Short abstract:

The paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of Danish SMEs, offering a conceptualization of computer security with post-progress and maintenance thinking in STS.

Long abstract:

The paper suggests contemporary maintenance and post-progress thinking (Denis & Pontille 2015, Tsing 2015, Danyi 2022) to advance the understanding of everyday computer security practices. Based on an ethnographic study of 30 companies, the paper presents dilemmas, compromise and disconcertments in handling computer security. Where resources are limited, trust is a key organizing principle and technologies are aging, computer security is good enough at best. Companies resort to “ordinary hope” (Jackson 2023) rather than solutionism: They hunt for floppy disks at garage sales, hang up posters, and make awkward exceptions.

Fragile Computing is suggested as an alternative to current concepts of computer security. What is fragile is not “bad”; an antique vase is not worth less because it is fragile, it is precious because of its fragility. Normativity multiplies in the realm of fragility (Denis et al. forthcoming). Attending to fragility is uneasy: It affects the one who cares and forbids executing simple judgment.

Danyi, E. (2022). Melancholy Democracy: Politics Beyond Hope and Despair. Habilitation submitted, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

Denis, J., & Pontille, D. (2015). Material ordering and the care of things. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 40(3), 338-367.

Denis, J., Domínguez Rubio, F & Pontille, D. (forthcoming) Fragilities. MIT Press, under review.

Jackson, S. J. (2023). Ordinary Hope. In Ecological Reparation (pp. 417-433). Bristol University Press.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.