Episode 5 (2022) Maja Urbanczyk - Hacking decision-making

This episode brings us Maja Urbanczyk who is a PhD Candidate at
Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

On more and more occasions, political decision-makers decide over
software that is to be used by the public. In these situations,
decision-makers rely on expert knowledge and risk assessment, in
order to make informed decisions. For software decisions, the
needed expertise comes from IT and IT-security experts and
software developers also known as: hackers. The degree of trust
that IT expertise receives from political decision makers is
highly dependent on the contextual framing of the people holding
the expertise: IT-experts are regarded as significantly more
trustworthy than hackers by the public as well as politics. At
the same time, political decision-makers need to acquire trust
from the public. This is likely to be more complex when more
information and opinions on a topic are available. With
knowledgeable lay-persons posing themselves as experts within the
discussions, acknowledged experts being vilified as so called
black-hats (hackers with little ethics) and decision-makers
walking on a thin line between technocracy/scientism, the greater
good and their own interests. It is complex for anyone to decide,
which expertise to follow and whom to trust. In some cases this
even ends in expertise being disregarded or even discarded by
decision makers. Interestingly, it happens that they frame it
afterwards as not having known about a technologys downsides. In
order to understand the many layers of construction and
attribution of non-knowledge and ignorance, I deconstruct these
kinds of situations and what I call the network of trust in a
qualitative, discursive study. Deconstructing and analyzing
decision-making processes with a focus on the role of
non-knowledge and ignorance will help to shed more light on the
complexity of technological governance. Additionally, this novel
approach shows how ignorance is not only a reason for
subordination, but also potentially a source of power.

This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The
Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel
organized at the European Association for the study of Science
and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on
2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace
Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who
also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz
University of Technology for funding.