being questioned, as individuals, institutions, and even nation-states confront the consequences of outsourcing core functions to a handful of global tech providers.

Maxigas will discuss how issues like data sovereignty, surveillance, and digital dependency are not just technical challenges, but political and social ones. We’ll also ask: do we truly need ‘high tech’ to meet our everyday needs, or do we simply need  better, more accountable tech?

Maxigas is Assistant Professor of Computational Methods for Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University and co-Principal Investigator with the critical infrastructure lab. He is the co-author of Resistance to the Current: The Dialectics of Hacking, a theoretical driven collection of case studies on the politics of informational capitalism, accounting for the long-term trajectory of hacker cultures.