Abstract
This chapter explores hacking as a mode of resilience, which calls into being a new approach to international policy practice, where awareness of embedded relationships enables the empowerment of communities, not merely to respond to disasters but to creatively engage with emerging problems or threats. This approach is often methodologically contraposed to a failed or failing modernist discourse of security, which assumed that security threats could be ‘solved,’ ‘prevented’ or ‘removed’ through technological or engineering approaches. Hacking as a methodology thus becomes less dependent on its etymological roots in computing technology and becomes a transformative process of building engaged communities through experimentation and grasping momentary and fluid connections and inter-relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Further information about the work of PetaJakarta can be found here: https://petajakarta.org/banjir/en/; the Jakarta Open Street Map Project here: http://www.gfdrr.org/sites/gfdrr/files/publication/Pillar_1_Using_Participatory_Mapping_for_Disaster_Preparedness_in_Jakarta_OSM.pdf; and the United Nations Global Pulse, Jakarta Pulse Lab, here: http://www.unglobalpulse.org/jakarta.
- 2.
In this regard, the implications of the Anthropocene accord closely with perspectives forwarded by a wide range of critical theorists associated with posthuman, new materialist and speculative realist approaches among others (for example, Braidotti 2013; DeLanda 2006; Coole and Frost 2010; Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Connolly 2013; Harman 2010).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
In the ‘non-philosophical’ method of Laruelle, information or data that is relevant bears no necessary relation to the essence of the problem or threat but is a direct form, trace or sign of its appearance. This ‘clone’ world does not provide representational knowledge of the problem or threat in-itself but enables us to orientate ourselves towards it: to pay attention to it.
- 6.
These sensibilities also shape a lot of the conceptual arts, as avant-garde ‘uncreative writer’ Kenneth Goldsmith puts it “context is the new content” (see Wilkinson 2015).
- 7.
This framing is dominant in the critical academic literature. As Read et al. note (2016: 13): “Ultimately we conclude that the new aspiration towards hubristic big data processing is just another step in the same modernist process of the production of statistical truth.”
- 8.
On problems of classification, see, for example, Bowker 2000.
- 9.
For a good history of cybernetic or relational approaches that exceed the subjective desires of the scientific researchers that initiated them, see Pickering 2010. Mixed ontologies therefore are not uncommon in the more ‘hands on’ world of scientific and policy experimentation, which is one of the reasons this article seeks to draw on real world engagements rather than sticking to the purely conceptual realm.
- 10.
PetaJakarta is a research project focused on the use of social media for the real time mapping of flooding in Jakarta (led by the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong in collaboration with the Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta) and Twitter Inc.), see Holderness and Turpin 2015 for an assessment of the Joint Pilot Study for the project, operationally active from December 2014 to March 2015.
- 11.
As Bruno Latour might state, the community has enlarged its ‘common world’ by recognising its interdependency with previously ignored agencies, “bringing nonhumans and the demos into the expanded collective” (2004, p. 215).
- 12.
CogniCity information is available here: http://cognicity.info/cognicity/.
- 13.
The building of flood walls and levees is quite possibly the least viable option in the epoch of the Anthropocene. Kathleen Tierney, for example, quotes Gerald Galloway, chair of the presidential committee report on the 1993 Mississippi River floods as stating “there are only two kinds of levees: those that have failed and those that will fail” (2014, p. 59). It is a classic example of what the Stockholm Resilience Centre (2014) terms ‘coercive resilience,’ tackling symptoms rather than the problem and therefore storing up greater problems for the future.
- 14.
See, for example, LifeHack.org: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/100-life-hacks-that-make-life-easier.html.
- 15.
Jean Baudrillard (1994) argues the ‘hyperreal’ exists independently when signs and signals no longer need to be related to (a modernist representation of) reality.
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Chandler, D. (2019). Building Community Resilience in the Anthropocene: A Study of International Policy Experiments with Digital Technology in Jakarta. In: Rampp, B., Endreß, M., Naumann, M. (eds) Resilience in Social, Cultural and Political Spheres. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-15329-8_11
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