The article “Hacking the Label” was an interview with two hacktivists of different generations: Carmin Karasic and Micha Cárdenas, conducted by Leonie Maria Tanczer. It was published on Ada, a feminist journal associated with the University of Oregon. As a result, this article will mostly reach feminists who are seeking or have obtained higher education.
This article didn’t have a thesis, as it was a transcription of a conversation between the author and two hactivists. They each discussed their opinions on several topics related to hacking, equality, and political activism.
The conversation began by discussing how the interviewees were involved in Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group that hosts virtual sit-ins and protests used to slow down chosen websites as a method of civil disobedience. Cárdenas also participated in the creation of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which was used to help immigrants find water stations placed in the desert.
The transition the turned towards the meaning and purpose of hacking. Cárdenas said she had always founding hacking innately political. For her, changing someone else’s code was political because it meant taking the power away from someone else. Karasic thought that was interesting, as she had felt that hacking in itself was neutral until it was applied to something particular.
Karasic said that she found hacking liberating in that she was no longer being judged for her gender and race. In the IT world, she had often experienced sexism and racism. However, she found that prejudice was, for the most part, less evident in the hactivism world.
Cárdenas found some resistance to her projects based on her gender identity and sexual orientation. Additionally, she found that some hackers believed hacking was about advancing technology, not making political change. Both Cárdenas and Karasic agreed that most of the resistance came from governments who found their actions as threatening as terrorist threats. Cárdenas found her work was most slowed down when her actions were being investigated by the government.
The next focus of the conversation was the purpose of hacktivism. Karasic believed that hacktivism was useful because it was another platform for people to express their political views and attempt to enact change. Cárdenas stated that hacktivism had the most effect when used to interfere with infrastructure, affecting the networking systems of certain companies. Additionally, Cárdenas liked how, with hacktivism, people could create a space for themselves out of nothing, instead of protesting at existing spaces in the physical world.
Cárdenas and Karasic also discussed the nature of feminism and hacking. Karasic found herself reluctant to identify as a feminist because of the history of racism and discrimination in feminist movements. Instead, she views her work as a creation for all people. Cárdenas is interested in creating for a new type of feminism, focused on transgender women. She explains that this is necessary because many previous feminist works have expressed fear of transgender people.
Cárdenas and Karasic then discuss how social categories such as race and gender play into hacktivism. Cárdenas is regretful that the internet focuses more on identity than it did twenty years ago, when a person could go online completely anonymously. They then discuss how black transgender women face more violence than transgender women of other races. This leads into the next point about hacker groups focused on women and people of color. Karasic discusses that it can be difficult to come up with examples of these groups because most hacker groups try to avoid gathering a lot of attention. The article concludes with Cárdenas talking about how people of color don’t need to be “included” in hacktivism and technology. Instead, they must break away from the white ideas of technology and create in a way that is unique to them.
The purpose of the article to start a discussion on hactivism, the image of hackers, and the racial and gender inequalities of hackers/hactivists. I appreciated the discussion on how feminism has changed throughout its history and must work to become more inclusive towards transgender women and women of color. I also found it very interesting that Karasic said her work was not about accomplishing feminist goals, she was trying to better the world for all people.
What I struggle to understand is morality of hacktivism. If you disagree with someone, does that give you the right to tear down their creations? While this is not necessarily what Karasic and Cárdenas were doing, they did discuss other hackers who felt that the work they did was not destructive enough. I think the concept of the “sit-in” hacktivism is a good balance of peacefully expressing displeasure and frustration.
Great summing-up of the article! It’s interesting that your question about hacktivism relies on a definition of hacking that is different from the one that Karasic and Cárdenas were using – perhaps hacktivism is a differnet kind of hacking altogether? Yet the question of whether political change sometimes necessitates destructiveness is also one that has ongoing importance.