Journal of Peer Production, No. 2: Bio/Hardware Hacking (2012)

During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software and computers. This is changing with the surge of synthetic biology, fablabs and hackerspaces, all of which suggests the wider diffusion of hacking practices and hacker politics. Hardware development and biological science are about to be infused with the same kind of contestations and contradictions that already characterize software hacking. This is because hackers are not simply innovating new technology, but are at the same time discovering new ways of engaging with the world. The issue highlights how hacking practices are inscribed in and shaped by the cultural and political contexts in which the hackers find themselves, with implications for the ways hacker politics are framed.

Contributions by Denisa Kera, Maxigas, Sara Tocchetti, Paolo Magaudda, Morgan Meyer, Mitch Altman

Curated by Alessandro Delfanti, Johan Söderberg
Published in July 2012
ISSN 2213-5316

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Eduardo Molinari: Walking Archives: The Soy Children (2012)

Who are children of genetically modified soy production? What disowned bastards are produced by the hybridization of agri-business, biotech, capital, and culture?

To answer these questions the Archivo Caminante (Walking Archive) embarks on a trip through the opaque and strange world of genetically modified soya plants in Argentina in search of its inhabitants, forms and structures, languages and narratives: the forces that swirl around the soya rhizome. In the style of Gulliver’s Travels it makes visible some of the routes in the soya chain giving shape to a new international division of labor food policy in global semiocapitalism.

More than 50% of the cultivated lands in Argentina are for soya production, with 90% of that area covered by Monsanto products and representatives. This agrarian system and its results are only possible using Roundup herbicide, the brand name of Monsanto’s glyphosate. The rhizome formed by soya production dives deep into the Argentine society: it organizes new political alliances, and, above all, modifies the social and cultural structure of the country. Is there a transgenic culture inside semiocapitalism? Does the soyazation process modify culture and society, or is it the other way around, and soyazation is only possible in a transgenic culture?

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, Spring 2012
ISBN 978-1-57027-244-8
82 pages

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Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White (eds.): Race After the Internet (2011)

“In Race After the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White bring together a collection of interdisciplinary essays exploring the complex role that digital media technologies play in shaping our ideas about race. Contributors interrogate changing ideas of race within the context of an increasingly digitally mediatized cultural and informational landscape. Using social scientific, rhetorical, textual, and ethnographic approaches, these essays show how new and old styles of race as code, interaction, and image are played out within digital networks of power and privilege.

Race After the Internet includes essays on the shifting terrain of racial identity and its connections to social media technologies like Facebook and MySpace, popular online games like World of Warcraft, YouTube and viral video, WiFi infrastructure, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, genetic ancestry testing, and DNA databases in health and law enforcement. Contributors also investigate the ways in which racial profiling and a culture of racialized surveillance arise from the confluence of digital data and rapid developments in biotechnology. This collection aims to broaden the definition of the “digital divide” in order to convey a more nuanced understanding of access, usage, meaning, participation, and production of digital media technology in light of racial inequality.”

Contributors: danah boyd, Peter Chow-White, Wendy Chun, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Troy Duster, Anna Everett, Rayvon Fouché, Alexander Galloway, Oscar Gandy, Eszter Hargittai, Jeong Won Hwang, Curtis Marez, Tara McPherson, Alondra Nelson, Christian Sandvig, Ernest Wilson.

Publisher Taylor and Francis, 2011
ISBN 0415802369, 9780415802369
352 pages

Review: Patti (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2012).

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