Toward Mundane Hope in Cyber Security: Practicing Alternatives to Utopia–Dystopia Futures

Despite the focus on “the future” in cyber security practice, policy, and scholarship, the question of hope has remained surprisingly unaddressed. This article aims to bridge this gap by exploring hope as a political force in relation to technology, power and future-making. Drawing on dominant cyber policy discourse, we first shed light on the “conventional” hope in cyber security: an innovations centered vision, temporally placed in the far future. We suggest that this hope relies on a co-constitutive bind between imaginations of tech utopia and dystopia. The former encapsulates the spirit of modernity, in which challenges are overcome through technological progress and grand technical breakthroughs, while the latter warns of a pending “cyber doom.” This article articulates a more mundane version of the future—one which is being made and unmade through ordinary, here-and-now struggles and tactics on the ground. We argue that a different kind of hope lies in these everyday ways of managing cyber security, situated in local and concrete material practices of patching, repairing, maintaining and enduring. We supplement this theoretical position with empirical evidence from interviews and ethnographic research that show that such nonbinary hope is already being practiced in the context of cyber incidents. Directing attention to repair, care, and endurance as a source of hope allows us to ask new questions about power and future-making, and shed light on activities which are often overlooked or underestimated in cyber security contexts.