Special Topics: Building Technologies for the Resistance
Course Information
Course Number
HCI Undergraduate: 05-499 D
HCI Graduate: 05-899 D
Course Description
How can we build usable, ethical technologies to resist surveillance capitalism? We live in an era where powerful institutions harvest and monetize user data, attention, and intellectual property with only weak notions of consent, accountability, and transparency. Unsurprisingly, there is increasing interest in building user-facing technologies that help everyday people resist surveillance capitalism. Resistance comprises a wide range of tactics, from data poisoning, to computer-supported collective action, to obfuscation, to non-participation. But building functional technologies of resistance is not enough — these technologies must be built in a manner that is both useful and usable in order to encourage widespread and sustained use. Moreover, they must be built in a manner that is ethical: in a way that is constructive and shifts power towards populations who would otherwise have little, and not in a way that allows bad actors to. In this class, you’ll learn about building usable and ethical technologies for “the resistance” — the distributed, decentralized masses of people who no longer want to passively participate in surveillance capitalism.
We’ll focus on building the skills necessary to conduct original research in this space, which requires an understanding of core concepts in cybersecurity, privacy, AI, and HCI. To build these skills, the class will include a small set of weekly academic readings, a number of in-class activities, and a group project in which you will get hands-on practice with (re-)designing and building resistance technologies. This class is primarily for Ph.D. level graduate students.
By the end of this class, you should have a final paper on the research you conducted in your groups. Groups that do well will be encouraged to see the project through to publication.
Semester Offered and Units
Semester: Fall 2024
Undergraduate: 12
units
Graduate: 12
units