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This paper explores the counter-/productive capacity of various loopholes in built environment practices for climate-neutral design and construction in relation to computational methods. It draws upon an ethnographic study of professional design and engineering practice.

Paper long abstract

The built environment is defined by a complex web of building codes, standards, planning models, and regulations, which are locally interpreted and, thus, creating potential loopholes. Practitioners navigate these when seeking permits, addressing expert reports, or moving through project phases. As the demands for climate-neutral and sustainable construction increase, techno-scientific methods—like building performance simulations (BPS), design optimization, and life-cycle analyses (LCA)—add further layers to these rules. Putting old and new standards and processes to work, I argue, exposes the loopholes of stagnant built environment practices but also some bearing generative potentials.

Based on a two-year empirical study of sociotechnical and organizational conditions for implementing computational methods for climate-neutral design in Germany, this paper uses loopholes as a productive lens to explore how constraints are both maintained and subverted. The research reveals that unclear definitions of climate-neutrality, the absence of legal mandates for BPS or LCA in design (and education), and path dependencies created by established planning models open loopholes that perpetuate ambiguity and the status quo. Meanwhile, environmental engineers and sustainability experts, as consultants, use gaps in technical expertise and up-to-date knowledge of climate regulations among architects and clients as a loophole to introduce more stringent climate measures and standards. Drawing on practice theory, social studies of computing, and STS-informed research on digital architecture, the paper explores the counter-/productive capacity of the observed loopholes toward the industry’s digital and sustainable transformation.

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This paper explores the authors' two-year experience of complaining their way to changing how the University of Amsterdam's digital identity system handles surnames. Through this process, a loophole emerged, revealing how workarounds both expose and paper over identity infrastructure inequalities.

Paper long abstract

Universities, as most large companies, use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to organize their workers’ data and integrate these with a wide range of Human Resource systems. At the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the last names of scholars are represented in public-facing systems exactly as they appear in their passport. This technically-enforced standard, however, denies options to queer and immigrant workers with different naming conventions.

This paper reflects on the empirical process of complaining our way to a workaround. After two years of bureaucratic back-and-forth, UvA’s HR staff identified and formalized a loophole: People who wished to change their last names could input their “display” surname as a “partner name”. We recount this empirical experience to investigate how a built-in standard is kludged to accommodate “atypical” last names. We ask: How does such a loophole make identity infrastructures visible? Who does not benefit from this newly-standardized loophole? We argue that this loophole simultaneously exposes and papers over the inequalities and injustices caused by identity systems.

The paper therefore contributes to debates about whether bureaucratic loopholes are forms of resistance or placation in digital identity systems (Wilcox et al., 2023); as well as how the visibility of loopholes can both harm and benefit different groups (Pollock, 2005). It also addresses a literature gap regarding the inner workings of ERPs: Considering that companies are locked into these systems, and that said systems define data flows and standards (Posner, 2018), how do different actors address and challenge ERP shortcomings?

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Drawing on the contested case of electromagnetic hypersensitivity and 5G resistance, I examine how ‘alternative’ researchers, entrepreneurs, therapists, and patients ‘make’ loopholes by exploiting absences at the level of scientific research, technological development, and medical application.

Paper long abstract

Many ‘uncertain’ or ‘rejected’ knowledges – ranging from parasciences, alternative therapies, as well as conspiracy theories – are accused of undermining the scientific consensus through the introduction of unfounded, faulty, deviant or even dangerous beliefs. ‘Alternative’ researchers, entrepreneurs, and (patient) activists can, however, also be understood as actively seeking out lacunae and inconsistencies in the edifice of science, which might provide opportunities for their beliefs to gain the status of accepted (scientific) knowledge and the many socio-economic benefits this incurs. By seeking or ‘making’ loopholes, moreover, such actors make potentially important claims about the shortcomings of existing technoscientific research and innovation.

Drawing on the contested case of electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EMH) and resistance to and rejection of wireless technologies (particularly 5G), this paper examines how EMH researchers, entrepreneurs, therapists, and patients endeavour to find and create loopholes at the level of scientific research, technological development, and medical application. All three of these loopholes exploit the notion of ‘absence’ or ‘failure’ in order to, one the one hand, challenge the scientific consensus, and on the other, foster new directions of research and innovation.

Rather than merely seeing these endeavours as attacks on science, they can thus also be understood as powerful reminders of ‘undone’ topics of research and unmet health needs as well as valuable stimuli for further research and innovation. As such, ‘making’ loopholes can be seen as healthy and indeed beneficial attempts at challenging taken-for-granted ways of knowing (and not knowing) that give further impetus to the democratisation of science.

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In this paper, I draw on Serres’ concept of the ‘parasite’ to examine cyber insurance as a technology designed to tame the vulnerabilities of digital infrastructure. The analysis is based on interviews with cyber security specialists, insurers, and cyber-insurance brokers.

Paper long abstract

Michel Serres develops, in The Parasite (1982), a conceptualisation of communication that emphasises what occurs in between the communicating partners. He names this in-between element the ‘parasite’. Notwithstanding the negative connotations the term carries in English, for Serres it is more ambivalent: while it denotes the impossiblity of closing communication loops, it also highlights the transformative work performed by what comes in between. In this paper, I draw on Serres’ ideas to examine cyber insurance as a technology designed to tame the vulnerabilities of digital infrastructure. The analysis is based on interviews with cyber security specialists, insurers, and cyber-insurance brokers.

The great promise of digitalisation has been its capacity to intervene in tasks previously carried out by analogue means and render theme more efficient. Communications, industrial processes, and the public sphere have all been transformed, and a multifaceted dependence on digital infrastructure has become an unnoticed part of everyday life. However, glitches and stoppages every now and then disrupt this sense of taken-for-grantedness. These interruptions may be caused by bugs, unintended mistakes, or criminals who exploit the vulnerabilities of datafied communication channels. The insurance industry, for its part, has positioned itself as a mediator that can come in between and provide protection against such vulnerabilities that, from the industry’s perspective, constitute a business opportunity. Yet insurers themselves are not immune to threat; as risks continue to change, the insurance industry continues to be challenged by the difficulty of containing the ever-developing parasitic vulnerabilities of digital infrastructure.

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This paper analyzes how radio amateurs in Japan employed emerging loopholes in early regulations, highlighting the effect of 1914 SOLAS Convention (signed in London) which prompted the Japanese Radio Telegraphy Law. This law resulted in legalizing enthusiasts’ activities as “experimental stations”.

Paper long abstract

This unpublished paper examines the early history of Japanese amateur radio from a techno-cultural perspective, focusing on "loopholes" that fostered an autonomous sphere within generally strict policies.

Drawing on 19th-century European achievement (Maxwell, Hertz, Marconi), Japan's wireless research began around 1897 under the Ministry of Communications. Inspired by Western successes while prioritizing domestic technological development, the government conceived radio as a means of maritime communication, allocating official operators on most of the equipped vessels (commercial and non-commercial).

However, the 1914 SOLAS Convention, prompted by the Titanic disaster, influenced Japan to shift the wireless policy. The resulting 1915 Wireless Telegraphy Law introduced licenses for private stations along with "experimental stations” —institutional gaps that happened to legalize amateur activities at the margins of maritime-focused regulations.

Unlike flexible environment of the US, Japan's state-led model (paralleling Europe) limited but did not exclude innovation; amateurs exploited loopholes through non-formal networks and self-made culture. By the 1920s, terms such as "amateur" and "layperson" emerged, portraying enthusiasts as scientifically curious contributors despite immature skills.

The 1925 start of broadcasting further differentiated amateurs from passive listeners, enriching "radio" representations. JARL's 1926 founding, with Esperanto-influenced naming (Japana Amatora Radio Ligo), embodied international aspirations for telecommunication.

These loopholes sustained domestic growth of radio culture and further resonate with European techno-science history: balancing social order with liberal innovation. The paper illuminates the interplay of technology, social imagination, and (inter)national regulations, offering implications for broader radio heritage in global history. Future research could trace post-1925 developments and techno-cultural shifts.

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Grain traders circumvent EU deforestation governance through loopholes constructed in ESG reports. Analysis of eight reports from ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus reveals how corporate texts produce responsibility, measurement, and disclosure gaps making regulatory evasion invisible.

Paper long abstract

The EU Deforestation Regulation requires proof that imported soya is deforestation-free. Nevertheless, Bastos Lima and Schilling-Vacaflor (2024) show that transnational traders circumvent this by segmenting supply chains: compliant batches go to the EU, non-compliant production goes elsewhere. The empirical pattern is clear, but a gap remains in explaining how these loopholes are discursively produced and legitimised within corporate sustainability governance itself. This study uses discourse analysis of eight ESG reports from ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus to examine how the textual apparatus of corporate reporting constructs the conditions under which regulatory evasion becomes procedurally invisible.

The analysis identifies three types of discursively constructed loopholes. Responsibility loopholes emerge where traders disclaim farm ownership yet control market access through satellite monitoring, geolocation polygons, and fintech platforms that tie credit to corporate ESG criteria. The disclaimers construct a gap between governance authority and accountability. Second, measurement loopholes arise where companies set their own classification thresholds and then apply them to assess their own supply chains through proprietary monitoring infrastructure. Third, disclosure loopholes is where the same reports mark mandatory indicators as 'not currently available' and later disclose positive performance data drawn from the very monitoring systems those indicators require.

These loopholes are actively created by discursive and technological formats that converge across four competing companies that produce the reports independently. The texts are reduced to forms of discourse aimed at complying with regulations and reassuring stakeholders from the Global North rather than actual transformation in the affected nations.

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This paper draws on historical debates about AI and rules to interpret some of the dilemmas of modern AI. If the practical ambiguity of rules once was thought to proliferate loopholes and preclude machines from thinking, today this ambiguity might present serious barriers to AI governance.

Paper long abstract

Sometime in 1949, Alan Turing, gave the philosopher Michael Polanyi a newspaper clipping of a horse race photo finish. In the photo, the two horses are in a ‘dead heat,’ both appearing to cross the line at the same moment, meaning that the (human) judges ultimately had to make the call. According to Polanyi, Turing gave him the photo as a memento of their friendly disagreement over whether rule-based systems could mimic human judgement or if there would always be a remainder, an excess to rules which could only be filled with tacit knowledge.

This ambiguity of rules was long seen as an insurmountable barrier to machine intelligence. It also made possible the easy-to-exploit loopholes and “computer says no” moments which persist in rule-based systems. Modern AI, in the form of machine learning, is no longer strictly rule-based or logical, instead its decision-making power arises from spotting patterns in large data sets. Now like Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, AI accomplishes tasks through repetition and feedback without needing to articulate the rules. But this begs the question: what happens when we need rules to govern them?

This paper draws on these historical debates about AI and rules and the example of sports technologies like the photo finish (Finn 2022) and goal line technologies (Collins and Evans 2013) to understand how rules are practically, materially and socially implemented as well as how they are circumvented and exploited, in order to shed new light on debates about AI Ethics, Fair ML and Value Alignment.

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This presentation examines how hype and filter bubbles form feedback loops that entrench techno-authoritarianism. Analysing moments when these loops rupture (particularly within or about the digital sphere), I explore how such “loopholes” can inform anti-authoritarian strategies in STS.

Paper long abstract

Hype bubbles - spectacular claims about emerging technologies - are diffused through pop culture narratives, often leading to the formation of filter bubbles, while filter bubbles - digital or otherwise - act as echo chambers that intensify exclusionary and populist homophily; which, in turn, creates the social conditions for new types of hype. Drawing on Hofstadter’s notion of the “strange loop” and insights from informal conversations with the Hype Studies network, I theorise on the feedback loop between hype shaping filter bubbles, and filter bubbles reinforcing new hypes, consolidating techno-authoritarianism through simultaneous/selective narrow content filtering and grandiose technological visions. Often, when a hype bubble bursts, filter bubble outcomes become visible, while the implications of filter bubbles are often masked by the hype surrounding new technologies. Yet, within this loop exist loopholes: moments of disillusionment/techno-refusal and un/intentional movement beyond comfort zones where normativity is disrupted, and opportunities for engagement, critique, and resistance emerge.

This 'technopop' analysis - a study of techno-infused populism and techno-amused pop culture - situates bubble loops and their loopholes as crucial empirical sites within STS. I demonstrate how rhetorical exaggeration, pop cultural resonance, and algorithmic sorting are entangled. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, I illustrate how actors identify and exploit these loopholes, sometimes subverting, sometimes reinforcing totalising tendencies. Ultimately, I propose that “estranging with the bubble” (to paraphrase Haraway) - a process of constant critique of bubbles through continuous perspective shift - invites STS to explore what can be done, and undone, with strange bubbly loopholes.

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The paper reflects on the relationships between loopholes and residual categories using a case study from the history of venture capital in the U.S. It traces the evolution of the category 'special situations' investment and its influence on the emergence of venture capital industry.

Paper long abstract

Loopholes are integral to socio-technical systems; residuals are integral to the ‘actually-existing’ classification systems (Bowker & Star 2000; Star & Bowker 2007). Both can be conducive to ‘gaming’ practices, as well as to innovation. Both have a definite lifecycle: once spotted, loopholes tend to close, as fools rush in, metrics change, inventions get copied. Similarly, residuals sometimes become ‘thicker’ in content and move closer to the ‘core’ of the classification in question (Eyal 2013). This paper compares loopholes and residuals by way of a case study from the early history of venture capital in the U.S. During its formative period, practitioners called venture capital investment ‘special situations.’ In so doing, they were using a residual category of security analysis, a profession whose categories dominated American finance at the time (Zhikharevich 2019). Drawing on original archival research, oral history, and published sources, the paper will reconstruct the career of ‘special situations’ in the history of American finance. First, it will show how ‘special situations’ evolved from a residual category at the margins of security analysis into the center of a dedicated investment strategy aligned with the emergence of ‘Space Age’ technological companies. Second, it will demonstrate how junior security analysts working in institutional finance used ‘special situations’ to describe the emerging opportunities in high-tech companies to their superiors, providing legibility and legitimation to the nascent venture capital industry. Third, it will leverage the historical case study to reflect on how residuals can become loopholes and vice versa.

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What is the role of loopholes in the management of platforms? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, this paper explores the parasitic politics of loopholes in the development of Google Search.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the parasitic politics of loopholes in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry—a shadow industry of marketing professionals that helps businesses, activists, and individuals to rank (or not) for certain terms on search engine results pages and, more recently, in chatbots. As uninvited guests who, in Serres' (2007: 54) terms, "interrupt the feast," SEO consultants have played a crucial role in both maintaining and subverting platforms like Google Search. The idea of "loopholes" has been particularly salient in this regard, offering a focal point for organizing these relationships. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the industry, I am tracing various parasitic operations over time, including analysis, paralysis, and catalysis. Looking at the perforated margins of contemporary systems in this way promises to contribute to what Stephen Brown (2013: 97) called a "dark organizational theory" of platforms and expands our understanding of technoscientific practice in the shadow of an automated system.

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Nick Bostrom has famously advanced utilitarian arguments to claim that achieving transhuman futures overrides other planetary concerns. His work is both duly critiqued and highly successful. What about the "spirit" of planetary care comes to light when his arguments are analysed as "loopholes"?

Paper long abstract

Making choices concerning shared interests and scarce resources is called the problem of public choice. It’s encountered at many scales, from sharing a birthday cake to designing social policy. In the Anthropocene, these questions take on a transcendental scale: what happens to public choice when the very planetary system itself is under threat? Utilitarianism, as a meta-ethical stance, promises to orient matters of public choice towards collective reason: it reduces them to calculating outcomes from a seemingly position-neutral rationality. This kind of rationality has been critiqued for ignoring structural injustices, such as exploitation, alienation, and systemic oppression. Nonetheless, as a system of reasoning, utilitarianism has become dominant, if not dominating.

In this presentation, I explore utilitarian rationality at transcendental scales through an example: the utilitarian arguments for a transhumanistic response to planetary threats proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom. Bostrom’s arguments are fairly famous and have been leveraged to mobilise significant movements, such as Effective Altruism, AI Safety, and Existential Risk Studies. They have also been duly and thoroughly critiqued, and rather than rehashing those critiques as-is, this presentation asks: what can we learn about the dominating force of utilitarian rationality by analysing Bostrom’s arguments specifically as loopholes? What is the “spirit of the law” that his arguments seem to subvert through a technicality of scale? Then again, what makes the loophole so successful, and what alternative ways to conceptualise care for planetary futures does its success override?

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Simulated phishing emails are cuckoo workflows that cause disruption to daily work. We observe that employees create loopholes, such as inbox rules, to detect and dismiss them automatically. These evasions keep work running smoothly while still producing metrics that appear compliant.

Paper long abstract

Simulated phishing attacks are a common method for teaching employees how to recognize and react to phishing emails. These simulated phishing emails insert themselves into everyday work email much like a cuckoo, an imposter demanding time and attention from workers. To create the cuckoo, security staff must bypass the organization's own spam filters and craft messages that use the same social engineering techniques used by criminal networks.

Drawing on interviews and observation with IT professionals, we explore how employees develop a range of loopholes to tame the cuckoo. Some use simple inbox rules to filter out unwanted messages. Others use the technical header information in emails to automate the workflow of phishing training, exploiting the same mechanisms that makes the training possible. By automating the response to phishing training, employees avoid the disruption caused by remedial training and maintain the smoothness of everyday work.

The work of managing the cuckoo goes largely undetected. Dashboards used to monitor phishing training cannot differentiate between engagement and evasion. Whether an employee spots the phishing attempt in earnest or catches it through a loophole, both behaviors still produce metrics that assure compliance with cybersecurity obligations.

We argue that these loopholes are not failures of security culture but mundane techniques for stabilizing everyday work under the pressures of compliance. By tracing the interplay between cuckoo workflows and employee‑led evasions, we show how loopholes sustain organizational order even as they subtly undermine the interventions meant to reshape it.