[Linganth] Luis Felipe Murillo on his book, Common Circuits

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Luis Felipe Murillo answers Biella Coleman's questions
about his new book, *Common Circuits.*

www.campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: 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.
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