‘Every society is shaped by its raw materials.’

‘Today, the age of data is characterized by e-waste and tech billionaires. But unlike oil and coal, data cannot be seen, touched, or smelled. Still, it manages to fuel economies, sway elections, and earn advertising dollars.’

‘Before the age of date, graphic designers needed access to photo type equipment and printing presses.’

‘The Designer as a Hacker is the first of four chapters that look at possible strategies that have surfaced to challenge the current economic conditions within design.’

‘As the production and infrastructure of publishing has radically changed, the designer as hacker offers potential new roles for designers. The role of a hacker is not just about learning to code or tinker with technology, it is a mentality towards a more ethical digital production’

‘A hacker is often thought of as someone who breaks into computer networks with malicious intent. Even the Oxford Dictionary defines a hacker as a person who gains unauthorized access to data.’

‘A 1984 glossary for computer programmers explains that a hacker is ‘a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer tot learn only the minimum necessary.’

‘Now that digital networks are critical infrastructures, the role of the hacker re-emerges at the centre of society. Graphic designers can share their skills across digital networks that are global and real-time. As many of these networks were imagined and built by hackers, they can provide designers with useful strategies and critical insights.’

‘The internet was developed during the cold ware by the US military as a communication network that could withstand a nuclear war. Until the 1990s its function was limited to military and scientific purpose. That changed with the invention of the web by British scientist Tim Berners-lee in 1989. ’

‘Berners-Lee refused commercial offers and convinced the scientific institution to make the code freely available.’

‘The potential for free exchange did not last long. After US congress passed a law in 1992, the internet was opened up for commercial use.’

‘These handful of tech companies do not only own most online platforms, but also much of the physical infrastructure that the internet is built on. 95 percent of the world’s internet traffic moves thought underwater cables connecting the continents.’

‘If you compare the map of today’s underwater internet cables, they closely resemble the map of the transatlantic telegraph cables dating back from the 1850s.’

‘How does the infrastructure of the internet influence graphic design? Perhaps the computer that designers use are made by apple, their design software by Adobe, their files are stored on Amazon web-servers, using Google’s internet cables, sent via phone towers owned by AT&T, and published on Instagram, ViacomCBS, or WanerMedia. The production of visual communication today is almost impossible without the platforms, products, or services of these media conglomerates.’

‘Designing user interfaces used to be a sub-discipline of graphic design. Now re-branded as UX design, the discipline is rapidly talking the lead.’

‘Programmes such as trackers and cookies collect data about user behaviour. As e-commerce keeps growing — worldwide online sales have almost doubled between 2017 and 2020 — each design decision has the potential to be monetized.

‘A/B testing and programmatic recommendations can create a perfectly engineered interface design that yields the highest profits. UX designer Matthew Strom explains that for a company like Amazon, moving the checkout button on their website could mean losing ‘millions of dollars in a single minute. With that amount of money involved, there is little wiggle room for a debate about the morality or aesthetics of consumer-engineered interface. Engineered interface have led to a Darwinist devolution of aesthetics, where only the design elements that yield profits survive, leading to an aesthetic of risk-aversion and sameness.’

‘Real-time communication accelerates the speeds of production, with little time to reflect ethically. Harris [design ethicist Tristan Harris] gives designers the advice that our time is scarce, and should be ‘protected with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights’.’

‘Another quality that separates data from other raw materials, is its abundance. The amount of data is so enormous that it cannot possibly be processed manually. This is why tech companies need to use artificial intelligent (AI) software to process data. Machine learning is a form of AI, where software learns autonomously by using large sets of training data.’

‘A New York Post article interviewed influencers who said: ‘Everyone’s editing their photos’, adding that being natural on the popular app: ‘... isn’t always financially rewarding’. This pushes visual culture towards an algorithmic capitalist aesthetic; a world of digital fakes and post-truth images, engineered to maximize likes, clicks, and advertising profits.

‘In 2017, Adobe estimated that almost one-third of all internet traffic is non-human. Those are automatic programs called ‘bots’ that crawl the internet, luring humans to their generated web shops. Whatever term you search for, you will find T-shirts, mugs, and other results generated for you.’

‘Contrary to the promise that capitalism creates an abundance of choice, the aesthetics of automation have evolved into a more uniform visual culture. On top of that, access to technology is distributed very unequally worldwide. High-bandwidth internet is limited to urban areas, primarily in wealthy countries.’

‘One in four people in the world does not have access to internet, and 60 percent doesn’t have a smart phone. Large parts of the world population have to make do with low-resolution images, pixelated cinema, or no digital communication at all.

‘Understanding images as an expression of inequality, reveals the ownership and production standards of images.’

‘The data economy has proven to be just as exploitative and proprietary as the manufacturing economy that preceded it. The more digital the work of graphic designers is becoming, the more the privately owned infrastructure will influence the production precess and the aesthetics.’

‘What designers can learn from hackers is that in order to use tools critically, they need to be understood, adapted, and customized. ‘Designers need to learn how to write, read, and fix code. They need to get literate before they can call themselves hackers’, says Anja Groten from Hackers & Designers.’

‘Some argue that designers don’t need to learn to code in order to understand the tools they use. In his book New Dark Age, James Bridle warns that good programmers can be just as uncritical of the economic and social context of technology and that it is more about learning a critical understanding of technology than the skill of coding itself.’

‘No matter how ‘smart’ technology is, a good idea can still outsmart it.’

‘As we have seen, hacker culture provides a valuable guideline for all critical makers ­— including designers — in the form of what is known as the hacker ethic.

‘First the seminal book Hackers (1984), in which Steven Levy says: ‘Access to computers should be unlimited and total’, and that the hacking ethic is about ‘ all information should be free’, and hackers ‘should be judged by their skills, not by their background, ethnicity, gender, position, or education.’

‘[Aran Balkan, digital activist and designer] Technology that respects human rights is decentralised, peer-to-peer, zero-knowledge, end-to-end encrypted, free and open source, interoperable, accessible, and sustainable. It respects and protects your civil liberties, reduces inequality, and benefits democracy. Technology that respects human effort is functional, convenient, and reliable. It is thoughtful and accommodating; not arrogant or demanding. It understands that you might be distracted or differently-abled. It respects the limited time you have on this planet.’

‘The Dutch collective Hackers & Designers brings together disciplines for hybrid experiments. Anja Groten is one of the founders, and writes: Hacking is not discipline-specific.’ She sees hacking first and foremost as a social activity. ‘The technologies we are building and using are created by a vast number of other people.’

‘Certain aspects of the hacker have already been appropriated by tech companies and used for profit motives. It is essential that hacker ethic is not just practiced, but its values should also continuously be defended and propagated.’