I heard about Luis Felipe R. Murillo’s Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures (Stanford University Press, 2025) on a Digital Labour list. I wasn’t able to attend the advertised talk but did pick up the book and read on the flight to Lisbon for a conference.
I have become slightly wary of Hackerspace books either through boosterism about the concept or the reverse. However Murillo’s take is delightfully nuanced and addresses some of the issues that they encountered in their ethnographic trips from San Francisco and Shenzen to Japan with the interspersed sections with particular hackers. It clearly becomes something greater for the studied people, but Murillo does not shy away from those who hang on or do not want to contribute.
I do like his exploration of common circuits, the “infrastructural conditions for informal learning based on open technologies” (p.3), that underpins the studies along with concepts of space and politics. That idea of sharing, teaching , and learning is a powerful triumvirate of concepts, but one that can be so easily abused. It began a thought process for the labs that I teach or those areas of learning with which i am involved.
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