[Air-L] Book Talk: Common Circuits, with Luis Felipe Murillo (online)

[Rafael Do Nascimento Grohmann]

Hi AoIR!

DigiLabour invites you to a book talk with Luis Felipe R. Murillo<https://lfrmurillo.online/> <https://lfrmurillo.online/> (University of Notre Dame) on Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures<https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/common-circuits> (Stanford University Press) to be held on May 29 at 5PM ET.

Where: DigiLabour YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0EPNV9QN0w

About the book
How hackers facilitate community technology projects that counter the monoculture of "big tech" and point us to brighter, innovative horizons. A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley "big tech" and venture capital firms. Yet very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, Common Circuits explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent, but often invisible, alternatives to the dominant technology industry. In what ways have hackers challenged corporate projects of digital development? How do hacker collectives prefigure more just technological futures through community projects? Luis Felipe R. Murillo responds to these urgent questions with an analysis of the hard challenges of collaborative, autonomous community-making through technical objects conceived by hackers as convivial, shared technologies. Through rich explorations of hacker space histories and biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social and technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects such as anonymity and privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; and small-scale open hardware fabrication for the purposes of technological autonomy. Murillo shows how hacker collectives point us toward brighter technological futures—a renewal of the "digital commons"—where computing projects are constantly being repurposed for the common good.

Author
Luis Felipe R. Murillo is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, whose work is dedicated to the study of computing from an anthropological perspective. Across several research projects within and beyond the Global North, his work investigates how social movements and technoscientific experts design and implement common technologies as responses to pressing social, technical, and environmental concerns.

See you there!

best,

Rafael



--

dr. Rafael Grohmann

Assistant Professor of Media Studies

Department of Arts, Culture and Media<https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/rafael-grohmann>

Faculty of Information<https://ischool.utoronto.ca/profile/rafael-grohmann/>

University of Toronto

Leader, DigiLabour<https://digilabour.com.br/>
Research Associate, University of Oxford<https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/rafael-grohmann/>

Founding Editor, Platforms & Society<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/PNS>

Principal Investigator, Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP)<https://digilabour.com.br/worker-owned-intersectional-platforms-woip/>

Co-Lead, Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF)<https://criticaldigitalmethods.ca/creative-labour-critical-futures/>


2024-2025 Faculty Fellow,  Queer and Trans Research Lab, Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto<https://sds.utoronto.ca/qtrl-cohort-2024-25/>