You are invited to a lecture by Eleanor Saitta on Power and Infrastructure, Wednesday 9 October, 16:00 – 18:00 at WSA, Lecture Theatre B, Level 2, Eastside Building.
Overview
Infrastructure has always been a way of projecting power into the world, from Roman roads to the Chinese imperial currency system. In the network age, infrastructure is increasingly taking things that were previously human behavior and moving them into formal systems, in what we call soft infrastructure. Infrastructure is especially interesting as a site for activist resistance to oppressive power structures because it is both a site of the intersection of monetary power and state-violence power and a tool for force multiplication. In this talk, I’ll explore the intersections between money, power, the rule of law, violence, infrastructure, and the revolution of the tool-makers.
Biography
Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex, transdisciplinary systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Among other things, Eleanor is a co-founder of the Trike project (http://octotrike.org) and the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (http://const.is), Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute (http://immi.is), Principal Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project (http://openitp.org), a member of the advisory board at Geeks Without Bounds (http://gwob.org), a contributor to the Briar project (http://briar.sf.net), and a Senior Security Associate with Stach & Liu (http://stachliu.com). Eleanor is a regular speaker at conferences including the CCC Congress, SigInt, Uncivilization, ToorCon, Knutepunk, and Arse Elektronika. She is nomadic, living mostly in airports and occasionally in New York, London, Stockholm, and Berlin. She can be found at http://dymaxion.org and on Twitter as @dymaxion.