Matt Goerzen

Matt Goerzen

Matt Goerzen

Research Interests: History of computer security; expertise and legitimacy; media manipulation; securitization; STS.

Matt Goerzen studies the history of computer security, with an emphasis on the ways hackers and other outsiders have influenced security policy and practices. Before pursuing his PhD, he worked as an artist and researcher, documenting hidden affordances and novel types of security vulnerability in emergent sociotechnical systems. His current work considers the historical establishment, scoping, and legitimization of computer security against the backdrop of the internet’s mainstreaming, with a particular interest in understanding why certain phenomenon (like technical vulnerabilities) may have historically been prioritized over others (like community management), and the resonance of such decisions in the contemporary moment.

Selected Publications:

Wearing Many Hats: The Rise of the Professional Security Hacker (with Gabriella Coleman), Data & Society Research Institute, 2021. https://datasociety.net/library/wearing-many-hats-the-rise-of-the-profes...

Hacking Security (with Gabriella Coleman), Logic Magazine, 2020. https://logicmag.io/security/hacking-security/

Selected Presentations:

Security by Spectacle: The Invention of Gray Hat Hacking & The Fight Against Microsoft in the 1990s (with Gabriella Coleman and Brian Friedberg), Berkman Klein Center, 2021. https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/security-spectacle-invention-gray-hat-h...

Entanglements and Exploits: Sociotechnical Security as an Analytic Framework (with Gabrielle Lim and Elizabeth Anne Watkins), Usenix Security FOCI ’19, 2019. https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci19/presentation/goerzen

Black Hat Trolling, White Hat Trolling, and Hacking the Attention Landscape (with Jeanna Matthews), WWW '19: Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference, 2019. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3308560.3317598

Previous Degrees:

Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy), Carleton University

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Concordia University

Masters of Communications Studies, McGill University

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