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Author Webb, Maureen, author.

Title Coding democracy : how hackers are disrupting power, surveillance, and authoritarianism / Maureen Webb ; foreword by Cory Doctorow.

Publication Info. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020]

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  364.168 WEB    Check Shelf
Description xxii, 389 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 323-368) and index.
Contents The hacker ethic: Germany's Chaos Computer Club and the genealogy of the hacker ethos -- The hacker challenge: cyberpunks on the electronic frontier -- A manifesto for the twenty-first century: privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful -- The burden of security: the challenges for the ordinary user -- Democracy in cyberspace: first, the governance problems -- Culture clash: Hermes and the Italian hackingteam -- Democracy in cyberspace: then the design problems -- The gathering storm: the new crypto--and information and net neutrality and free software and trustbusting-wars -- Hacker Occupy: bringing Occupy into cyberspace and the digital era -- Distributed democracy: experiments in Spain, Italy, and Canada -- The value and risk of transgressive acts: corrective feedback -- Mainstreaming hackerdom: a new condition of freedom.
Summary "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."-- provided by publisher.
Subject Hacktivism.
Cyberspace -- Political aspects.
Internet -- Social aspects.
Computer security.
Democratization.
Computer security. (OCoLC)fst00872484
Cyberspace -- Political aspects. (OCoLC)fst00885798
Democratization. (OCoLC)fst00890123
Hacktivism. (OCoLC)fst01763882
Internet -- Social aspects. (OCoLC)fst01766793
Aktivismus. (DE-588)4000973-7
Computersicherheit. (DE-588)4274324-2
Cyberspace. (DE-588)4266146-8
Demokratie. (DE-588)4011413-2
E-Partizipation. (DE-588)1208516159
Hacker. (DE-588)4113821-1
ISBN 9780262043557 hardcover alkaline paper
0262043556 hardcover alkaline paper
9780262542289 paperback
0262542285 paperback
Standard No. 40029833022
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