Hacking Difference in Indonesia: The Ambivalences of Designing for Alternative Futures

The paper offers an ethnographic account of racial and cultural difference as sites to contest dominant practices of computing and technology. Specifically, we focus on how a collective of Indonesian biohackers position the care labor of a generation of women (referred to as Nenek-nenek in Bahasa Indonesia) to retrace the origins and boundaries of their making, hacking, and citizen science practices. The paper's contribution is to bring the study of the political economy of hacking and making into conversation with themes of racial and cultural difference in postcolonial computing across HCI, STS, and design. More specifically, the paper examines how Indonesian biohackers position situated histories and expertise as properly technological. Further, we show how their articulation of Indonesian difference was in turn appropriated by foreign hackers and commentators to envision tech futures against the status quo.