Book Review: Common Circuits

Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures, by Luis Felipe R. Murillo (2025). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

In Common Circuits, Luis Felipe R. Murillo examines whether hackerspaces can be understood as alternatives to the currently dominant mode of technological production, which is structured around utilitarian and market-oriented logics. His argument rests on two central concepts. The first is the “digital” or “technological commons,” which refers to open technologies linked to free software, open-source code, open hardware, and open access to data. Hackerspaces are therefore understood as community spaces where these commons are produced and circulated. The second concept, “common circuits,” refers to the social and infrastructural conditions that make possible learning, cooperation, and experimentation with open technologies. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s relational anthropology (1950), Murillo argues that these spaces operate through gift economies, reciprocity, and mutual aid, thereby fostering the simultaneous production of technologies, social ties, and alternative forms of governance.

To support his argument, Murillo situates hackerspaces within a longer history of practices that have sought to decommodify technologies from their status as private property in the service of both individual and collective emancipation. He revisits the phone phreaking movement of the 1950s, the countercultural movement of the late 1960s, and, above all, the figure of the hacker, whose emergence is closely intertwined with the rise of computing. This historical grounding is essential as it demonstrates that computing and electronics, although mainly developed for military or bureaucratic purposes, also contributed to the emergence of technical communities across Euro-American contexts and beyond. Having carried out extensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between 2010 and 2017 in San Francisco, Shenzhen, and Tokyo, Murillo examines the hackerspaces Noisebridge, Chaihuo, and Tokyo Hackerspace (THS), together with the trajectories of active hackers, in order to assess the extent to which these experiences can be understood as alternatives to dominant models of technological production.

Noisebridge, the first hackerspace examined by the author (Chapter 1), was founded in 2008 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Murillo portrays it as a convivial community space bringing together people from diverse social backgrounds and with varying levels of technical expertise. Interactions are primarily organized around the exchange of practical knowledge, collaborative problem-solving, and the collective learning of how to design, repair, and assemble open electronic devices. The author pays close attention to “Circuit Hacking Monday,” a workshop during which engineers, programmers, and technologists voluntarily share their expertise. According to Murillo, the popularity of this initiative illustrates the capacity of such spaces to provide novices with opportunities for informal learning alongside experienced practitioners, enabling them to acquire basic skills through hands-on practice. Beyond this form of informal learning based on a “do-it-together attitude” (38), Murillo presents Noisebridge as an experiment in horizontal governance characterized by the absence of formal hierarchy. This is reflected both in the ethical principle “be excellent to each other” (39), which encourages participants to adopt practices grounded in mutual aid and respect, and in decision-making processes based on member consensus.

After Noisebridge, the book turns to Chaihuo (Chapter 3), a hackerspace in Shenzhen, a city that has become emblematic of China’s electronics industry. Murillo captures the energy of this space, which emerged from the encounter between Shenzhen Do It Yourself (SZDIY), an independent collective of hackers, Seed Studio, an open-hardware company, and foreign engineers working in the region. He shows that Chaihuo is embedded in a distinctive ecosystem in which a community of technologists, tech companies, and production infrastructures facilitates the circulation of knowledge and technical objects. In this sense, Chaihuo functions as a hub for collaboration and exchange where local and international participants develop projects grounded in principles of technological openness.

Murillo nevertheless argues that Chaihuo cannot be understood independently of its broader environment. On the one hand, the success of Seed Studio – Chaihuo’s partner company – attracted the attention of Chinese policymakers, who sought to replicate the model by establishing state-funded makerspaces; the rapid failure of these spaces is, according to the author, illustrative that communities of practice cannot be created through public policy alone. On the other hand, Chaihuo distinguishes itself from Shanzhai, Shenzhen’s well-known economy of imitation and copy-making. Although both worlds rely on comparable technical expertise, Murillo argues that the technological commons are sustained by a moral economy based on openness, sharing, and reciprocity, whereas Shanzhai remains external to these circuits. Chaihuo ultimately appears as a hybrid space in which open technologies circulate between community-based production and commercial valorization without, in Murillo’s view, undermining the hackerspace’s underlying ethos.

The subject of Chapter 5, the Tokyo Hackerspace (THS), founded in 2009, complements the other two hackerspaces as a site of collaborative work and ingenious forms of tinkering. Murillo’s analysis focuses on how the members of this space mobilized in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which occurred in Japan on March 11, 2011. He shows how the hackerspace became a site of collaborative experimentation that enabled participants to develop and disseminate open technologies in response to the crisis. One emblematic example is the open-source Geiger counter. Originally designed to detect radioactive particles, the device became a vehicle for collective learning. Faced with a scarcity of reliable information, THS members organized workshops where participants learned to build, operate, and interpret their own counters. Murillo thus argues that responding to the disaster required the creation of a “common circuit” through which people could collectively produce, share, and appropriate the knowledge necessary to understand radioactivity. The chapter also examines other comparable initiatives that emerged in Japan at that time, such as the Safecast project, launched by a group of entrepreneurs and technologists. Supported by an extensive network of volunteers and institutions, this large-scale project developed a reproducible method for collecting, geolocating, and sharing radiation data. Murillo interprets these citizen initiatives as responses to the shortcomings of Japanese institutional crisis-management systems, while also placing them within a broader reshaping of power relations between credentialed experts, lay experts, and volunteers.

Interspersed with these community case studies, Common Circuits also devotes attention to individual hacker trajectories. Chapters 2, 4, and 6 focus respectively on Mitch Altman, NalaGinrut, and Gniibe. Altman, co-founder of Noisebridge, experienced disillusionment with the military appropriation of his innovations, leading him to leave the corporate sector for open-source work. NalaGinrut, a Chinese hacker based in Shenzhen, embodies a trajectory of late self-learning. From a modest background, he taught himself programming and promotes free software among local entrepreneurs, viewing hacking as both an ethical and spiritual endeavor. Finally, Gniibe, a Japanese hacker disappointed by the technocentrism of the Linux project, advocates an ethics of “do no harm” and argues for technologies that empower rather than constrain users. Through these portraits, Murillo highlights the diversity of moral commitments underpinning participation in community projects while revealing a shared aspiration toward alternative modes of technological development.

In his conclusion, Murillo returns to the question that structures the entire book: are hackerspaces prefiguring technopolitical alternatives? He begins with the observation that open technologies and the values of openness, sharing, and collaboration associated with them now occupy a central place in the contemporary global digital economy. He argues that this visibility of technological commons is often accompanied by their invisibilization within dominant ways of thinking, which struggle to recognize them as genuine techno-political alternatives. For Murillo, what gives hackerspaces and community projects their alternative potential is a capacity to interrupt – albeit temporarily and in a localized manner – the circuits of neoliberal globalization geared toward the continual expansion of market logics. However, he does not adopt an idealized view of technological commons. He instead highlights two major limitations of it. First, community projects remain vulnerable to appropriation. Market actors absorb their language, their tools, and sometimes even their participants. Second, the reader will find throughout the spaces and trajectories studied in the book how socio-technical experiments can reproduce socio-economic inequalities, gender discrimination, or the exploitation of precarious workers. For Murillo, these tensions call for understanding the commons as an aspiration – a “commons in the making” (155). He concludes by emphasizing a fundamental question raised by this reflection: “Commons for whom? Commons for what and under what historical circumstances?” (158).

Richly documented and highly readable, Common Circuits makes several contributions. First, it contributes to the sociology and anthropology of work by showing how technologies can mediate forms of non-market labor grounded in cooperation, self-learning, and individual emancipation. The book also offers a valuable contribution to contemporary debates on technological commons, which often remain centered on North American and European experiences. One of its major strengths lies precisely in the attention it pays to contexts and initiatives that are frequently overlooked in academic literature. In this respect, it usefully complements the work of Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffman, Marie-Christine Bureau, and Michel Lallement (2018) on makerspaces in Europe and Africa. Common Circuits can also be read as an illustration of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s “sociology of emergences” (2016), which seeks to expand our understanding of the social world by identifying and valuing alternatives that dominant frameworks often overlook or marginalize. One question nevertheless remains open at the end of the book: how can we envision large-scale techno-political transformation based on open technologies when participation in such initiatives largely depends on technical skills that are unevenly distributed? The book does not provide answers to this, which remains a task for future research.

References

Berrebi-Hoffman, Isabelle, Marie-Christine Bureau, and Michel Lallement. 2018. Makers: Enquête sur les laboratoires du changement social. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Mauss, Marcel. (1923) 1950. Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2016. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London/New York: Routledge.