Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock

Author:Sasha Costanza-Chock [Costanza-Chock, Sasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Hacking the Hurricane? Hackathons, DiscoTechs, Convergence Spaces, and Other Design Events

So far, this chapter has focused on ongoing design sites like hacklabs, makerspaces, and fablabs. Another key type of design site can be found in temporary events like hackathons and design jams. A hackathon is “an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development collaborate intensively over a short period of time on software projects.”86 The mythology of hackathons is perhaps best expressed in the 2010 film The Social Network. In one scene, a young Mark Zuckerberg presides over what is essentially a frat party, but with computers. Drunken (white, cisgender, male) college student developers gather in a dark basement, bingeing on beer and pizza, competing to solve a coding challenge and thereby win employment at the then-nascent social network site TheFaceBook.com. Many of the dynamics at play in semi-permanent sites like hacklabs also operate, sometimes with condensed intensity, in more temporary or pop-up design sites like hackathons.87

Hackathons have become increasingly popular both in the private sector and under the auspices of the neoliberal state. They are understood by corporate managers as potentially effective ways to identify new talent, and therefore as a possible mechanism in the tech sector hiring pipeline. In “Hackathons as Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the ‘New’ Economy,” sociologists Sharon Zukin and Max Papadantonakis draw from their ethnography of seven New York City hackathons to provide a withering critique: “Hackathons, time-bounded events where participants write computer code and build apps, have become a popular means of socializing tech students and workers to produce ‘innovation’ despite little promise of material reward … [Hackathons] reshape unpaid and precarious work as an extraordinary opportunity, a ritual of ecstatic labor, and a collective imaginary for fictional expectations of innovation that benefits all, a powerful strategy for manufacturing workers’ consent in the ‘new’ economy.”88 In short, from a managerial perspective, hackathons provide excellent opportunities for the extraction of free labor. This helps explain the increasing popularity of hackathons within the regular practices of technology firms.89 As evident in figure 4.3, hackathons have become increasingly popular over the last decade. The state has also adopted hackathons at multiple levels, from city halls to the White House. Symbolically, a government agency running a hackathon signals an embrace of technology, as well as of the solutionist framework of civic technology. Some government actors may cynically organize these events as (primarily) a media spectacle. Others are truly excited by the possibilities of civic tech and its instantiation in the event form of a hackathon.

Many of these same dynamics are at work in the nonprofit sector and in “civic hackathons.” On the one hand, nonprofit and civic hackathons are less focused on the creation of profitable new firms; instead, they typically seek to produce social, environmental, or civic innovations. On the other, if anything, this sector is more solutionist than the private sector. The assumption that a “hackathon for good” will be successful if it produces a new app that can help “solve” a social problem runs deep.

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