Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism

Hackers as vital disruptors, inspiring a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens take back democracy.

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.

Author: Maureen Webb
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 07/27/2021
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.80w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780262542289

About the Author
Webb, Maureen: - Maureen Webb is a labor lawyer and human rights activist. She is the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World and has taught national security law as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia.