Greg Elmer will be giving a keynote entitled "Thinking out of the Box: Towards a Progressive Politics of Live Research", and Ganaele Langlois will be presenting on "Tracking Networks: Notes on a Semio-Technical Approach".

Hacking the Grid: Does Electricity Want to Be Free?

Gary Genosko, Lakehead University

Abstract

Free web content idealists believe that information wants to be free. My strategy in this presentation is to ask: does electricity want to be free? If so, on whose terms, and by what means? I want to look for preliminary answers to my questions in countercultural struggles against the electrical companies, namely, in Yippie technoculture, practices of rogue electricians in the cannabis culture of grow-ops, eco-warriors cutting down hydro towers, and alt-energy, off-the-grid, drop outs. In order to imagine what an electrical commons might look like, I regain some hard lessons from the history of black outs, especially large-scale events in the northeast such as New York City (1965) and Toronto (2003).