Hacktivists as Heirs of the New Left

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 11:03:10 +0000

The issue of Quaderni journal dedicated to hacking has just been published. In it, I published an article on hacker action repertoires and their connection to the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

Here is the abstract:

After recalling the connection between the pioneers of hacker activism and the anti-technocratic tactics employed by the New Left, this article proposes to interpret the wave of repression that hit hackers in the late 1980s as one of the power strategies designed to end the crisis of governmentality that began in the 1960s — a strategy that has since been reactivated whenever a “hacker front” has seemed on the verge of reconstituting itself. In doing so, it invites us to see this episode of securing cyberspace and repressing transgressive repertoires of action as a critical moment in the genealogy of authoritarian liberalism.

‘Direct Action Against Computerization (1960-1990)’

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 18:59:38 +0000

In the political genealogy of computers, and even more so in the dominant historiography of the Internet, [neo-Luddite] opposition has been largely overlooked.

Among the actors who contributed in one way or another to shaping these technologies and the discourse surrounding them before the 1990s, postwar humanist scientists and technophile hippies of the 1960s are often mentioned (see, for example, the works of Fred Turner). Together, they helped to remove computers from large bureaucracies by promoting smaller machines, designed as tools for individual liberation, with all the unthoughts that were theirs (and ours, one might say, since their hopes and utopias also greatly influenced the dominant discourse on the Internet…). In the history of the right to personal data protection, we also sometimes refer to computer scientists, researchers, and lawyers who, as early as the 1960s, alerted public opinion and legislators to the risks of these technologies for privacy.

Hacking on Félix Tréguer

Hacktivists as Heirs of the New Left

‘Direct Action Against Computerization (1960-1990)’