A Hacking Atlas: Holistic Hacking in the Urban Theater

Abstract

This essay is intended to help further the understanding of contemporary social change and social activism, which in turn should assist people developing civic intelligence within both local and global communities. Civic intelligence is a social phenomenon that describes how well collectivities address their shared problems efficiently and equitably. It describes examples at a variety of scales from a neighborhood trying to stop a new trash incinerator from being built next to its school to the global climate change agreement negotiated in Paris in 2015. To accomplish this effort, the concepts of hacking and holistic hacking, and hacking spaces (and seven types of hacking spaces) are introduced and then employed in relation to an actual activist mobilization called Shell No, that was waged in Seattle by environmental activists over a 30-day period in Spring 2015.