Indispensable reading for all who are concerned about cyberspace, corporate capture and democracy.

[ancianita]

Last edited Mon Oct 31, 2022, 01:50 PM - Edit history (2)

From the author:

Who controls code? is the urgent civics question.

A struggle is taking place right now as corporations, states, criminal elements, and parts of civil society vie to build the coded environment around us. Hackers are savants in this world. But their identity is protean. Sought after for their talents, almost folkloric in status, they’ve been recruited and reviled, celebrated and imprisoned.

While there are IT authoritarians capable of bringing down critical infrastructure and sowing strife between nations, hackers might also be vital disrupters in the emerging digital environment with its dystopic, anti-democratic tendencies.

There is an astounding array of hacker experiments underway right now that could fundamentally change the current political economy.

Hacking can become a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a growing social movement in which ordinary citizens are taking things into their own hands when reform is out of sight.

At a time when people’s faith in elites to govern has never been lower, hacking is inspiring a new wave of activism, a new way of thinking and acting, as citizens fight to take back their democracies.

… Citizen hackers are inventing new forms of distributed democracy. The central question will be how we ordinary citizens and tech insiders go forward together to accomplish the hard work of democracy in the digital age.
We’ve got to try.

From Cory Doctorow:

This is a book about hackers and hacker politics: the nuts-and-bolts and the big picture. The people who appear in it are, like our fellow human beings -- deeply flawed, cracked vessels who struggle to contain bad impulses and to let the pure water of our noble ones pour out freely.

Hacker politics are anti-authoritarian because hackers know that authorities are just as damaged as they are. Hacker politics are pluralistic because hackers know that unchecked power is a catastrophe in the making, because without those checks, the bugs in the system will run wild and brick the device before you even know there's something wrong there. It is a political ethos that accounts for the fallibility of human beings as much as for their unlimited potential. It is designed to avoid making things worse, even if it doesn't always know how to make them better.

Hacker politics may not solve our problems, but as this book makes clear, they are going to be part of the solution.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. +1 for Cory Doctorow endorsement. . . nt

[ancianita]

7. Have you read

Doctorow's Little Brother and Homeland? Highly recommended for all levels of users; two great books that illustrate why and how this one can work to save us from privatization, from military to media to institutional levels.

[alwaysinasnit]

2. k&r for visibility

[ancianita]

3. TY.

fyi, Amazon's got only 12 left in stock.

[ancianita]

4. More on Facebook today from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on "How to ditch FB without losing

your friends, or family, or customers and communities."


https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

[msfiddlestix]

6. ✔️ Ty n/t

[ancianita]

5. More on the Facebook platform: "10 universal steps for open source code review" from opensource.com

I gotta say, FB's AI is responding to my interests!

Stuff I might not have the capacity to do, but my kids and grandkids would definitely want and actually do.

https://opensource.com/article/22/10/code-review?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAYMartin&fbclid=IwAR07arZbZOgX5vm-TcivnuLqK78bgw6yl_Qk4ZBpOh1a_WWZr-SpcDW9JHs