ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that Latin American hackers and amateur programmers have been modifying and reverse engineering the products of the global software industry for decades, contributing to the long-standing status of gaming as a social phenomenon, while making pirated and shared computer applications and electronic games the standard in the region. While multinational technology firms have sought to secure their intellectual property (IP) through legislation and litigation along with software encoding and encryption practices, these same corporations have frequently ignored the Latin American market, or seen their products’ prices skyrocket beyond the reach of the region’s consumers due to importation taxes. Out of these particular historical and economic circumstances, software modification, or modding, has taken shape in Latin America as a grassroots form of convergence and an exercise of communication power that exceeds the conventional definition of “piracy” as theft of copyrighted material for economic gain. Like hacktivism and electronic civil disobedience, modding is best understood as an act of counterconsumption—one that operates beyond the traditional norms of commercial exchange. By focusing on the concrete practices of modders in several specific cases, this chapter examines how seemingly “peripheral” actors have repurposed the tools of the dominant market, establishing software modification as a counterconsumptive practice that democratizes access to information technology.
