Research Seminar: Jacob Bruggeman

Virtual Event
September 23, 2026
Time 12:00-1:30
Registration via Eventbrite

This paper examines how software known as honeypots—deceptive digital systems designed to turn the technique of “social engineering” on hackers—transformed the political economy of expertise in cybersecurity from the mid-1990s through the mid-2010s. Whereas businesses and research institutions once courted hackers as skilled but unruly employees, the development and deployment of honeypots allowed them to capture the hacker’s skills without employing white hat hackers or outsourcing security. By automating the surveillance of hacker behavior and translating those observations into codified “best practices,” honeypots rendered illicit knowledge extractable, replicable, and profitable. Drawing on trade journals, government reports, and professional debates within the computer security community, this paper situates the rise of honeypots within a longer history of managerial strategies to observe, measure, and appropriate the expertise of skilled laborers at a distance. In reframing cybersecurity as a site of labor history, it argues that the honeypot exemplified a broader shift in American business practice: from managing creative or deviant workers directly to mediating their work through data capture and simulation. The paper thus extends histories of computing and management into the digital era, showing how the “co-creation” of cybersecurity by hackers and professionals was also a process of dispossession—one in which the hacker’s ingenuity was absorbed into automated systems of surveillance and control that underwrote the networked economy.

Jacob Bruggeman is an assistant professor at Ohio State University. 

Rebecca Slayton from Cornell University will provide an introductory comment.