Hacking e práticas de liberdade: conspirando com hackers outros mundos

Abstract

This thesis aims at thinking/discussing/tensioning our ordinary way of relating with the technical objects, conspiring to other types of relations with the hackers in order to broaden our degree of freedom. More than the hackers themselves, there is the interest for other possible worlds they carry around, the practices of freedom they perform, allowing us to participate in other types of relations with knowledge and the ruling power. To achieve this, we didn’t only describe some hacks; but, above all, we also operated in the sense of opening technical objects which, in general, we see as black boxes. The thesis is composed by three parts; in the first one, having Gilbert Simondon as a privileged interlocutor, we addressed some positions that we can occupy in the encounters with the technical objects (as an inventor, a producer, a consumer, a user, and so on), highlighting that hacking appears as an inventive movement whereby the individual takes back the object virtualities to update them. We do not only approach our way of relating with the tangible technical objects, but also with a very special type of objects, which are the softwares, calling into question their opening/closing. In the second part, we dwelled on thinking and discussing our encounters with the nets of heterogeneous technical objects that participate of different surveillance strategies and conduct of conducts. Especially with Antoinette Rouvroy, we addressed two phenomena which have been referred by the terms Internet of Things and Big Data, highlighting the ubiquity of the technical objects, the massive data collection – not rare in real time – and the profile production through which is operated by what the author calls “algorithmic governmentality”. With the hackers’ practices, going from anonymity practices to the creation and provision of programs and their source code, we aim at presenting other forms of composition that can contribute, so we can exercise practices of freedom. Lastly, in the third and final part, we dedicated ourselves to address the creation of new worlds. To achieve this, we took as basis the thoughts of Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri, we argued about the fights over the common (against its expropriation, for its collaborative production and for ways of dealing with it). Also, employing a more philosophical background, we resumed the creation of new worlds through hacking as an inventive act, considering it under the views of Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Lévy. Thus, by means of countless encounters – with objects, with algorithms, with hackers, with philosophers, with activists, etc. – we emphasize, throughout this thesis, the urgency of rethinking the way we relate with the technical objects.