Publicação
Logs and hacks: Amazon, surveillance, and hacking as epistemic practice
| Resumo: | This article examines how artistic interventions expose and contest Amazon’s entanglement with surveillance, platform capitalism, and the politics of data. Focusing on Ring™ Log (2019) by Mark Sample and Dear Jeff Bezos (2013) by Johannes P Osterhoff, I analyze how these works use speculative and hacktivist tactics to reveal the ideological programs embedded in Amazon’s products and services. Sample’s piece stages a parody of automated neighborhood surveillance through pseudo-logs of Ring smart doorbells, foregrounding how machine vision and language transform everyday life into exportable incident data. Osterhoff’s performative work turns a hacked Kindle into a device that emails reading activity directly to Amazon’s CEO, thus exaggerating and exposing the invisible data extraction mechanisms in proprietary e-readers. Read together, these works illustrate a defiant, procedural critique that not only denounces digital surveillance but re-enacts its logics from within. Situating these interventions in relation to Amazon’s broader infrastructural power —shaping the corporate web through innovations such as recommendation algorithms and cloud computing services— I argue that hacking emerges as more than resistance: it is an epistemic practice, a way of knowing and making visible the extractivist logic of commercial technologies as they conquer our daily lives. |
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| Autores principais: | Santos, Bruno Daniel Ministro dos |
| Assunto: | Big Tech Platform capitalism Artivism Hacktivism Digital literature |
| Ano: | 2026 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | artigo |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Instituto Politécnico de Beja |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório Institucional do IPBeja |
| Resumo: | This article examines how artistic interventions expose and contest Amazon’s entanglement with surveillance, platform capitalism, and the politics of data. Focusing on Ring™ Log (2019) by Mark Sample and Dear Jeff Bezos (2013) by Johannes P Osterhoff, I analyze how these works use speculative and hacktivist tactics to reveal the ideological programs embedded in Amazon’s products and services. Sample’s piece stages a parody of automated neighborhood surveillance through pseudo-logs of Ring smart doorbells, foregrounding how machine vision and language transform everyday life into exportable incident data. Osterhoff’s performative work turns a hacked Kindle into a device that emails reading activity directly to Amazon’s CEO, thus exaggerating and exposing the invisible data extraction mechanisms in proprietary e-readers. Read together, these works illustrate a defiant, procedural critique that not only denounces digital surveillance but re-enacts its logics from within. Situating these interventions in relation to Amazon’s broader infrastructural power —shaping the corporate web through innovations such as recommendation algorithms and cloud computing services— I argue that hacking emerges as more than resistance: it is an epistemic practice, a way of knowing and making visible the extractivist logic of commercial technologies as they conquer our daily lives. |
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