The Critical Engineering Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

The Critical Engineering Manifesto

criticalengineering.org

20 pointsHugoMelo9 comments

This has got to be the most interesting way anyone has made money off a combination of cypherpunk culture and paranoia over control of the internet.

  In the second phase of the workshop students learn to read network topologies
  as political control structures, seeing how corporations and governments shape
  and control the way we use computer networks.
  
  Students learn to study these power structures by tracing the flow of packets
  as they pass over land and sea.
  
  Macro-economic and geostrategic speculations are made.

> The Critical Engineer deconstructs and incites suspicion of rich user experiences.

I've read that a dozen times and I still have no idea what it's supposed to mean, is this meant to be a Koan?

I read it as two things: 1) Critical Engineers are skeptical that "rich user experiences" are the most effective way of interacting with systems, 2) "rich user experiences" tend to oversimplify and misrepresent systems for the sake of usability or aesthetics.

To deconstruct means something like "disassemble" or "reverse engineer" - to reduce something to its constituent parts in order to de-mystify it. Quite a lot of posts on HN do this - explaining how some particular effect is achieved via clever hacks.

"Inciting suspicion" is about encouraging people to ask questions about why an interface works the way it does. Is it a dark pattern[1]? Why those options, why that layout, what is the person who designed this trying to encourage me to do?

[1] http://darkpatterns.org/

Perhaps its ironic: very simple user experience, impenetrable meaning.

So it's not just me... the whole thing seems quite hard to understand, and somewhat full of hot air?

> The Critical Engineer looks to the history of art, architecture, activism, philosophy and invention and finds exemplary works of Critical Engineering.

I'd be interested to hear some of those examples. Does describing a form of government or human organization count as engineering?

Seems like a misguided attempt to break engineering the same way social sciences were largely broken; by embedding left-wing politics at their core so that their assumptions are not scrutinized and by substituting sound scientific method with literary analysis.

You're really missing the point if you think this document is proposing an alternative to engineering. It's addressed to a subset of artists and engineers deeply concerned with the political and interpretative dimensions of engineering.

While there is usually a technical aspect to critical engineering projects, most engage issues well beyond the scope of the "sound scientific method." See: CV Dazzle by Adam Harvey. [1] I suggest looking at Garnet Hertz's Critical Making for a more informed picture of this kind of work. [2]

[1] http://ahprojects.com/projects/cv-dazzle/

[2] https://twitter.com/criticalpdfs

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