What Should Hackathons Do?: Bringing Up the "Cyborgly" and "Political" in Interdisciplinary Hackathon Research

As hackathons go mainstream, they face an increasing and partly controversial appropriation that calls for critical examination. Born as software development events within the open-source community, hackathons consistently became the feeding grounds of private companies and venture capitalists looking for new talent and products. In this context, we ask: is the evolving hackathon format retaining its distinctiveness and relevance? This paper explores these questions through a dual contrast: the latest insights into hackathon research versus a more radical, "cyborgly" perspective on hack[ing mar]athons, and the "social" versus "political" nature of issue-oriented hackathons. As a result, we re-envision hackathons as stagings of both our inner contradictions and collective disagreements. The inherent entangled fabric of hackathons warrants them attention as intuitively more-than-human co-creation formats and sociotechnical phenomena uniquely positioned at the intersection of technology, society, and politics.