I’m deeply fascinated by counterculture(s) and their ability to rally like-minded people around a shared set of ideals. Growing up, I used to hang around with a bunch of misfits: a few punks, lots of nerds (the Warhammer kind, not the computer kind) a sprinkle of sound systems folk and, last but not least, skaters.
I never fully identified with any of these groups - but that’s another story.
My point is, counterculture is fascinating and, I argue, we don’t have enough of it. Yes, yes, the rise of fandoms is a thing, but my millennial self can’t stop itself from wandering what role a physical place should be playing in these increasingly digital culture spaces. To be clear, nothing wrong with connecting with people digitally - I’ve met and bonded with many over Discord, over at the Near Future Laboratory or La Locanda Dei GDR (my Italian D&D community that helped keeping me sane during the various lock downs - shout out to Froggy for organising many entertaining quests!).
Anyways, I find this tension between (counter)culture and place intriguing. And something I kept coming back to while reading the Cult of The Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn.
The cDc was (is?) the most famous hacking supergroup, until arguably Anonymous and LulzSec came by a decade or so ago. The cDc had their start with BBS (bulletin board systems, little more than a glorified bacheca where, if you knew where to look, you’d be able to download files from).
Various members came and went, on either side of the law. They were the first to push - nay, force - Big Tech to take security seriously, they helped establish the protocol for bug hunting and disclosing and were directly involved in establishing the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
But all of this came later. In the beginning, a bunch of teenagers with (mostly) angsty handles were writing t-files (shorthand for text files) and exploring phreaking - the precursor to hacking that involved, amongst other things, playing 2.6kHz whistles into telephone receivers to unlock long-distance calls.
As Menn often says in his book, the cDc was first and foremost a metaphysical place for publishing articles and generally non-conformist thinking. Their distance from the more, let’s say, grey side of the hacker scene left them generally untouched from the various waves of prosecution.
But all of that can be found in greater detail in the book, I won’t spoil too much. What did catch my eye, though, was a brief anectode in the first third of the book. The author mentioned how Bruce Sterling was clocked on the nose at one of the early hacker meetings.
Now, this might not mean much to you, but my synapses quite enjoyed that little sentence. Not because Sterling got punched, but because it kinda made it click in my mind.
For who does not know, Sterling is an author (mainly sci-fi, with a couple of nonfiction books sprinkled in there) who is best known to me - besides than for his book The Difference Engine, co-authored with William Gibson - for being a pioneer, at least linguistically, of Design Fiction.
He wrote, back in the day in Wired:
Design Fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.
Brief sidenote: diegetic prototypes (Kirby, 2010 & 2011) are objects that exist to encapsulate the ethos of a possible or alternative world. Think of Star Trek’s Tricorder or wands in Harry Potter. They deceptively seem like mundane objects - because they are. They exist in these alternative worlds, but, when isolated and brought back to our world and context, they are imbued with layers of meaning and symbolism that bring to life the alternative world (or future) they came from.
Diegetic prototypes, largely thanks to the work of Julian Bleecker and then Dunne & Raby (and many others) are central to design’s role in Futures work. They are, to paraphrase Julian, archaeological artifacts from the future. We can design the values, concerns and nuances of possible futures into these objects, and “bring them back” to examine them, debate and discuss whether the future they come from suits our values.
I love the idea. But, at the same time, I’ve always been relatively reticent to design diegetic prototypes. In fact, my PhD’s starting point is a lukewarm critique of the whole idea.
Yes, we should design objects and experiences showing how possible futures might look. Yes, we should have nuanced conversations about these futures - with the broadest set of folks as possible.
But I also believe that diegetic prototypes, given that they come from a long tradition in filmmaking, they tend to target only the sense of sight. I can totally recall the shape of a tricorder. But I don’t exactly know how it feels. Is it heavy, or made out of some space-grade polymer? Does it faintly smell of hand sanitiser? Are those buttons squishy or tactile switches รก la mechanical keyboard?
Also, we all know that tricorders are works of fiction. They suspend the disbilief for a brief while, but with a flick of the actor’s wrist they’re back in the pocket. This is all good when in the context of a tv series or a movie. But more often than not Design Futures operates in workshops and boardrooms. We, as practitioners, cannot run away from the question: How does it work?
For some time, I was happy to simply reply “it doesn’t work, it’s a provocation”. But the nagging feeling kept coming back. Over time, I realised that a lot can be done with relatively simple means, so there is really no excuse for a diegetic prototype not to be a functioning piece. And here I close the circle with the cDc: we - as in, Design Futures practitioners - should learn more from hackers. Less lip service, more tinkering.