Johan Söderberg
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 159255 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Johan Söderberg |
| PRENOMES | Johan |
| SOBRENOME | Söderberg |
| ASSINATURA | SÖDERBERG J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3227-2452 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1981 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Tech-oligarchic visions of automated science
Vägval i miljösociologin
Artikeln undersöker teorival och kunskapssyn inom det miljösociologiska fältet mot bakgrund av de senaste årens valframgångar för klimat- och vetenskapsförnekande, högerpopulistiska partier. Det nya politiska läget påkallar en genomlysning av kunskapsteoretiska positioner i fältet. En central fråga är sättet på vilket de klimatvetenskapliga rönen ska integreras i sociologiska studier av klimatkrisen, antingen som en utgångspunkt eller som ett obj…
Slutreplik
Hacking médical
Le hacking médical transpose à la médecine et à la santé le slogan hacker « l’information veut être libre ». Cet article porte sur un groupe de hackers connu sous le nom de Four Thieves Vinegar Collective (Collectif du vinaigre des quatre voleurs). Au nom de l’« autonomie corporelle », le collectif s’efforce d’abattre les restrictions d’accès et de contourner les formes de contrôle dans le secteur de la santé. Le hacking médical est le dernier re…
Risk management in a global market of alternative addiction care
The controlled substance “ibogaine” is reported to have unique addiction-interrupting properties. Due to its illegal status, the drug's application for treating substance dependency has been explored by a network of addicts and harm reduction activists in underground and off-shore clinics. The article investigates the strategies that practitioners have adopted to mitigate harm from administrating this potentially cardiotoxic drug. The case study …
Against underdog metaphysics
A major target of the Marxist critique of 'post-theory'-a broad term encompassing post-structuralism, post-Marxism, and postcolonial theory-has been its notorious deconstruction of the subject. The affirmation of marginal, excluded, and deviant subject positions within the same corpus has been noted less frequently. To recalibrate the Marxist critique of post-theory to also encompass its affirmative moment, we consult Alvin Gouldner and his overl…
The Return of the Repressed
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. I…
The psychedelic renaissance
Psychedelic substances are undergoing a renaissance. As they have been out-of-bounds for public research for half a century, the development process has been driven by drug user communities. With the prospect of a legalization of psychedelics, the data collected by users about toxicity, dosage, etc. have been turned into billion-dollar assets. Know-how stemming from stigmatized user communities is being transferred to companies and put under the …
Resistance to the Current
How hacking cultures drive contemporary capitalism and the future of innovation. In Resistance to the Current, Johan Söderberg and Maxigas examine four historical case studies of hacker movements and their roles in shaping the twenty-first-century's network society. Based on decades of field work and analysis, this intervention into current debates situates an exploding variety of hacking practices within the contradictions of capitalism. Depolit…
The Three Pillars of Functional Autonomy of Hackers
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 valu…
Jämställdhetspolitik som ideologi eller vetenskap
In this article we analyze the public debate on gender mainstreaming of higher education and research in Sweden between 2016– 2020, focusing on 1) positions that advocate the gender equality initiatives and 2) positions that criticize them. A recurring theme in the defense and the critique of gender mainstreaming is whether gender mainstreaming policies should be understood as ideologically driven or not and how this relates to the university’s s…
Inquiring Hacking as Politics
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
The cloud factory
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…
The Genealogy of “Empirical Post-structuralist” STS, Retold in Two Conjunctures
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 co…
Oceanic thirst? Food consumption in mediaeval Sweden
The article explores data on food consumption in mediaeval Sweden and discusses the implications with regard to living standards. The key question is whether food consumption was more plentiful and/or more varied during the late mediaeval era than during the early modern epoch. Based on two mediaeval account books, from the castles of Nyköping and Stegeborg, respectively, three conclusions emerge. (1) Compared to mid-sixteenth century royal farms…
Hacking Capitalism
The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement demonstrates how labour can self-organise production, and, as is shown by the free operating system GNU/Linux, even compete with some of the worlds largest firms. The book examines the hopes of such thinkers as Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Negri, in the light of the recent achievements of the hacker movement. This book is the first to examine a different kind of polit…
Hacking Hacked! The Life Cycles of Digital Innovation
Media Technologies
The late-medieval crisis quantified
The article aims to assess the size of secular taxes in medieval Sweden in real terms. The size of taxes is calculated as the quantity of butter and the number of oxen that could be bought for a given tax sum. In addition, nominal taxes are converted into grams of silver. Three distinctive periods are discerned: (1) a phase of low taxes 1320–1363; (2) a period of very high taxes from 1363 up to the Engelbrekt uprising in 1434; and (3) a new phase…
Automating amateurs in the 3D printing community
In this paper a case study of an open source, home-built 3D printer called ‘Rep-rap’ serves as an entry point to the deskilling debate. This debate has centred on Harry Braverman's proposition that deskilling is a general trend, given the prevalence of capitalist relations of production, or, differently put, contractual employment relations. The origins of 3D printing can be traced back to numerically controlled (NC) and computerised numerically-…
Resistance to commodification
Long historical series of farmland prices and rents are rare, especially for the pre-industrial era. This article makes two contributions: (1) series of land prices and rents are presented for a peripheral economy of the time, East Sweden, in the period 1274–1649. Phases of decline and growth are compared to those of some other European regions; (2) the effects of certain anti-capitalist institutions on farmland prices are explored. An unanticipa…
Determining social change
This article takes the political engagement of hackers as a prism for examining the relations between technological determinist thinking and collective action. The concept ‘collective action framing’ is borrowed from social movement theory to describe how hackers have appropriated notions of a post-industrial, information society in their struggles against intellectual property laws and state censorship. Hackers have reintroduced an element of co…
Atoms Want to Be Free Too! Expanding the Critique of Intellectual Property to Physical Goods
“Atoms are the new bits”. That is the latest buzz arising from the Californian trade press. What do we get when this dictum is sampled with the old rallying cry: “Information wants to be free”? We suggest that the predominant, bounded critique of intellectual property is thereby destabilised. Constitutive of that critique was the exceptionality attributed to information goods (bits) vis-a-vis tangible goods (atoms). It was thus intellectual prope…
Prices and the growth of the knowledge economy in Sweden and Western Europe before the industrial revolution
This article uses long-term series of real prices for various goods and services to analyse the evolution of the knowledge economy before the Industrial Revolution by focusing on Sweden in comparison with other European countries. During the early modern period, the relative price of knowledge-intensive goods and services, such as iron, paper, salt, sea transports and silver, decreased relative to a Consumer Price Index. The increased productivit…
Free Space Optics in the Czech Wireless Community
The article investigates how users in the Czech wireless network community invented a technology for sending data over visible, red light. For five years, this was the most affordable method for connecting computers. The development of this technology was guided by the idea that it should be controlled by its users. With reference to this experiment, it is argued that a shared ethical and/or political vision can contribute to the establishment of…
Determining social change
This article takes the political engagement of hackers as a prism for examining the relations between technological determinist thinking and collective action. The concept ‘collective action framing’ is borrowed from social movement theory to describe how hackers have appropriated notions of a post-industrial, information society in their struggles against intellectual property laws and state censorship. Hackers have reintroduced an element of co…
The hacker movement as a continuation of labour struggle
Examining the way in which capital exploits the volunteer labour of free software developers, this article argues that there is a historical continuity between hackers and labour struggle. The common denominator is their rejection of alienated work practices, which suggests that corporate involvement in the computer underground, far from inhibiting further struggles by hackers, may function as a catalyst for them
Hacking Hacked! The Life Cycles of Digital Innovation
Misuser Inventions and the Invention of the Misuser
The conflicts which have erupted over hacking, cracking and filesharing offer a stepping-stone for rethinking the involvement of users in innovation processes. As technical design processes invariably proceed in the shadow of established relations of social power, we can expect them to encompass conflicts over what constitutes the creative use of technology versus its misuse. The figure of the misuser calls attention to the importance of antagoni…
Real wage trends in urban Europe, 1730–1850
This article deals with long-term real wage trends in Stockholm, 17301850, seen against an international background. It is argued that the second half of the eighteenth century exhibits more evident downward real wage trends than does the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which has been the subject of most of the standard of living debate. Some hypotheses are advanced as to the links between real wage decline on the one hand and processes…
Jämställdhetspolitik som ideologi eller vetenskap
In this article we analyze the public debate on gender mainstreaming of higher education and research in Sweden between 2016– 2020, focusing on 1) positions that advocate the gender equality initiatives and 2) positions that criticize them. A recurring theme in the defense and the critique of gender mainstreaming is whether gender mainstreaming policies should be understood as ideologically driven or not and how this relates to the university’s s…
The Genealogy of “Empirical Post-structuralist” STS, Retold in Two Conjunctures
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 co…
The late-medieval crisis quantified
The article aims to assess the size of secular taxes in medieval Sweden in real terms. The size of taxes is calculated as the quantity of butter and the number of oxen that could be bought for a given tax sum. In addition, nominal taxes are converted into grams of silver. Three distinctive periods are discerned: (1) a phase of low taxes 1320–1363; (2) a period of very high taxes from 1363 up to the Engelbrekt uprising in 1434; and (3) a new phase…
Servants and Bourgeois Life in Urban Sweden in the Early 20th Century
By 1900, most Swedish servants had a rural background. They had migrated to the city from the countryside to perform domestic service in private households. Here they met bourgeois ideals of the comfortable home where the masters could demand home-cooked meals, clean clothes and pleasant surroundings. Servants were needed in order to fulfil this ideal. Yet, the number of domestic servants declined strongly in urban Sweden during the first half of…
Hard times in 19th-century Sweden
The cloud factory
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…
Free Space Optics in the Czech Wireless Community
The article investigates how users in the Czech wireless network community invented a technology for sending data over visible, red light. For five years, this was the most affordable method for connecting computers. The development of this technology was guided by the idea that it should be controlled by its users. With reference to this experiment, it is argued that a shared ethical and/or political vision can contribute to the establishment of…
Spontaneous Processes of Civilization
A vertical perspective has in practice, though not in theory, dominated recent research on the civilization process. This process is seen basically as heteronomous, carried out through forces imposed on the masses by the elite. The civilization process is seen as external and coercive. Criticisms of this interpretation are developed. Though we reject a definition of civilization solely in terms of impulse control, our aim is not to shatter the he…
Mark och försörjning. Befolkning och markutnyttjande i västra Småiand 1800–1850
Skogsbygd i omvandling. Studier kring befolkningsutveckling, omflyttning och social rörlighet i Revsunds tingslag 1820–1977
A long-term perspective on regional economic development in Sweden, Ca. 1550–1914
The aim of this article is to provide a broad picture of regional economic development in Sweden over a long-term perspective, from the middle of the sixteenth century until about the time of the First World War. Attention is focused mainly upon the shifting balance between major regions of the country. The article concludes with a discussion of the long-term trend in terms of generative and competitive growth respectively and of long regional cy…
Real wage trends in urban Europe, 1730–1850
This article deals with long-term real wage trends in Stockholm, 17301850, seen against an international background. It is argued that the second half of the eighteenth century exhibits more evident downward real wage trends than does the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which has been the subject of most of the standard of living debate. Some hypotheses are advanced as to the links between real wage decline on the one hand and processes…
Corn-price rises and equalisation
The period between the price revolution of the sixteenth century and the long inflation which set in around 1730 was marked over large tracts of Europe by stable or even falling prices and rising real wages.1 The features of stagnation and defensive adaptation are often pointed out by way of contrast with the pronounced economic and demographic expansion of the preceding and succeeding periods.2
Hard times in 19th-century Sweden
Spontaneous Processes of Civilization
A vertical perspective has in practice, though not in theory, dominated recent research on the civilization process. This process is seen basically as heteronomous, carried out through forces imposed on the masses by the elite. The civilization process is seen as external and coercive. Criticisms of this interpretation are developed. Though we reject a definition of civilization solely in terms of impulse control, our aim is not to shatter the he…
Consumption, gender and preferences in Sweden, 1920–1965
This article traces broad trends in consumption patterns by gender in Sweden. It is argued that these patterns differed markedly, even among married couples. Over time, women became a more important consumption group. This can be seen in their increased consumption of clothes, shoes, journals and newspapers, alcohol and tobacco. Some of these goods had previously been coded as masculine. Some possible underlying preferences behind the changing pa…
Controversial consumption in Sweden, 1914–1945
The article examines some varieties of controversial consumption in Sweden from the First World War to 1945. The focus here is on cosmetics, cigarettes, films, jazz music and dancing. All these types of consumption were growing. From a morally conservative position, they presented a threat. It was perceived that a new lifestyle had been emerging since the end of the World War, associated with the advance of the wild, the primitive, and the erotic…
Copyleft vs. Copyright
Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx's concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free …
Prices and Economic Change in Medieval Sweden
The article explores relative price changes in medieval Sweden, with a focus on grain, beer, salt, oxen, butter, wax and iron. Supplementary data are provided on copper and hops. Most of these goods declined substantially in price relative to grain. The magnitude of the relative price shifts reflects technological and organisational change. Price cuts tended to be larger for goods that possessed a high knowledge content, such as iron, copper, and…
Collapse of a Bourgeoisie? The Wealthy in Stockholm, 1915–1965
The paper explores the decline of the propertied bourgeoisie in Sweden in the twentieth century by analysing data from Stockholm Directory of Wealth reporting on private wealth in the years 1914, 1928 and 1963. Wealth tax statistics are used as complementary sources. How did the overall level of wealth change among the affluent Stockholmers during this period? Who were the wealthiest people in Stockholm and how did the social stratification withi…
The hacker movement as a continuation of labour struggle
Examining the way in which capital exploits the volunteer labour of free software developers, this article argues that there is a historical continuity between hackers and labour struggle. The common denominator is their rejection of alienated work practices, which suggests that corporate involvement in the computer underground, far from inhibiting further struggles by hackers, may function as a catalyst for them
Misuser Inventions and the Invention of the Misuser
The conflicts which have erupted over hacking, cracking and filesharing offer a stepping-stone for rethinking the involvement of users in innovation processes. As technical design processes invariably proceed in the shadow of established relations of social power, we can expect them to encompass conflicts over what constitutes the creative use of technology versus its misuse. The figure of the misuser calls attention to the importance of antagoni…
Servants and Bourgeois Life in Urban Sweden in the Early 20th Century
By 1900, most Swedish servants had a rural background. They had migrated to the city from the countryside to perform domestic service in private households. Here they met bourgeois ideals of the comfortable home where the masters could demand home-cooked meals, clean clothes and pleasant surroundings. Servants were needed in order to fulfil this ideal. Yet, the number of domestic servants declined strongly in urban Sweden during the first half of…
Prices and the growth of the knowledge economy in Sweden and Western Europe before the industrial revolution
This article uses long-term series of real prices for various goods and services to analyse the evolution of the knowledge economy before the Industrial Revolution by focusing on Sweden in comparison with other European countries. During the early modern period, the relative price of knowledge-intensive goods and services, such as iron, paper, salt, sea transports and silver, decreased relative to a Consumer Price Index. The increased productivit…
Free Space Optics in the Czech Wireless Community
The article investigates how users in the Czech wireless network community invented a technology for sending data over visible, red light. For five years, this was the most affordable method for connecting computers. The development of this technology was guided by the idea that it should be controlled by its users. With reference to this experiment, it is argued that a shared ethical and/or political vision can contribute to the establishment of…
Beauty imagined
Atoms Want to Be Free Too! Expanding the Critique of Intellectual Property to Physical Goods
“Atoms are the new bits”. That is the latest buzz arising from the Californian trade press. What do we get when this dictum is sampled with the old rallying cry: “Information wants to be free”? We suggest that the predominant, bounded critique of intellectual property is thereby destabilised. Constitutive of that critique was the exceptionality attributed to information goods (bits) vis-a-vis tangible goods (atoms). It was thus intellectual prope…
Automating amateurs in the 3D printing community
In this paper a case study of an open source, home-built 3D printer called ‘Rep-rap’ serves as an entry point to the deskilling debate. This debate has centred on Harry Braverman's proposition that deskilling is a general trend, given the prevalence of capitalist relations of production, or, differently put, contractual employment relations. The origins of 3D printing can be traced back to numerically controlled (NC) and computerised numerically-…
Resistance to commodification
Long historical series of farmland prices and rents are rare, especially for the pre-industrial era. This article makes two contributions: (1) series of land prices and rents are presented for a peripheral economy of the time, East Sweden, in the period 1274–1649. Phases of decline and growth are compared to those of some other European regions; (2) the effects of certain anti-capitalist institutions on farmland prices are explored. An unanticipa…
Determining social change
This article takes the political engagement of hackers as a prism for examining the relations between technological determinist thinking and collective action. The concept ‘collective action framing’ is borrowed from social movement theory to describe how hackers have appropriated notions of a post-industrial, information society in their struggles against intellectual property laws and state censorship. Hackers have reintroduced an element of co…
Media Technologies
The late-medieval crisis quantified
The article aims to assess the size of secular taxes in medieval Sweden in real terms. The size of taxes is calculated as the quantity of butter and the number of oxen that could be bought for a given tax sum. In addition, nominal taxes are converted into grams of silver. Three distinctive periods are discerned: (1) a phase of low taxes 1320–1363; (2) a period of very high taxes from 1363 up to the Engelbrekt uprising in 1434; and (3) a new phase…
Oceanic thirst? Food consumption in mediaeval Sweden
The article explores data on food consumption in mediaeval Sweden and discusses the implications with regard to living standards. The key question is whether food consumption was more plentiful and/or more varied during the late mediaeval era than during the early modern epoch. Based on two mediaeval account books, from the castles of Nyköping and Stegeborg, respectively, three conclusions emerge. (1) Compared to mid-sixteenth century royal farms…
Sociology (25 obras) · Political science (23 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Economics (16 obras) · Computer Science (12 obras) · Epistemology (12 obras) · Politics (12 obras) · Hacker (9 obras) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (9 obras) · Social science (9 obras)