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Guest Talk w/ Christina Dunbar-Hester | Directing Signals: Of Politics and Protocols

Talk Christina Dunbar-Hester
researcher practitioner
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Christina Dunbar-Hester (USC, Science and Technology Studies) draws on her three books—Low Power to the People, Hacking Diversity, and Oil Beach—to examine protocols as 'terms of relating' that both open up new associations and enforce control, using Langdon Winner's framework that technologies encode order and politics. She traces this through 1990s-2000s pirate/low-power FM radio activism and community Wi-Fi ('cantennas'), gender exclusion and feminist server/code-of-conduct interventions in FLOSS communities, and the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach as a site where standardized shipping protocols produce 'envirotechnical' dependencies and violence (pollution, whale strikes) hidden behind frictionless-flow imagery. She closes by distinguishing protocols (which create hard material/standardized handoff points) from merely 'culturally disciplining' practices like crypto-dancing or feminist server principles, and argues analysts must attend to both material and ideational levels of protocols, their recurring maintenance needs, and how local changes do or don't scale to systemic ones.

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cultural-discipline-vs-hard-coded-protocol envirotechnical-infrastructure-and-maintenance feminist-servers-and-codes-of-conduct-in-floss-communities governance guest-talks low-power-fm-radio-activism-and-community-wifi protocol-watching protocols protocols-as-terms-of-relating-opening-vs-control