Hacking Body Politics: Tackling the Technical Tropes

As the rationale and reason of the ‘internet of things’ progresses vigorously to encompass all things, organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, conscious or not – including all aspects of our increasingly connected bodies, an ‘internet of organisms’ (IoO) seems to be steadily transpiring. As socially fabricated organic subjects now turned artificially intelligent corporeal objects in the IoO – in the surveillance of information capitalism, our bodies and actions are mined, and on this base, patterns are fabricated, predictions concocted, and suggestions devised. But as posthuman bodies, can we not conspire with systems and things as allied artifice to hack back the larger apparatuses of power that we are immersed in? Rather than acting as the janitors of the machinery – can we be malfunctioning code, a screw loose in the contraptions of power? Exemplified by works from a design inquiry, this article argues that we must evolve as fluid negotiated un/common bodies with things, being precise with obscurity, transforming metadata into ‘betadata’, and DIY re-cyphering our entangled embedded bodies.