GENDr is probably worth a try for the laughs alone. Even just the process of conceptualizing and building it might be a worthy exercise. Which brings to mind another way to perhaps subvert the master: “the lulz.”

What are the lulz? Per the Encyclopedia Dramatica (Warning: click at your own risk; dangerous content ahead), as quoted in Biella Coleman’s superb Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (see page 67) the lulz are defined as experiencing humor at someone else’s expense. But there is something deeper there, especially when enacted by the hacker collective, Anonymous:

“Just as the element of surprise transforms the physical act of love into something beautiful, the anguish of a laughed-at victim transforms lol into lulz…Lulz is engaged in by Internet users who have witnessed one major economic/environmental/political disaster too many, and who thus view a state of voluntary, gleeful sociopathy over the world’s current apocalyptic state…”

What I’m proposing here (and doing so briefly for a number of reasons) is that perhaps there is value in actions taken by hackers and hacker collectives against major corporations during which millions of individuals’ private information is stolen from internal data stores and released to the public. Perhaps the release of this information brings to the fore of our public discourse the power which our corporations hold over us by keeping our data in their internal systems — perhaps it will force us to ask why they do it and, most importantly, why we allow it so readily.