Cyberfeminist + Hacker Coding Methods

GR - Graduate

The traditions of open-source culture rooted in hacker and cyberfeminist history encourage developers and users to fork public codes and contribute to building the internet that we face in our daily lives, either via modification or redistribution. The contemporary user experience of the internet primarily revolves around filling in the web infrastructures with personal content that preserves nothing but one's obsession with the self. That's because Silicon Valley Corporations, too, felt encouraged to join the open-source culture in the early 80s. They hired in-house developers to, once they fork the public codes, erase the author's credits and make the code private, so that they can sell it back to the users in the form of User Experience accompanied by their company logo. In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond claims that this was the time when the term "hacker" started having a bad connotation and referred to computer vandals -- an abuse that continues to this day in order to protect the corporate definition of an average user. Shortly after, the cyberfeminist self-published interfaces were escorted out of the internet's 'homepage' -- the Google Search. Since then, the distinction between developers and users remains sharp even though corporate developing methods never got divorced from the traditional open-source methods. With the rise of AI technologies, the historical reference to hackers and cyberfeminists is becoming more distant from the user who is now becoming a command developer, pulling the codes from the libraries curated by corporations.

In this course, we will explore the coding strategies from a hacker and a cyberfeminist perspective in order to develop and publish perfect forgeries of our favorite, institutional platforms and populate them with content that works in our favor, not theirs. You could be a US immigrant required to provide evidence to the state that you've achieved national/international recognition as part of your O-1B Visa -- in which case you'd make a forgery of an e-flux article page and populate it with the transcribed interview about your project which never happened. You could need to elevate your public persona -- in which case you'd make a forgery of Kim Kardashian's Instagram page and populate it with AI-generated images of you two hanging out together. You could have lost a court case for no reason -- in which case you'd re-open the case and build documents to object to the court decision. The options to make web forgeries work in our favor are endless.

To set the critical and theoretical ground, we will explore the key essays from the cyberfeminist and hacker history. Ideally, the websites made during the course will stay in the course and become a memory during which we reflect on contemporary forms of urgent publishing, state of the internet, and role of the user.