Join us this Thursday, May 4th, from 14-16 hrs (German time) for the third RUSTLab lecture of this summer term. Laura Kocksch will present her work on “Fragile Computing – When Digital Security is Beyond Repair”.
“Don’t judge”, the IT manager of an online retailer urges me while I am investigating a poster, that is clumsily taped to the wall. The poster instructs employees to not use any other programs on a computer that retrieves customer’s addresses. The Spotify player – opened against the order of the poster – plays a rhythmic pop song while we stand here. Driven by this observation, and others from a six-month ethnographic study of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Denmark, the talk explores cybersecurity as part of indetermined infrastructures. It will proceed in three sections:
(1) It argues that SMEs do not maintain well-assured or audited IT infrastructures but have learned to live with indeterminacies.
(2) Their practices are not naïve or easy to live with but invoke moral judgment from experts and require perennial re-negotiation of material compositions and organizational tactics.
(3) When trying to improve cybersecurity, the governmental agency we collaborate with in this project, engages in new modes of governmental action.
The talk concludes that Fragile Computing includes indetermined infrastructures, practices dealing with complex moralities and a new mode of governmental action and research.
Location: on campus (Universitätsstr. 104, Room 3.27, 44799 Bochum) and Zoom
Zoom Link
PW: RUSTlab
You will find additional resources and information on this term’s guiding theme Infrastructuring Indeterminacies here on our website.