Hacking in the Humanities: Cybersecurity, Speculative Fiction, and Navigating a Digital Future

by Aaron Mauro

Overview

What would it take to hack a human? How exploitable are we? In the cybersecurity industry, professionals know that the weakest component of any system sits between the chair and the keyboard. This book looks to speculative fiction, cyberpunk and the digital humanities to bring a human - and humanistic - perspective to the issue of cybersecurity. It argues that through these stories we are able to predict the future political, cultural, and social realities emerging from technological change.

Making the case for a security-minded humanities education, this book examines pressing issues of data security, privacy, social engineering and more, illustrating how the humanities offer the critical, technical, and ethical insights needed to oppose the normalization of surveillance, disinformation, and coercion.

Within this counter-cultural approach to technology, this book offers a model of activism to intervene and meaningfully resist government and corporate oversight online. In doing so, it argues for a wider notion of literacy, which includes the ability to write and fight the computer code that shapes our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350231009
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/05/2022
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Aaron Mauro is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Brock University, Canada.
Aaron Mauro is Associate Professor of Digital Media at Brock University, Canada.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Human Exploits: An Introduction to Hacking and the Humanities
2. “Hack the Planet”: Pop Hackers and the Demands of a Real World Resistance
3. Academic Attack Surfaces: Culture Jamming the Future and XML Bombs
4. Supply Chain Attacks and Knowledge Networks: Network Sovereignty and the Interplanetary Internet
5.Cryptographic Agility and the Right to Privacy: Secret Writing and the Cypherpunks
6. Biohacking and Autonomous Androids: Human Evolution and Biometric Data
7. Gray Hat Humanities: Surveillance Capitalism, Object Oriented Ontology, and Design Fiction
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Open, accessible, engaging, energetic, and enthusing – Hacking in the Humanitiesexplores essential impulses of today's digital humanities in the context of their intellectual foundations, their current possibilities, and their necessary reflection of and in the human condition.” —Ray Siemens, University of Victoria, Canada

“Not just a 'how to' book, this is a 'why to do it' book for anyone who seriously uses digital tools for research. Important for those who analyze how things work in the digital realm, especially for academics in the humanities and social sciences, this book goes way beyond simple rules and delves into the deeper sources, and implications, of digital (in)security. Any careful cyborg (and we are all cyborgs!), needs to read this book. It is a matter of our digital well-being, which is just as important as our biological health.” —Chris Hables Gray, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA

From the Publisher