Gabriella Coleman

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pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Members of Congress condemned WikiLeaks, and a federal criminal investigation put pressure on PayPal, Visa, and others that helped people donate to the website. The sprawling online activist group known as Anonymous then coordinated denial-of-service attacks on PayPal and Visa, effectively commandeering the mantle of hacktivism. The story of Anonymous, told more fully in books by anthropologist Gabriella Coleman and journalist Parmy Olson, is fascinating and complex. It also owes a little of its culture to cDc. One of cDc’s good friends and onetime web hoster, Tom Dell, had written software for Patrick Kroupa’s MindVox and then run Rotten.com, an early shock site that was a forerunner of 4chan. 4chan was mostly teenage boys chatting about pictures, and posts were labeled “Anonymous” by default.

The most impressive story: as part of Anonymous’s Operation Tunisia, during the Arab Spring democratic uprisings, he personally defaced the web page of the country’s prime minister, who had approved mass hacking of citizens. But that and the other relatively high-minded feats proved impossible to confirm. Author Olson described the Tunisian defacement as Monsegur’s work, citing him as the only source. Professor Gabriella Coleman, who was perceived as sympathetic, obtained chat logs and said Monsegur did not lead the team that performed the Tunisian defacing. In any case, even Monsegur’s few remaining supporters would have to agree he was an inveterate liar. His more prosaic crimes, such as stealing car parts and credit card numbers, were no mystery at all.

People involved in the process said that the prior regime had had a leadership vacuum and consistently played down what many people told them about Jake. “What you tolerate and don’t tolerate defines you,” one of them said. New directors included the EFF’s Cindy Cohn, cryptography experts Bruce Schneier and Matt Blaze, and Gabriella Coleman, the anthropologist who chronicled Anonymous. After a few days, Barlow’s Freedom of the Press Foundation, which by now had added Snowden to its board, dropped Jake as an unpaid advisor. Noisebridge, a warehouse-sized San Francisco hacker space Jake had cofounded, said he could not come back.


pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The mask had previously become a vague symbol of faceless rebellion, popularized in 2005 in the film adaptation of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, in which a masked anonymous figure incites a massive anarchic rebellion against an oppressive police state. The masks allow Scientology protestors to remain anonymous during real-life protests, and also grant them a perceived heroic flair. By the summer of 2008, Anonymous had grown beyond the confines of 4chan. Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist and leading scholar specializing in the documentation of hacker culture, emphasizes the diversity of the group. She tells me that although there are many young people involved in Anonymous, the perspective of “angst-ridden teenagers with no lives is a misconception.” I think there’s a kind of hypersociality among these people.

Andreas Heldal-Lund, founder of the anti-Scientology website Operation Clambake, says, “Attacking Scientology like that will just make them play the religious persecution card. They will use it to defend their own counter actions when they try to shatter criticism and crush critics without mercy.” However, some critics have formed alliances with Anonymous when they agreed to stop DDoSing. Gabriella Coleman argues that Anonymous’s attacks have done some real good. Scientology has received so much negative attention that they’ve refrained from legal intimidation tactics. If I had released some of the papers I’ve released recently six years ago, I would have been embroiled in legal battles. Anonymous really changed the landscape.

Because they’re operating anonymously and in a lulzy fashion (for example, posting news stories about Tupac Shakur’s New Zealand whereabouts), they may as well be operating under the Anonymous banner. Their methods, motivations, and aesthetic are identical, however they don’t seem to recruit or share Anonymous’s populist ideals. And unlike Anonymous, they’re a discreet group of skilled individuals which could conceivably be dismantled. Gabriella Coleman guesses that it’s impossible to know who is responsible for the Sony hack. It’s just impossible to verify, because there is a very well-organized cybercrime mafia that exists in Russia and Bulgaria and other places, and they can very much exploit what Anonymous is doing. There’s a well-known security flaw at Sony, and the next thing you know they steal all the credit cards and then someone at Sony claims it’s Anonymous.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

His language and ideas influenced anarchism and later, online cultures that advocated illegal downloading, anonymity, hacking and experiments like bitcoin. Echoes of John Perry Barlow’s manifesto ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ can be seen in this earlier period of Anon culture and in analyses that reflect a more radical horizontalist politics, like Gabriella Coleman’s work. Barlow was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, anarchist hackers and defenders of an Internet free of state intervention, capitalist control and monopolizing of the online world. In a similar style to the rhetoric of 4chan and Anonymous (‘we are legion’), it warned: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the home of Mind.

American writer David Auerbach explained that one of the defining features of what he called A-culture, or anonymous chan culture, was ‘the constant hazing of n00bs through argot and complex conventions and elite technical knowledge polices the boundaries of the subculture to inoculate it from massification.’ Gabriella Coleman wrote that ‘trolling proliferated and exploded at the moment the Internet became populated with non-technologically-minded people’ and went on to say ‘Trolls work to remind the masses that have lapped onto the shores of the Internet that there is a class of geek who, as their name suggests, will cause Internet grief, hell, misery.’

She characterized Fox News’ unflattering description of 4chan trolls as an attempt to ‘maximize audience antipathy’ toward them and said ‘mainstream media outlets aim to neutralize a particularly counter-hegemonic cultural space.’ As late as 2014, when 4chan was full of extreme racist and misogynist content, Gabriella Coleman wrote in much more positive tones again about the hacker cultures that had emerged from it: What began as a network of trolls has become, for the most part, a force for good in the world. The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet is a tale of wonder, of hope, and of playful illusions.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Hal Abelson, “The Lessons of Aaron Swartz” technologyreview.com, October 4, 2013. 24. Gabriella Coleman, “Gabriella Coleman’s Favorite News Stories of the Week,” techdirt.com, Oct. 12, 2013. 25. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 27 (2001): 415–44. 26. Roli Varma, “Why So Few Women Enroll in Computing? Gender and Ethnic Differences in Students’ Perception,” Computer Science Education 20(4) (2010): 301-316. 27. For more precise figures, see Christina Dunbar Hester and Gabriella Coleman, “Engendering Change? Gender Advocacy in Open Source,” June 26, 2012, last accessed July 9, 2014, available at http://culturedigitally.org/2012/06/engendering-change-gender-advocacy-in-open-source/. 28.

hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy the many faces of anonymous Gabriella Coleman The partial or total reproduction of this publication, in electronic form or otherwise, is consented to for noncommercial purposes, provided that the original copyright notice and this notice are included and the publisher and the source are clearly acknowledged. Any reproduction or use of all or a portion of this publication in exchange for financial consideration of any kind is prohibited without permission in writing from the publisher. First published by Verso 2014 © Gabriella Coleman 2014 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of new left books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-583-9 eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-584-6 (US) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-689-8 (UK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the library of congress Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the US by Maple Press I dedicate this book to the legions behind Anonymous—those who have donned the mask in the past, those who still dare to take a stand today, and those who will surely rise again in the future.

Thankfully, that is not what they had in mind. It turns out that they didn’t ban me from reentering the channel. And so ten minutes later, racked by anxiety, I logged back on: biella: hello q Topiary biella: sorry about that i was away cooking biella: this is me biella: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman biella: i have referred many reporters here biella: and am writing/presenting on Anonymous They responded immediately: Topiary: Hi biella, apologies for the kick. biella: no it is ok biella: you gave fair warning :-) and i have been too too idle biella: more than i would like Topiary: We’re just usually very strict and sometimes a little paranoid of unidentified users in here. […] Topiary: I liked what I read in your link.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Or I’d page idly through coding blogs, until I found a fun new “library”—a module of code prewritten, that you can use to help create a new program of your own. (Heyyy, a new way of doing dataviz in JavaScript using info hoovered out of Google Sheets! Maybe I should play around with that for a few hours.) I craved those moments of absolute clarity and success, the moment when the program came to life, doing precisely what I asked it to. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist friend of mine who has closely studied hacker culture for years. As a writer herself, she noticed something interesting about the act of coding versus scribbling. “You don’t have ‘coder’s block’ the way you have ‘writer’s block,’” she told me. “Of course some writers really love writing.

Now the alarm was really raised, and not just among cypherpunks. Coders and hackers of all stripes flipped out. From their point of view, corporate America was using a new copyright law to criminalize the very act of writing code. “For them, the lawsuits were an attack on their right to tinker, to write code,” notes Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who has closely studied hacker culture. “It was the moment when they really began to say that code was speech, and these laws were the government making speech illegal. They were all about sharing, showing their code, and now they’re being told that can be against the law.”

Along the way to writing Coders, I’ve been fortunate to talk to many brilliant folks who offered invaluable feedback and conversation. That includes Max Whitney, Fred Benenson, Tom Igoe, Michelle Tepper, Saron Yitbarek, Katrina Owens, Cathy Pearl, Tim O’Reilly, Caroline Sinders, Heather Gold, Ian Bogost, Marie Hicks, Anil Dash, Robin Sloan, danah boyd, Bret Dawson, Evan Selinger, Gary Marcus, Gabriella Coleman, Greg Baugues, Holden Karau, Jessica Lam, Karla Starr, Mike Matas, Paul Ford, Ray Ozzie, Ross Goodwin, Scott Goodson, Zeynep Tufekci, Steve Silberman, Tim Omernick, Emily Pakulski, Darius Kazemi, Cyan Banister, Craig Silverman, Chris Coyier, Chet Murthy, Chad Folwer, Brendan Eich, Lauren McCarthy, Annette Bowman, Allison Parrish, Dan Sullivan, Grant Paul, Guido van Rossum, Jens Bergensten, Mark Otto, Mitch Altman, Peter Skomoroch, Jimoh Ovbiagele and all the hackers at Ross Intelligence, Rob Graham, Steve Klabnik, Rob Liguori, Adam D’Angelo, Belle Cooper, Dug Song, Kim Zetter, David Silva, Sam Lang, Ron Jeffries, Susan Tan, and John Reisig.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The relationship between the Occupy Movement and Anonymous is detailed in Sean Captain, “The Real Role of Anonymous in Occupy Wall Street,” Fast Company, October 17, 2011, http​://www.f​astcompa​ny.com/​178839​7/th​e-real-ro​le-of-anon​ymo​us-at-occ​upy-wa​ll-str​eet. 8 is it wise to actually encourage DDoS attacks: Yochai Benkler explains why Anonymous should not be viewed as a threat to national security in “Hacks of Valor,” Foreign Affairs, April 4, 2012, http​://ww​w.forei​gnaffa​irs.com​/arti​cles​/1​3738​2​/​yocha​i-benk​ler​/​hack​s-of-val​or. 9 One of the few to study this question in depth: Gabriella Coleman’s work offers a comprehensive history and analysis of Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman “Our Weirdness Is Free: The Logic of Anonymous – Online Army, Agent Chaos, and Seeker of Justice,” Triple Canopy (2012), http​://canop​ycano​pycan​opy.com​/​15​/our​_​weir​dness​_​is​_​free; and “Peeking Behind the Curtain at Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman at TEDGlobal 2012,” TED Blog, June 27, 2012, http​://blo​g.ted.c​om/20​12/06​/27​/peeki​ng-behi​nd-the-cur​tain-at-an​onymo​us-gabr​iell​a-colem​an-at-te​dglob​al–201​2/. 10 MIT Museum Hack archivist: A history of MIT hacks is detailed in T.F.

At the same time, it is not something that should be treated as a national security threat. Putting aside the “who” and the “how” of Anonymous, the deeper question is why? Why has Anonymous erupted now, and what does this phenomenon represent? One of the few to study this question in depth is McGill University anthropologist Gabriella Coleman (who admits that after years of analyzing Anonymous she still has trouble answering the question, “Who is Anonymous?”). Anonymous is not an organization, Coleman believes, it’s a name adopted by a range of groups to describe a wide array of actions linked in spirit and that share a certain disdain for authority.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

Some key characters, like William or Sabu, have volatile personalities, and in hearing their extraordinary stories, you, the reader, will come to learn about social engineering, hacking, account cracking, and the rise of the online disruptor perhaps more engagingly than if you read about these techniques alone. There are many people in Anonymous who are not the subject of police investigations like the ones featured in this book, and they also seek to uphold genuine standards of legality and political activism. For other perspectives on Anonymous, keep an eye out for work by Gabriella Coleman, an academic who has been following Anonymous for several years, and a book on Anonymous by Gregg Housh and Barrett Brown, due out in 2012. The documentary We Are Legion by Brian Knappenberger also gives more focus to the political activism of Anonymous. Part 1 We Are Anonymous Chapter 1 The Raid Across America on February 6, 2011, millions of people were settling into their couches, splitting open bags of nachos, and spilling beer into plastic cups in preparation for the year’s biggest sporting event.

Some of the more popular Anonymous Twitter feeds simply tweeted the news, unable to provide much comment. One suggested the arrests were like cutting off the head of a hydra; more would grow back. Anonymous, the implication was, would bounce back from this. Jennifer Emick had a field day, pointing out on Twitter that Anonymous was now as good as dead. Gabriella Coleman, a Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in Montreal, was one of the rare few to meet Sabu in person while living in New York. He was not so different from his online persona, she remembered. Though she’d studied Anonymous for years, Coleman was in shock. She had suspected Sabu was up to something (why else would he meet?)

I also believe that people, no matter how sociopathic, narcissistic, or duplicitous they may seem to be, have a genuine urge to tell their stories and carve out some sort of legacy. I believe that is why it helped that, when I first started speaking in March 2011 to the hackers who hit HBGary and then formed LulzSec, I told them their interviews would be contributing to a book I was writing about Anonymous. In addition, Gabriella Coleman, now Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, regularly provided me with a refreshing dose of clarity on who Anonymous was as a collective and how it worked. Coleman has shown extraordinary dedication to studying the Anonymous phenomenon.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

“where it will end up”: David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age (New York: Crown, 2018), 224. weaponize it: Hackers call this type of operation “hack-and-leak.” Gabriella Coleman has termed it a public interest hack: “a hack that will interest the public due to the hack and the data/documents.” Coleman claims that the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous innovated the public-interest hack around 2007: Gabriella Coleman, “The Public Interest Hack,” Limn, 2017, https://limn.it/articles/the-public-interest-hack. released the memo: “Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security,” October 7, 2016, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national.

expense of advertising and supporting the product: Karger et al., “Retrospective,” 1163. FOSS: For the locus classicus of FOSS, see Richard Stallman, “GNU Manifesto,” March 1985, http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/toc/dr-dobbs-1980.html#10(3): March 1985. For an excellent ethnography of the FOSS LINUX/Debian community, see Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). all bugs are shallow: Linus’s law was formulated by Eric S. Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 1999). Raymond named his law in honor of Linus Torvalds, the first developer of the Linux kernel.

, Josephine Wolff, You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). Recent anthropological work on hackers focuses on social upcode, the norms and rules of the hacker/cybersecurity community. See, e.g., Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (London: Verso, 2014). Economic analysis: See, e.g., Ross Anderson, “Why Information Security Is Hard—An Economic Perspective,” Proceedings 17th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2001, https://www.acsac.org/2001/papers/110.pdf.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Coders sometimes harbor God impulses; they sometimes even have aspirations to revolutionize society. But they almost never aspire to be politicians. “While programming is considered a transparent, neutral, highly controllable realm ... where production results in immediate gratification and something useful,” writes NYU anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, “politics tends to be seen by programmers as buggy, mediated, tainted action clouded by ideology that is not productive of much of anything.” There’s some merit to that view, of course. But for programmers to shun politics completely is a problem—because increasingly, given the disputes that inevitably arise when people come together, the most powerful ones will be required to adjudicate and to govern.

One of the best parts of the writing process was the opportunity to call up or sit down with extraordinary people and ask them questions. I’m thankful to the following folks for responding to my inquiries and helping inform the text: C. W. Anderson, Ken Auletta, John Battelle, Bill Bishop, Matt Cohler, Gabriella Coleman, Dalton Conley, Chris Coyne, Pam Dixon, Caterina Fake, Matthew Hindman, Bill Joy, Dave Karpf, Jaron Lanier, Steven Levy, Diana Mutz, Nicholas Negroponte, Markus Prior, Robert Putnam, John Rendon, Jay Rosen, Marc Rotenberg, Douglas Rushkoff, Michael Schudson, Daniel Solove, Danny Sullivan, Philip Tetlock, Clive Thompson, and Jonathan Zittrain.

Benjamin Jowett (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1871), 559. 166 “We are as Gods”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (self-published, 1968), accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods. 167 “make any man (or woman) a god”: Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2001), 451. 167 “having some troubles with my family”: “How Eliza Works,” accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://chayden.net/eliza/instructions.txt. 168 “way of acting without consequence”: Siva Vaidyanathan, phone interview with author, Aug. 9, 2010. 168 “not a very good program”: Douglas Rushkoff, interview with author, New York, NY, Aug. 25, 2010. 168 “politics tends to be seen by programmers”: Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” Anthropological Quarterly, 77, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 507–19, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost. 170 “addictive control as well”: Levy, Hackers, 73. 172 “Howdy” is a better opener than “Hi”: Christian Rudder, “Exactly What to Say in a First Message,” Sept. 14, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exactly-what-to-say-in-a-first-message. 173 “hackers don’t tend to know any of that”: Steven Levy, “The Unabomber and David Gelernter,” New York Times, May 21, 1995, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.unabombers.com/News/95-11-21-NYT.htm. 174 “engineering relationships among people”: Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

From Project Chanology, wherein 4chan users targeted the Church of Scientology . . . Patrick Barkham, ‘Hackers declare war on Scientologists amid claims of heavy-handed Cruise control’, Guardian, 4 February 2008. 24. Gabriella Coleman, basing her analysis on Lewis Hyde’s classic analysis . . . Benjamin Radford, Bad Clowns, University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, NM, 2016; Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, Verso: London and New York, 2014. 25. When Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown quit Twitter . . . Alex Abad-Santos, ‘The “Millie Bobby Brown is homophobic” meme is absurd, but that doesn’t mean it’s harmless’, Vox (www.vox.com), 15 June 2018; Roisin O’Connor, ‘Millie Bobby Brown quits Twitter after being turned into an “anti-gay” meme’, the Independent, 14 June 2018. 26.

This puts a different perspective on the lauded amorality of trolls. They were not, in this case, doing it for the lulz. Their punishment had a purpose. Many analysts identify trolls as subversive ‘tricksters’, waging indiscriminate war on social norms. The troll is a ‘self-appointed cultural critic’, as Benjamin Radford puts it. Gabriella Coleman, basing her analysis on Lewis Hyde’s classic analysis of the trickster as a ‘boundary crosser’ and spirit of ‘mischief’, sees trolls as embodying the archetype.24 Even the white-supremacist incitements of the neo-Nazi troll Andrew Auernheimer, known as ‘weev’, are of the same transgressive type.


pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“Given that citizens are increasingly dependent on privately owned spaces for our politics and public discourse . . . the fight over how speech should be governed in a democracy is focused increasingly on questions of how private companies should or shouldn’t 180 MICAH L. SIFRY control speech conducted on and across their networks and platforms.”22 One answer to this question has come from a loose knit group of online activists who call themselves “Anonymous.” It’s hard to describe Anonymous, which I suppose is part of the point. Gabriella Coleman, a New York University anthropologist who has studied Anonymous closely, says “there are no leaders, anyone can seemingly join, and participants are spread across the globe, although many of them can be found on any number of Internet Relay Chat Channels where they discuss strategy, plan attacks, crack jokes, and often pose critical commentary on the unfolding events they have just engendered.”23 You might call Anonymous a virtual flash mob, though at times its “members” have gathered physically, as when they organized protests against Scientology in 2008.

Rebecca MacKinnon, “WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to Internet speech,” December 2, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-12-02/opinion/ mackinnon.wikileaks.amazon_1_wikileaks-founder-julian-assangelieberman-youtube. Reuters, “Eric Schmidt Expects Another 10 Years at Google,” January 26, 2011, www.mb.com.ph/articles/300691/eric-schmidt-expects-another10-years-google. MacKinnon Ibid. Gabriella Coleman, “What It’s Like to Participate in Anonymous’ Actions,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2010, www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2010/12/what-its-like-to-participate-in-anonymousactions/67860. Cassell Bryan-Low and Sven Grundberg, “Hackers Rise for WikiLeaks,” The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB10001424052748703493504576007182352309942.html.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

Raymond in The Jargon File (a bible for hackers everywhere), is: “One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.” We spoke to several hackers acting under the banner of Anonymous who confirmed this motivation. Anonymous is, as described by anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, a “name employed by various groups of hackers, technologists, activists, human rights advocates, and geeks.”1 They appeared in newspapers worldwide when they took on the Church of Scientology, attacking and defacing the website after a video of Tom Cruise meant for internal promotion leaked to the public.

Part of this text appears in an article written by Alexa Clay and Roshan Paul titled “Scaling Social Impact by Giving Away Value,” which appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on September 26, 2011, http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/scaling_social_impact_by_giving_away_value. 34. Kurt Wagner, “Facebook Has a Quarter of a Trillion User Photos,” Mashable, September 17, 2013, http://mashable.com/2013/09/16/facebook-photo-uploads/. 4. HACK 1. Gabriella Coleman, “Our Weirdness Is Free,” Triple Canopy, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/our_weirdness_is_free. 2. Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” July 2008, https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto. 3. Official statement from family and partner of Aaron Swartz, http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/. 4.


Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Like some of the examples introduced in the last section, he suggests processes of “dynamic recombination,” such as the refusal of work, the inven- Coding Publics 93 tion of temporary autonomous zones, and free software initiatives, as potential ways out of the conundrum.116 In “Code Is Speech,” Gabriella Coleman cites examples of programmers engaging deeply in political protest against the dominant regime of intellectual property and defending their sense of autonomy over production, enforcing their “rival liberal legal regime intimately connecting source code to speech.”117 After all that has been said to this point about the claims of the free software movement, perhaps its political position becomes more coherent when considered in line with Arendt’s stress on the relation of collective action to politics.

(Access to the source code is a precondition for this.); Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor; Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this.)” Ibid., 41. 53. Gabriella Coleman, “Code Is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers,” Cultural Anthropology 24 (3) (2009): 433–434; available at http://gabriellacoleman.org/. 54. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948); available at http://www.un.org/ en/documents/udhr/. 55.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND Requests for permission to modify material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved At the time of writing of this book, the references to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate. Neither the author nor Princeton University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coleman, E. Gabriella, 1973– Coding freedom : the ethics and aesthetics of hacking / E. Gabriella Coleman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14460-3 (hbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-691-14461-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-140-08452931—(e-Book) 1. Computer hackers. 2. Computer programmers. 3. Computer programming—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Computer programming—Social aspects. 5.

The prospect of finally meeting (actually in person) people you often interact with, although typically only through the two-dimensional medium of text, is thrilling. Many participants, unable to contain their excitement, skip the first (and maybe second) night of sleep, spending it instead in the company of peers, friends, alcohol, and of course computers. FIGURE 1.2. Debconf10, New York Photo: E. Gabriella Coleman. No respectable hacker/developer con could be called such without the ample presence of a robust network and hundreds of computers—the material collagen indisputably connecting hackers together. Thin laptops, chunky personal computers, reams of cable, fancy digital cameras, and other assorted electronics equipment adorn the physical environment.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

At its broadest it refers to a ‘playful’ and ‘pranking’ attitude among programmers and coders, although governments and corporations engage in it as well. We are concerned here with situations where a person gains unauthorized access to a digital system for political ends. Such hacking, to borrow Gabriella Coleman’s artful phrase, will usually be ‘either in legally dubious waters or at the cusp of new legal meaning’.51 I call it political hacking. Its purpose might be to access information, to expose the functioning of a system, or even to alter or disable a particular system—perhaps for the sake of liberty.

Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1854) in Political Thought, eds. Michael Rosen and Jonathan Wolff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 81. 49. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003), 319–23. 50. Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham City Jail (1963) in Political Thought, 85. 51. E. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 19. 52. Ibid. 53. Tom Simonite, ‘Pentagon Bot Battle Shows How Computers Can Fix Their Own Flaws’, MIT Technology Review, 4 August 2016 <https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602071/pentagon-botbattle-shows-how-computers-can-fix-their-own-flaws/?


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

The website of Dylann Roof’s photos and writings, www.lastrhodesian.com, has been taken down but can be accessed in the Internet Archive at http://​web.archive.org/​web/​20150620135047/​http://lastrhodesian.com/​data/​documents/​rtf88.txt. 3. See description of the CCC by the SPLC at www.splcenter.org/​get-informed/​intelligence-files/​groups/​council-of-conservative-citizens. 4. Gabriella Coleman, the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University, has written extensively about the activism and disruptions of the hackers known as Anonymous and the cultural and political nature of their work of whistleblowing and hacktivism. See Coleman, 2015. 5. FBI statistics from 2010 show that the majority of crime happens within race.


pages: 253 words: 75,772

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

Worse still, the category “hacktivists” has no fixed meaning: it can mean the use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of the Internet but can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals. That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the United States, whose ideas the government finds threatening. Gabriella Coleman, a specialist on Anonymous at McGill University, said that the group “is not a defined” entity but rather “an idea that mobilizes activists to take collective action and voice political discontent. It is a broad-based global social movement with no centralized or official organized leadership structure.


pages: 273 words: 76,786

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

Lewis, Corporate Wasteland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 42. 35 Ashley Fantz and Atika Shubert, ‘Wikileaks “Anonymous” Hackers: “We Will Fight” ’, CNN, 10 December 2010. 36 Lucy Osborne, ‘Urban Explorers Enter London’s Landmarks’, Evening Standard, 10 November 2011. 37 David Pinder, ‘Old Paris No More: Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-Spectacle’, Antipode 32: 4 (October 2000). 38 Quentin Stevens, The Ludic City: Exploring the Potetial of Public Spaces (London: Routledge, 2007). 39 Michael Scott, ‘Hacking the Material World’, Wired 1: 3 (July/August 1993). 40 E. Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub, ‘Hacker Practice: Moral Genres and the Cultural Articulation of Liberalism’, Anthropological Theory 8: 3 (September 2008). 41 Jonas Löwgren, ‘Origins of hacker culture(s)’, 2000, at webzone.k3.mah.se/k3jolo/HackerCultures/origins.htm. 42 Eric S. Raymond, The New Hacker’s Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 310. 43 ‘The London Underground’, at sleepycity.net/posts/247/The_London_Underground. 44 James Nestor, ‘The Art of Urban Exploration’, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 August 2007. 45 There are about 10,000 registered users, according to Davenport (2011), and Zero, ‘The Anger Tunnel’, Drainor Magazine (2009) suggests there are probably about 3,000 active in the UK. 46 High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland; Luke Bennett, ‘Bunkerology – A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Urban Exploration’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 3 (2011). 47 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1934). 48 High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland, p. 63. 49 Similar to the work of Willis and Jefferson on ‘hippie culture’ in ‘The Cultural Meaning of Drug Use’, in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 2006). 50 Charles Arthur and Josh Halliday, ‘Lulzsec Leak: Is This the Beginning of the End for the Hackers?’


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

“Islamic law held that he had not intended to steal the book as paper and ink, but the ideas in the book—and unlike the paper and ink, these ideas were not tangible property,” writes historian Carla Hesse. These debates are timeless. Copyleft, it should be noted, is a less grandiose and more complex topic, its politics deftly analyzed by academics including Christopher Kelty (Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008) and Gabriella Coleman (Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012). Coleman, in particular, makes a compelling case that hacking culture, and by association copyleft, though “politically agnostic,” simultaneously upholds values including equalizing access to information, sharing, and unalienated labor that could be interpreted as progressive: “Hackers’ insistence on never losing access to the fruits of their labor—and indeed actively seeking to share these fruits with others—calls into being Karl Marx’s famous critique of estranged labor” (253). 34.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

So they let it be known that the Church of Scientology had sent this takedown notice, and it caught fire across the internet – and became the latest target of the moment for a trolling operation that quickly escalated on a scale like nothing that had been seen before. The operation quickly caught the eye of an academic researcher and became the start of what grew into years of anthropological study. Now a professor at the anthropology department at Harvard, Gabriella Coleman first came across my radar when I was an early-career journalist following Anonymous, 4chan and the hacktivist movements around it. Whenever you entered an Anonymous discussion thread or chat channel,21 Biella (as she was known) would be there, tolerated as a constant presence by the Anons, like some cool aunt of the collective.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008). 2. Jodi Dean, “The Communist Horizon,” lecture at No-Space in Brooklyn, New York (July 28, 2011), vimeo.com/27327373. 3. W3Techs, “Usage of Operating Systems for Websites,” w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/all. 4. E. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2012); Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits; David Bollier, “Inventing the Creative Commons,” in Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (New Press, 2008). 5. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (Pantheon, 1986), 138–141; see also Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Judy Malloy, ed., Social Media Archeology and Poetics (MIT Press, 2016). 6.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Previous drafts have benefited from the valuable comments of Geof Bowker, Peter Sachs Collopy, Paul Edwards, Bernard Geoghegan, Lydia Liu, Eden Medina, and Mara Mills on cybernetics and information theory, while Alex Bochannek, Elena Doshlygina, Michael Gordin, Loren Graham, Martin Kragh, Adam Leeds, Ksenia Tatarchenko, and others have taught me much about the Soviet situation. At the risk of leaving many others unnamed, I would also like to thank Colin Agur, Karina Alexanyan, Chris W. Anderson, Mark Andrejevic, Rosemary Avance, Burcu Baykurt, Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Jonah Bossewitch, Gabriella Coleman, Laura DeNardis, Jeffrey Drouin, Maxwell Foxman, Alexander Galloway, Gina Giotta, Abe Gong, Eugene Gorny, Orit Halpern, Lewis Hyde, Andryi Ishchenko, Carolyn Kane, John Kelly, Beth Knobel, Liel Liebovitz, Deborah Lubken, Kembrew McLeod, David Park, Ri Pierce-Grove, Amit Pinchevski, Jefferson Pooley, Erica Robles, Natalia Roudakova, Chris Russil, Jonathan Saunders, Limor Schifman, Trebor Scholz, Steven Schrag, Zohar Sella, Lea Shaver, Bernhard Siegert, Peter Simonson, Thomas Streeter, Ted Striphas, Patrik Svensson, McKenzie Wark, David Weinberger, and Jonathan Zittrain for helpful conversations and comments on drafts over the years.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

survey of 2,784 open source developers: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger, et al., “Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study,” International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht, Netherlands, 2002, Figure 35: “Reasons to Join and to Stay in OS/FS Community.” “improve my own damn software”: Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004): 507–19. it had only 30 employees: Gary Wolf, “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess,” Wired 17(9), August 24, 2009. “as smart as everyone”: Larry Keeley, “Ten Commandments for Success on the Net,” Fast Company, June 30, 1996.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“‘If I Want It, It’s OK’: Usenet and the (Outer) Limits of Free Speech.” Information Society 12 (4): 365–86. PHILLIPS, WHITNEY. 2015. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. PHILLIPS, WHITNEY, JESSICA L. BEYER, AND GABRIELLA COLEMAN. 2017. “Trolling Scholars Debunk the Idea That the Alt-Right’s Shitposters Have Magic Powers.” Motherboard, March 22. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4k549/trolling-scholars-debunk-the-idea-that-the-alt-rights-trolls-have-magic-powers. PLANTIN, JEAN-CHRISTOPHE, CARL LAGOZE, PAUL N.


pages: 384 words: 112,971

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

I am grateful beyond measure to Yaniv Soha, Anne Collins, Sarah Porter, and Tom Killingbeck for their keen editorial input and to Daniel Novack and Natalie Cereseto for their valuable legal advice and good humor. I am thankful to everyone at Doubleday U.S., Random House Canada, and HarperCollins U.K. for all the hard work they did to transform my words into an object out in the world. I owe so much to my earliest readers and friends: Sarah Chihaya, Michelle Cho, Ming-Qi Chu, Gabriella Coleman, Maggie Doherty, Eve Fine, Gloria Fisk, Shanon Fitzpatrick, Len Gutkin, Amy Hungerford, Evan Kindley, Sean McCann, Marcel Przymusinski, Sarah Rose, Poulami Roychowdhury, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Richard Jean So, and Rachel Watson. Kasia van Schaik read my manuscript several times, always with an exacting and generous eye.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

In my view, some uses should be forbidden, and some uses should be permitted, and only very few uses should require specific consent by the person whose data is at issue. I have also benefitted enormously here (and elsewhere) from the work of Julie Cohen. See, especially, Julie E. Cohen, “The Surveillance-Innovation Complex: The Irony of the Participatory Turn,” in The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, ed. Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, and Tamar Tembeck (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 207–26. 93.Tim Wu believes there is a wrong here with a remedy, The Curse of Bigness (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018). Others are clear there’s a competitive harm, but unsure about the remedy.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

“The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy.” Philosophy & Technology 31, no. 2 (2018): 213–33. . Configuring the Networked Self. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. . “The Surveillance–Innovation Complex: The Irony of the Participatory Turn.” In The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age, edited by Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, and Tamar Tembeck, 207–26. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. . “What Privacy Is For.” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 7 (2013): 1904–33. Cohen, Noam. “It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know.” The New York Times, March 26, 2011.


pages: 426 words: 117,775

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

More recently, cultural scholar Douglas Thomas has used Levy’s work along with other primary documents and accounts, such as “The Hacker Manifesto,” to further explore the implications of a hacker ethos (see Thomas, Hacker Culture; The Mentor, “Conscience of a Hacker”). This ethos does not exist in a vacuum; other scholars have explored the interplay between these values and the economic, social, and legal conditions in which they exist. Gabriella Coleman examines this context in detail, charting the heterogeneous movements that fall under the umbrella of “hackers” and showing that Levy’s account is specific to MIT rather than being indicative of hackers more broadly—though it is at least legible across much of the technology world (see, e.g., Coleman, “Hacker Conference”; Coleman and Golub, “Hacker Practice”; Coleman, Coding Freedom).


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

“The discussion pages also work to discursively discipline new or dissenting contributors. It is in these spaces that undesirables are ‘sorted out’” (Tkacz, 2010, p. 50). After all, bureaucratic control helps in justifying the dehumanization of certain categories of people, through creating pseudorational, linear scripts of behavior (Bauman, 1989/2000; Burrell, 1997). E. Gabriella Coleman’s description of hackers can be equally applied to Wikipedians: Much in the same way that a guild artisan learned and followed the techniques cultivated by their guild, a hacker enters a world of standardized conventions and preferences and unique social organization when volunteering on a free software project. (2001, p. 29) Newcomers need to prove their usefulness to a Wikipedia but also, through an apprenticeship of a sort, show that they have acquired the knowledge of customs, rituals, and rules.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Don Peck, “They’re Watching You at Work,” The Atlantic, December 2013, 76. When work is largely done in computing environments, the assessment can be very granular. Software engineers are assessed for their contributions to open source projects, with points awarded when others use their code. E. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013) (exploring Debian open source community and assessment of community members’ contributions); Stephen Baker, The Numerati (New York: Houghton-Miffl in, 2008), 33. 87. Mat Honan, “I Flunked My Social Media Background Check.


pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

In response to a 2012 accusation by the Daily Mail that the hacking group Anonymous now had the capacity to “shut down the entire U.S. power grid” they said, “that’s right, we’re definitely taking down the power grid. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when all the equipment we use to mount our campaign is rendered completely useless”(Gabriella Coleman, personal conversation, 2012). See also William Pentland, “Push Back: Utility Coalition Fights Federal Cyber Security Standards,” FierceEnergy, September 24, 2015, http://www.fierceenergy.com/story/push-back-utility-coalition-fights-federal-cyber-security-standards/2015-09-24. from renewables by 2030: Senate Bill 350, Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015.