Medicine hacking applies the motto “information wants to be free” to medicine and health. This paper discusses a hacker group called Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. Under the banner of “bodily autonomy”, the collective strives to raze obstacles to access and upend gatekeeping functions in the healthcare sector. Medicine hacking is the last resort for those who have been excluded from the public health care system, either because of the steady retraction of the neoliberal state from its former obligations towards its citizens, or because reactionary groups have captured the state and are using it to curtail health care for minorities. Questions discussed in connection with this case study are: What kind of trust system replaces the authority that was once invested in medical professionals and public health authorities? What individual and collective strategies develop in the absence of state-sanctioned and trusted public health expertise and regulations?

The article examines theory choices and conceptions of knowledge within the field of environmental sociology against the backdrop of recent electoral successes of climate- and science-denying right-wing populist parties. The new political situation calls for a critical review of epistemological positions within the field. A central question concerns how findings from climate science should be integrated into sociological studies of the climate crisis - either as a point of departure or as an object of problematization. Another key tension lies between the risk that anti-democratic expert regimes may legitimize themselves by invoking a climate emergency, and the opposing risk that the public is misled and kept ignorant of the causes and consequences of climate change. How one positions oneself on these issues largely depends on whether expertise is understood as grounded in substantive knowledge of external realities or as a relational, socially attributed property. Positions within environmental sociology tend to be divided between a natural-scientific and/or political-economic orientation and an STS-inspired orientation. Through a close reading of the work of Rolf Lidskog and Goran Sundqvist - two prominent representatives of the latter approach - the article examines epistemological assumptions and lines of conflict within environmental sociology. The aim of the article is to clarify the crossroads facing environmental sociology in a time of climate emergency, crisis of trust in expertise, and authoritarian populism.

The surge of post-truth calls for a reassessment of psychoanalytic and ideology critique-approaches in the social sciences. Both traditions are dismissed by the principal antagonists in the post-truth debate, the "positivist" defenders of science and the "post-modern" critics of science. The antagonists share a predisposition towards anti-humanism, refusal to distinguish between the latent and the manifest, and adherence to descriptive methods. In order to substantiate these claims, the article investigates commonalities between B.F. Skinner and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The article concludes that the allegedly "pseudo-scientific" or "metaphysical" concepts of Subject and Truth, pivotal to both psychoanalysis and ideology critique-approaches, need to be rehabilitated in response to the challenge of post-truth.

Authoritarian populism and science denialism have thrown the Science and Technology Studies (STS) community into a "moment of post-truth." As is suggested by this pun on the proverbial saying, a foundational assumption of STS is called into question by post-truth: The "symmetry principle." It lays down that STS scholars must not discriminate between true and false beliefs among the actors. Symmetrical treatment of all knowledge claims strengthens the weakest actor in a scientific controversy. That those actors deserve the support they get follows from another foundational assumption of STS, namely the reduction of science to politics. According to the "pouvoir = savoir formula", epistemological marginalisation is identical with political marginalisation. Phenomena associated with post-truth, such as astroturfing, gaslighting, doubt-mongering, etc. tells us differently. It prompts scholars to adopt an asymmetrical stance towards actors' self-understanding (what used to be called "false class consciousness"). To make sense of the hostility provoked by such a proposition, the chapter delves into the disciplinary history of STS. This disciplinary history underwrites the suspicion that the warnings from leading STS scholars about the return of scientism hides an even more alarming prospect. Namely, that post-truth will put ideology critique-approaches back on the agenda.

We propose a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship between social emancipation and alternative technology development. Key is the "functional autonomy" of the collective of users and developers of the technology vis-a-vis state and capital. We draw on previous empirical work about three hacker projects to substantiate the claim that the functional autonomy of hackers rests on three "pillars of autonomy": technical skill, shared values, and collective memory. These three pillars sustain the autonomy of a community of hackers so that it may successfully resist recuperation attempts by capital. We make this claim in contradistinction to looser constellations of users, citizen scientists, DIY hobbyists, etc., where the functional autonomy tends to be much weaker. Hence, in the latter case, we should expect the actors to be recuperated in short time. The emancipatory promises that they make in regard to their practices, and are often mirrored in the academic literature about user innovation, citizen science, etc., will then turn sour. From this observation, we develop a second-order reflection on the role of the scholar studying purportedly emancipatory technology projects. As against the popular "follow-the-actors" approach, we defend the continued need for scholarly critique. We do so with the caveat that critique must in part be conducted as self-critique.

The "imperative of data" seems to be at the core of current debates concerning relationships between technology and society, as well as the status of knowledge, freedom and identity. Departing from the plenary roundtable Datafication and Technoscience from Below: Sharing, Moving, Opening at the 7th STS Italia Conference held in Padua (June 2018), the authors go through different aspects of the sociotechnical process of datafication, emphasizing from complementary STS perspectives some of the most urgent and emergent challenges posed by the constant exploitation of data at an economic and financial level. Topics covered are ambivalences of datafication and their consequences for everyday life (Pellegrino); the epistemological consequences of the "race to the bottom-up" and fake news as ultimate drift of such a race (Soderberg); data-logies and grassroots epistemologies as conditions for possibility for a datafication from below (Milan).

This paper presents a case study of an open-source 3D printer called 'Rep-rap'. 3D printing derives from computer numerical control machinery, a technology first introduced against a background of industrial conflict. This historical fact reactualises labour process theory as a theoretical resource. However, the hobbyists in the Rep-rap project are located 'outside' the typical setting studied in labour process theory, that is, the workplace. The case study is, therefore, suitable for examining the limits of labour process theory. Its key tenet regarding structured antagonism between labour and capital is put to the test when the 'point of production' is located in a community and 'labour' consists in non-remunerated contributions by hobbyists (i.e. non-employees). Drawing on theories of the social factory and free labour in the cultural sector, the article argues that this is changing as hobbyists, fans, makers, etc., are put to work by start-up firms and venture capital in the so-called "sharing economy."

A collected book review published in the peer review section of STHV, where four newly published books relating to hacking are taken as a point of departure for reflecting over the conditions of being a scholar studying a just-in-time topic such as hackers.

Johan Soderberg's manifesto for Media Theory

Abstract Recent discussions in science and technology studies (STS) about the risks of science and technology have led to political economy occupying centre stage. Closely related to political economy as a field of investigation are a number of overarching concepts, such as class, capitalism and interest. However, reliance on such concepts is rejected in post-Actor Network Theory STS. This stand-off over overarching categories can be traced back to two conjuntures in the genealogy of STS. First, the influence of Hegel and his concept of “totality”; and second, the influence from anti-hegelian French epistemology with its celebration of the opposite concept, that of “multiplicity”.