Over recent years, media as practice has emerged as a fruitful framework for exploring what people do with media. After reviewing the current state of research, this commentary argues that there is need to widen our understanding and to advance our conceptualisation of media practices. It seems no longer overstated to say that almost any form of political engagement today relates in one way or another to media technologies and infrastructures. As a consequence, media are increasingly sites of an active political struggle in their own right. To bring these developments into dialogue with media practice research, ‘acting on’ is introduced as a lens through which we can investigate the opportunities and limitations of actors’ practices related to media technologies and infrastructures for political engagement.

Practices related to media technologies and infrastructures (MTI) are an increasingly important part of democratic constellations in general and of surveillance tactics in particular. This article does not seek to discuss surveillance per se, but instead to open a new line of inquiry by presenting qualitative research on the Chaos Computer Club (CCC)-one of the world's largest and Europe's oldest hacker organizations. Despite the longstanding conception of hacking as infused with political significance, the scope and style of hackers' engagement with emerging issues related to surveillance remains poorly understood. The rationale of this paper is to examine the CCC as a civil society organization that counter-acts contemporary assemblages of surveillance in two ways: first, by de-constructing existing technology and by supporting, building, maintaining and using alternative media technologies and infrastructures that enable more secure and anonymous communication; and second, by articulating their expertise related to contemporary MTI to a wide range of audiences, publics and actors. Highlighting the significance of "privacy" for the health of democracy, I argue that the hacker organization is co-determining "interstitial spaces within information processing practices" (Cohen, 2012(Cohen, , p. 1931, and by doing so is acting on indispensable structural features of contemporary democratic constellations.

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Computerization, digitalization and datafication are by far no neutral or self-dependent occurrences. They are, to a large degree, co-determined by heterogeneous actors who reflect about, construct, configure, manipulate or even control media. The contributors to this issue put the spotlight on these actors and investigate how they influence, shape and (re)configure broader social constellations. Instead of exploring what people do with media, the articles focus on the many ways individuals, civil society initiatives, corporations and social movements act on media. The notion of acting on media denotes the efforts of a wide range of actors to take an active part in the molding of media organizations, infrastructures and technologies that are part of the fabric of everyday life. Therefore, by conceptualizing acting on media as a form of political action, the issue aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the media practice paradigm.

The increased level of technical abstractness poses a challenge for laypersons and politicians alike to notice the political impacts specific technical developments might bring. By presenting qualitative research on Europe’s oldest and one of the world’s largest hacker organizations – the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) – the article shows that the CCC acts as a civil society organization that brings together a wide range of knowledge, skills and experiences related to media technologies and infrastructures. By deconstructing the abstractness of a given technology, the CCC materializes its formerly unrecognized political quality. Yet, the political endeavour of closing the expert-public gap, in the interests of public democracy, is only brought to life once the outcomes of a particular hack are communicated in comprehensible manners to diverse publics and audiences. Overall the article points to the emergence of new modes and practices of expertise by conceptualizing the Club’s active demonstration of expertise through hacking and its articulation of expertise through media-related practices and interactions with institutional politics as interlocking arrangements. Today, hackers – and in particular hacker organizations – are best considered actors whose skills, knowledge and experiences are ever more relevant for political cultures and democracy at large.