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Utopian Hacks - Limn

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In a lab in Oakland a group of elite, yet heterodox engineers are trying to re-imagine what computers can and should ‘do.’ It is here, in this lab in Silicon Valley (or in close proximity to Silicon Valley, depending where you draw its boundaries), that I base my ongoing ethnography. The group, clustered around an engineer named Bret Victor, is part of YC Research’s Human Advancement Research Community (HARC), an industry-financed research lab devoted to open and foundational research. “Hacking” is for the members of this group, just as it is for many other engineers, at best a word for tentative work (as in: “This is just a hack”) or for using technologies for other purposes than those originally intended for them. It can also be a derogatory term for not thinking through the consequences of the accumulation of amateurish, low-quality tech development. Thus: when the engineers I research describe their work, “hacking” would not be one of the key terms they would choose. However, I wa

Utopian Hacks - Limn Follow Us FB X --> Utopian Hacks Not all engineers create equally. Götz Bachmann takes us inside the labs of "radical engineers" and the starkly different futures they imagine for us. Götz Bachmann In a lab in Oakland a group of elite, yet heterodox engineers are trying to re-imagine what computers can and should ‘do.’ It is here, in this lab in Silicon Valley (or in close proximity to Silicon Valley, depending where you draw its boundaries), that I base my ongoing ethnography. The group, clustered around an engineer named Bret Victor, is part of YC Research’s Human Advanc

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