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Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism
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Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism
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Overview
Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.
About the Author
Table of Contents
Foreword Cory Doctorow xi
Author's Note xv
Acknowledgments xix
1 The Hacker Ethic: Germany's Chaos Computer Club and the Genealogy of the Hacker Ethos 1
In Berlin 1
Getting to the Chaos Commmumcation Camp 2
First-Wave Hackers: Hacking Culture in the US from the Late 1950s, including the Hands-On Imperative and Other Principles of a Hacker Ethos 5
Second-Wave Hackers: Computers and Code for the People, including the People's Computer Company, The WELL, Homebrew, Silicon Valley, RMS, and Free Software 10
First-Wave Europe: The Early Development of European Hacker Culture in the 1970s and 1980s 13
The Early Days of the Chaos Computer Club 15
1989: A Watershed Year for Germany and the CCC 18
The Fall of the Wall 21
The 1990s: Hackerdom Expands, Silicon Valley Takes Off, and a Schism Develops between the Philosophies of Proprietary Software and Free Software 22
First Impressions: Be Excellent to Each Other 29
2 The Hacker Challenge: Cypherpunks on the Electronic Frontier 33
Third-Wave Hackers: The Cypherpunks 33
Fellow Travelers, Reluctant Heroes, and the Cryptowars of the 1990s 40
The Smart-Ass Antipodean 51
3 A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century: Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful 53
Code Is Law, and the Onion Router Proves It 53
WikiLeaks 56
A New Kind of Cypherpunk 60
Snowden 65
A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century and the Concept of Popular Sovereignty 68
The Burden of Security: The Challenges for the Ordinary User 71
Security 101 71
The Sakharovs 78
Berlin: City of Freedom, City of Exiles 79
A Cryptoparty 84
5 Democracy in Cyberspace: First, the Governance Problems 93
Harry 93
Internet Governance: "Loraxes Who Speak for the Trees" 95
Harry Redux 98
Of Trees and Tongues 101
What Is Democracy? Or How to Govern Democratically in a World That Is No Longer Flat? 105
Hacker Governance: Noisy Square 108
6 Culture Clash: Hermes and the Italian Hackingteam 111
The Italian Embassy 111
Black, White, and Gray 114
7 Democracy in Cyberspace: Then the Design Problems 125
The Problem of Provable Security 125
The Problem of Designing Privacy-Preserving Protocols 127
Email: A Case in Point 130
Remaking the Internet for the Twenty-first Century 135
8 The Gathering Storm: The New Crypto-And Information and Net Neutrality and Free Software and Trust-Busting-Wars 139
A New Digital Era Civics Is Necessary 139
The New Cryptowars 140
The New Information Wars 145
The New Net Neutrality Wars 153
The New Free Software Wars 157
The New Trust-Busting Wars and the Unsustainability of Current Digital Capitalism 164
The Gathering Storm 172
9 Hacker Occupy: Bringing Occupy into Cyberspace and the Digital Era 175
The Occupy Movement 175
A Multitude of Diverse Experiments 185
Hacking Experiments Using Federated Technology, or the Basic Internet Structure 186
Hacking Experiments Using P2P Distributed Technology 191
Hacking Experiments Using the Blockchain 194
Solid? 198
The Blockchain Reality Check 202
"The Next System" 204
10 Distributed Democracy: Experiments in Spain, Italy, and Canada 207
Getting Control of Democratic Processes: The indignant of Barcelona 207
Hacking Corruption: Xnet's 15MpaRato 211
Hazte Banquero (Become a Banker) 217
Maddish: Platforms for the People 220
PartidoX 222
Homage to Catalonia 230
Hacking Electoral Politics in Italy: "A New Politics Is Possible" 233
Hacking Democratic Decision Making Itself: A Canadian Algorithm for Global Democracy 243
No More Wrecking Balls 247
11 The Value and Risk of Transgressee Acts: Corrective Feedback 249
Berlin's Graffiti 249
The Value of Transgressive Acts 252
The Risk of Transgressive Acts 255
Hacker Crackdown 3.0 259
Where Power Meets Its Limits: The Making of Martyrs 271
Democratic Constitutionalism as Conversation Leading to Rough Consensus 275
12 Mainstreaming Hackerdom: A New Condition of Freedom 281
A City upon a Hill 281
Libre Planet, the Heart of Free Software 284
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation Awards 290
Pros, Cons, and Disobedience Awards 292
MIT's Media Lab 297
Harvard and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society 303
Emergence 307
Enlivening a Moral Imagination 309
The Epicenter of a Civilization 318
Coda 321
Notes 323
Index 369