[PeDAGoG] Hackers as Vital Disruptors for Democracy

[Nadarajah Manickam]

*BOOK LAUNCH & LECTURE ON "CODING DEMOCRACY: HOW HACKERS ARE DISRUPTING
POWER, SURVEILLANCE, AND AUTHORITARIANISM"*
MAUREEN WEBB

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 5:30PM – 7:00PM PST, VIA ZOOM WEBINAR (REGISTRATION
REQUIRED)

Organized by SFU's Institute for the Humanities;
Co-sponsored by SFU's Vancity Office for Community Engagement, Lawyers'
Rights Watch Canada, & B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA)

https://www.facebook.com/events/212470693893864
http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-institute/public-events/public-events/2021/coding-democracy.html

Register HERE
<https://sfu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gbX_IVcjTNio7nVAK19v8A>

DEFENDING DEMOCRACY: ONE OF 24 BOOKS TO HELP UNDERSTAND THE WORLD IN 2021
(THE MIT PRESS)

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.

Webb travels to Berlin, where she visits the Chaos Communication Camp, a
flagship event in the hacker world; to Silicon Valley, where she reports on
the Apple-FBI case, the significance of Russian troll farms, and the
hacking of tractor software by desperate farmers; to Barcelona, to meet the
hacker group XNet, which has helped bring nearly 100 prominent Spanish
bankers and politicians to justice for their role in the 2008 financial
crisis; and to Harvard and MIT, to investigate the institutionalization of
hacking. Webb describes an amazing array of hacker experiments that could
dramatically change the current political economy. These ambitious hacks
aim to displace such tech monoliths as Facebook and Amazon; enable worker
cooperatives to kill platforms like Uber; give people control over their
data; automate trust; and provide citizens a real say in governance, along
with capacity to reach consensus. Coding Democracy is not just another
optimistic declaration of technological utopianism; instead, it provides
the tools for an urgently needed upgrade of democracy in the digital era.

BOOK REVIEW

I’ll admit it: Hacker triumphalism makes me nauseous. Ever since Anonymous
strapped on Guy Fawkes masks and started digitally sticking it to
Scientologists and the Westboro Baptist Church, certain parts of the
internet have become convinced that God is a hacker, here to wash the hard
drives of the impure with cleansing viruses. Especially hackers. Coding
Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and
Authoritarianism, by lawyer and human rights activist Maureen Webb, managed
to reach through my comfortable layers of snark-justified disinterest. Webb
doesn’t just praise cypherpunks for being the edgy little hornets’ nest
kickers they are. She’s building a powerful case for the fact that
technology as we know it—omnipresent, flawed, world-improving—has become so
entrenched and static that it really does need the hackers worrying the
edges of its firewalls. In Webb’s telling, hackers aren’t heroes destined
to bring the world to a grand new order of their own transgressive
imaginings. They’re agents of positive chaos. —Emma Grey Ellis, WIRED's 13
Must-Read Books for Spring

SPEAKER

Maureen Webb is a labour, human rights and constitutional lawyer. Her book,
Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance and
Authoritarianism, published in 2020 by The MIT Press, made Wired magazine’s
“Thirteen Must Read Books for Spring 2020” list. Also the author of
Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post 9-11
World (San Francisco: City Lights, 2007), Maureen’s work has been praised
by voices as diverse as Craig Newmark, Randi Weingarten, Cory Doctorow,
Andrew Feenberg, Jeremy Waldron, and Mark Danner. She’s been invited to
speak in many venues, including Chatham House, Virtual Futures, the Oxford
Literary Festival, the London Front Line club, the Chicago Council on
Global Affairs, the World Affairs Council of California, and most recently
the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Part of the activist
community in BC, she’s served on the boards of Lawyers Rights Watch Canada
and the BC Civil Liberties Association, and from time to time, taught
public interest law at UBC law school. In addition to her writing about
technology and democracy, she’s written many pieces on the human rights
dimensions of national security. An article she published on the Canadian
Anti-terrorism Act was cited extensively in the trial judgment in R. v.
Khawaja.

https://www.facebook.com/events/212470693893864
http://www.sfu.ca/humanities-institute/public-events/public-events/2021/coding-democracy.html


-- 
Nat/Nada
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