Disobedient Electronics: Protest

Garnet Hertz

Disobedient Electronics: Protest (2017) is a limited edition publishing project produced by Garnet Hertz that highlights confrontational work from industrial designers, electronic artists, hackers and makers. The project features work from 10 countries that disobey conventions, especially projects that highlight injustices, discrimination or abuses of power. Topics include the wage gap between women and men, the objectification of women’s bodies, gender stereotypes, wearable electronics as a form of protest, robotic forms of protest, counter-government-surveillance and privacy tools, and devices designed to improve an understanding of climate change. Approximately half of the 25 contributors are academics, while the other half are from the broader maker, tech and art communities.

The projects in the collection are diverse, including Abortion Drone by Women on Waves that uses consumer-grade quadcopters to deliver morning-after pills to women in regions where abortion is illegal. Other sections highlight technologies designed to aid protesters, including Pedro Olivera and Xuedi Chen’s ‘Backslash’ series of devices, including an emergency personal router and a device to back up your cameraphone photos in case of police confrontation. Historical projects are also published, including the Barbie Liberation Organization’s instruction manual from 1993 for switching the electronic voiceboxes between Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, a gender-swapping act that succinctly highlights the stereotypes promoted by toymakers.

The call for submissions for the project was drafted the day after the 2016 U.S. election, partially as a response to the concept of “post-truth”: ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. While facts still matter, the larger issue is that persuasion and creative communication is necessary. In some ways, progressive dialogue has stagnated in its own Facebook filter bubble and needs to refocus with its roots in direct action.

Industrial design - and the creation of experimental electronic objects - is a useful tool to communicate complex issues, like the wage gap between women and men, homophobia, racism, surveillance and privacy, human rights, economic disparity, climate change or other topics. This directly borrows from a host of approaches, including DiSalvo’s concept of Adversarial Design, Oroza’s Technological Disobedience, Sengers’ Reflective Design, Ratto’s Critical Making, Wodiczko’s Interrogative Design, Lozano-Hemmer’s Perversion of Technological Correctness, Critical Art Ensemble’s approach to Tactical Media, or Flood & Grindon’s Disobedient Objects. This project strives to take a more confrontational ‘Yes Men’ attitude than a clinical ‘Dunne & Raby’ approach. Although affirmative design must be critically questioned, the larger issues of human rights, racism, sexism, pollution, etc. are more pressing topics in 2017. Speculative futures can be useful conceptual tools but are whimsical compared to the urgency of the present.

The project also questions standard models of academic publishing. As an experiment in research dissemination, three hundred handmade copies were produced and disseminated for free to targeted researchers – an approach also taken in ‘Critical Making’ (Hertz, 2012). This publishing process works by releasing the material exclusively as a physical and handmade book and disseminating it for free to those interested enough in the topic to offer some form of project contribution. Contributions include using the book as a part of an academic curriculum, including the book in an exhibition, adding it to a library, or writing critical responses to the book. This “contributionware” approach focuses on making higher quality connections with fewer individuals.

This method functions around three ideas: 1. scholars still adore hardcopy books, and most academic publications are lacklustre as physical artefacts, 2. publishing does not need to have a large audience to have significant impact: Google Scholar, for example, considers publications to be notable if cited at least ten times, and 3. after a period – six months, for example – the content can be freely released as a PDF or EPUB to help the wider dissemination of the work.

In conclusion, this project aims to point out that:

1. Building electronic objects can be an effective form of social argument or political protest.

2. DIY, maker culture and local artisanal productions can have strong nationalist and protectionist components to them – in some senses populism can be seen as the rise of the DIY non-expert.

3. Critical and Speculative Design (Dunne & Raby) are productive approaches to question industrial design, but perhaps not adversarial enough to reply to contemporary populist right-wing movements (Brexit, Trump & Le Pen). Questions like “Is it moral to punch Nazis in the face?” should be answered with smart alternatives to violence that are provocative pieces of direct action.

4. If we are living in a post-truth time, we should focus on trying to make progressive arguments and facts more legible and engaging to a broad and diverse audience.

5. The fad of ‘Maker Culture’ is over. Arduinos and 3D printers are fascinating things, but the larger issues of what it means to be a human or a society needs to be directly confronted.

6. Academic publishing can be carried out as a form of research-creation that combines handmade craft with publishing. Carefully built physical book artefacts can be leveraged to help foster personal engagement and collaboration with an audience.