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Abstract

This article analyses security discourses that are beginning to self-consciously take on board the shift towards the Anthropocene. It first sets out the developing episteme of the Anthropocene, highlighting the limits of instrumentalist cause-and-effect approaches to security, which are increasingly becoming displaced by discursive framings of securing as a process generated through new forms of mediation and agency and capable of grasping interrelations in a fluid context. This approach is the methodology of hacking: creatively composing and repurposing already existing forms of agency. It elaborates on hacking as a set of experimental practices and imaginaries of securing the Anthropocene, using as a case study the field of digital policy activism with a focus on community empowerment through social-technical assemblages being developed and applied in ‘the City of the Anthropocene’: Jakarta, Indonesia. The article concludes that policy interventions today cannot readily be grasped in modernist frameworks of ‘problem solving’ but should be seen more in terms of evolving and adaptive ‘life hacks’.

Keywords

Anthropocene digital activism hacking Jakarta security

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Securing the Anthropocene? International policy experiments in digital hacktivism: A case study of Jakarta

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