Hacking The Future
The term “hacking” has been attached with bad and evil connotations for a long time by the public. However, we see a turn in the situation that artists and engineers are not only redefining technology and social impact of technology but also redefining the meaning of “hacking” itself. “Hacking the future” enables us to think about the invisible effects that our advancement in technology has on the earth and society overall and about the boundaries that we can create or destroy using such technologies for a better future.
We have been witnessing a boom of internet-based technologies since the turn of the millennium. This new platform brought huge changes to our social organization since that. It has became a boundary object with a global scale and massive flexibility. The “Hacking the Future” panel focus on how technology has changed our way of thinking the world.
The first guest panelist is Joana Moll with her project “DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST” and “CO2GLE” . Both of them focus on the invisible fact that the fancy term “cloud computation” is just another resource consuming and pollution creating process. She clarify how our data are store in huge databases in remote areas around the world. She stressed the fact that maintaining the internet’s normal function is taking up a great part of the world energy and creating a huge amount of carbon dioxide emission. It’s impressing of how much warm house gas google search engine is emitting right now.
Then Ben Grosser discussed the impact of metrics towards our social media behavior. He came up with the process of “decomposing” social media with “demetricator” Chrome extension that hides the metrics on social medias like facebook and twitter and “textbook” extension to remove images from the webpage to decompose the effect of image in the social media on how we communicate. The “demtricator” has been succeeded in proving that hiding those like, comments, and share figures could lead to less compulsive behavior. The “textbook” tackles the problem that emotion-packed pics were incredibly effective in the 2016 election as they can inflict one’s idea towards a people or a subject. Also he showed his project “Go Rando” which can confuse the recommendation algorithm and make sure that your social media is not getting manipulated by the providers.
Lastly, Lauren McCarthy how the “follower” culture affects our relationship in the real world. She introduced her project “Crowd Pilot”, “Followers”, and “Lauren”. “Crowd Pilot” is a dating experiment she conducted where she was inspired by the Amazon Mechanical Turk and create an online group who would guide her behavior on the date. From this study, she pondered on the idea of self-identity and how we perceive ourselves after “following” the actions of someone else. These ideas also was combined in her “Lauren” project that think of our relationships with smart home technology and out redefined role in our home.
The internet is a boundary object of huge scale. It has created all kinds of groups we have never seen before. Three genres of hackers was emerging as the internet merged with our social organization. Online racism and the GIFT theory also was introduced as a side effect on speech freedom online. We’re not only benefiting from the advance of technology. We should also begin to consider the side effect of the technologies.
