Histories of Hateware

Our digital infrastructures are complicit in the problem of online abuse and harassment. Researchers across a variety of fields have recognized this and have begun to study how digital environments enable and sometimes even prop up bad actors. This presentation examines some of the historical underpinnings of what Brown calls “hateware,” computational environments that employ policies, algorithms, and designs that enable, actively encourage, and sometimes even directly participate in abuse or harassment. He turns to a previous technology, the telephone, in order to better understand the intertwined histories of harassment and technological infrastructure.