The lobby of the fabled MIT Media Lab is full of prototype future vehicles and artificial limbs. But as you travel up and back into the Center for Civic Media, or “Civic,” as it’s better known, you encounter a different vibe, a hodgepodge of chairs and couches, and random artifacts like a giant cowboy hat and a life-sized cutout of a mutant Dalek from the cult television show Dr. Who.
The visual contrast is fitting. While the Media Lab is in many ways an advanced research and development machine tooled for capitalist output, the scholars and students of Civic study things like how the Trayvon Martin story migrated from social into mainstream media.
Within this unique realm, Assistant Professor Sasha Costanza–Chock teaches a class called the Codesign Studio that, in many ways, functions as a critique of the profit-driven culture of MIT, and teaches students that all voices have value. To those ends, the Studio’s core premise calls for those creating in communities to partner with locals and impacted parties.
Never one to shy away from controversial topics, Chock, who analyzed data collected at Occupy encampments in 2011, is focused on surveillance this semester. He and his teaching team have countless reasons for concern, from his own Media Lab partnering with mega monopolies like Microsoft and Google, to armed police handling basic school security in New York. They’ve also partnered with organizations representing marginalized populations that have long been targets of government surveillance, and are seeking to design solutions that help better serve those groups.
With all of the above in mind, a recent “DiscoTech” (short for “Discover Technology”) event at Civic was demonstrably more community-friendly than most software-oriented hackathons. After brief introductions, participants divided into small groups and broke the ice with stories about surveillance in their lives. From there, the connections flowed among roughly 40 attendees; at lunch, two people who had never met before compared notes on building hacker spaces in Iraq, and collaborating on community networks and anti-car bomb surveillance systems.
With the clock running, one group experimented with facial recognition software and face painting, seeing what designs and colors work to fool these prevalent surveillance tools. Another outfit held a workshop to allow people to map their assets and identify any electronic threats they face. Ambitiously, one team worked on infrastructure that could detect and possibly defeat attempts, by authorities or criminals, to track all mobile phones in a specific area.
Chock and the gang hacking at Civic weren’t alone. In San Francisco, a concurrent meetup focused on making privacy and security tools more user-friendly. At the same time, allies in India tweaked old closed circuit surveillance cameras, while in Mexico City, participants made their own progress. Some of the MIT efforts seemed mildly significant in the international scheme of things; one group, for example, walked the Kendall Square area, mapping public surveillance cameras. But, like the old saying goes, while it’s important to think globally, it’s as critical to (counter-)act locally.
