Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI
This work addresses a foundational problem for the HCI community by advocating for a radical political reorientation, though it is incremental in proposing a new framework rather than empirical results.
The paper tackles the lack of an explicit political vision in HCI, arguing it perpetuates systemic oppression, and proposes an anarchist HCI framework focused on dismantling oppressive systems through principles like emancipatory autonomy and prefigurative counterpower.
The HCI community has worked to expand and improve our consideration of the societal implications of our work and our corresponding responsibilities. Despite this increased engagement, HCI continues to lack an explicitly articulated politic, which we argue re-inscribes and amplifies systemic oppression. In this paper, we set out an explicit political vision of an HCI grounded in emancipatory autonomy - an anarchist HCI, aimed at dismantling all oppressive systems by mandating suspicion of and a reckoning with imbalanced distributions of power. We outline some of the principles and accountability mechanisms that constitute an anarchist HCI. We offer a potential framework for radically reorienting the field towards creating prefigurative counterpower - systems and spaces that exemplify the world we wish to see, as we go about building the revolution in increment.