Hacking

What is hacking, exactly, and who practices it? Are hackers merely those who “enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software and/or hardware” (Wikipedia 2025), or is there something more going on here? The hacking thread invites a reclamation of hacking in times of polycrisis. From commoning, repair and debugging to making, unmaking and decomposing, the DIY and DIT (Do-It-Together) legacies of hacker practices have long encouraged public experimentation with alternative sociotechnical futures. This rich diversity of hacker cultures across the globe has too often been omitted from mainstream technomyths of digital progress, however, which orient hacking around the neoliberal innovation context of Silicon Valley tech moguls (Braybrooke & Jordan 2017; Braybrooke & Smith 2021). Hacker communities across the globe continue to build worlds, however, and it’s time to dig in.