Coding Democracy
How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
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.
Webb travels to Berlin, where she visits the Chaos Communication Camp, a flagship event in the hacker world; to Silicon Valley, where she reports on the Apple-FBI case, the significance of Russian troll farms, and the hacking of tractor software by desperate farmers; to Barcelona, to meet the hacker group XNet, which has helped bring nearly 100 prominent Spanish bankers and politicians to justice for their role in the 2008 financial crisis; and to Harvard and MIT, to investigate the institutionalization of hacking. Webb describes an amazing array of hacker experiments that could dramatically change the current political economy. These ambitious hacks aim to displace such tech monoliths as Facebook and Amazon; enable worker cooperatives to kill platforms like Uber; give people control over their data; automate trust; and provide citizens a real say in governance, along with capacity to reach consensus. Coding Democracy is not just another optimistic declaration of technological utopianism; instead, it provides the tools for an urgently needed upgrade of democracy in the digital era.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Foreword: There Are Two Kinds of People
- Author’s Note
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Hacker Ethic: Germany’s Chaos Computer Club and the Genealogy of the Hacker Ethos
- 2 The Hacker Challenge: Cypherpunks on the Electronic Frontier
- 3 A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century: Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful
- 4 The Burden of Security: The Challenges for the Ordinary User
- 5 Democracy in Cyberspace: First, the Governance Problems
- 6 Culture Clash: Hermes and the Italian HackingTeam
- 7 Democracy in Cyberspace: Then the Design Problems
- 8 The Gathering Storm: The New Crypto—and Information and Net Neutrality and Free Software and Trust-Busting—Wars
- 9 Hacker Occupy: Bringing Occupy into Cyberspace and the Digital Era
- 10 Distributed Democracy: Experiments in Spain, Italy, and Canada
- 11 The Value and Risk of Transgressive Acts: Corrective Feedback
- 12 Mainstreaming Hackerdom: A New Condition of Freedom
- Coda
- Notes
- Index