ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the pedagogy of hacking practices and the politics of privacy in the context of surveillance policies in Mexico, evidenced by reports of state-sponsored espionage. Sisifo Pedroza first came to El Rancho hoping to explore the politics of creative processes and expand his practice as a music professor at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México through the educational potentials of open-source software. “Pegasus didn’t necessarily change the way we work” says Hacklib, since protecting privacy and fostering anonymity are staples of hacker culture; however, by engaging socio-cultural contexts prompted by particular state policies, El Rancho, according to Hacklib, becomes a place of techno-political inquiry. As multiple calls for external experts to investigate the matter with transparency remain ignored, maybe the state itself can be identified as a device running proprietary source code and holding citizens to strict, vulnerable roles.
