Category: book reviews

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

May all academics aspire to write such a book as Biella has here. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is a remarkably accessible work of ethnography on a technically and ethically seeming inaccessible community and subject matter: Anonymous and its politics. Biella’s account is absolutely gripping—I struggled to put this book down. Moreover, I was enchanted (as intentioned) by the story she weaves using the backdrop of humanity’s mythological reflexions—the parallel and polarizing Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies of Anonymous as objective, transparent truth advocates as well as hackers for lulzy pleasure, embodying the trickster spirits of gods like Loki or Enki. Biella successfully justifies her role as ethnographer-enchantress to pull us from our cynical doubts about these so-called criminals into the heady excitement of Anonymous’s world, where we might better appreciate the reasons why they did what they did and the profoundly unique mark on recent history they have made.

Perhaps, I am biased as a fan and student of creative forms of technology-augmented political action and a friend of Biella. Perhaps, this explains why I found the Acknowledgments and Note on Sources sections as absorbing as the main text. But I think it’s more than my personal feelings and connections. I think it’s also the effect of an exceptional piece of scholarship and storytelling.

Biella packs more than five years of participant observation, interviews, and study into a tight argument for why we cannot dismiss Anonymous as mere criminals. We get firsthand accounts of the political rationales of key Anons and watch their savvy use of media and mobilization tactics activate and embolden geeks into activists, and capture the attention and imagination of the world. Biella provides evidence of the positive impact their hacking of computer systems and the media cycle has had supporting ex-Scientology victims, Arab Spring protesters, and Occupy Wall Street activists. Furthermore, she illustrates how they have helped establish an important contemporary tradition of whistleblowing around civil rights violations and corruption in public and private sectors cresting with the Manning and ongoing Snowden leaks.

Biella also reminds us that neither are their justifications clean nor their actions obviously positive in outcome, even to her. When Anonymous chose to shine its light on certain rape cases in the US and Canada, they likely revictimized the victims in the process of pushing for justice to proceed. And the infighting of Anonymous among itself or with the historical hacker movements they nod to like anti-sec blur things further. Anonymous is far from monolithic or in consensus, and this has meant some of their operations are contradictory in their goals and ethics. Still, we find much to admire in the decentralized, anti-fame-seeking nature that persists and accomplishes much in spite of itself. Anonymous is a new kind of movement that defies simple categories.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy will change your mind about Anonymous, the utility of hacktivism and its ethical and moral foundations, and hopefully the unfairness in how it’s been criminalized. Pick it up now.

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is not about designing “a people’s platform.” This book is a critique of the state of the media and internet technology industry, which often uses “for the people” style rhetoric to justify its profit-seeking and control-oriented design decisions. The socio-technical system of our current media ecosystem is not “open” or “democratic” or “free” in real terms; tech entrepreneurs and pundits are selling investors, consumers, and policymakers on a disingenuous vision of the future of cultural production. We may all have better access to the means of production now, but new elites own the means and modes of distribution—and that is where the political and economic value now lies.

Astra Taylor is at her best in this book when she is critiquing the media and internet industries as a content creator. As a documentary filmmaker and savvy storyteller of her own and her friends’ cases, she successfully humanizes what the free culture movement as a philosophy and business strategy has meant for creators. These are people who have worked hard to maintain editorial independence from corporate commissions, branding, big labels, etc. They have a progressive politics that is often in resonance with the core ideas of free culture regarding shared ownership of cultural goods and even an anti-institutional flare. But when big companies adopt this same rhetoric, they are doing so to sell advertising against the free culture on their platforms, leaving little or nothing for the creators.

The system makes more money for mainstream artists but the long tail just means that all the independent things are free too, without the economies of scale offered by Vevo Music Videos on YouTube or record sales driven by Spotify plays. Filmmakers, musicians, and journalists are all suffering from this in ways that are waved away because anyone COULD make it big, go viral, etc. They can be their own personal brand and through hard work, make a living. But, ironically, it’s harder than ever to make a living. The philosophy suggest that those who love to make culture should we content doing so without payment.

Unfortunately, a lot of this terrain is familiar. Taylor goes through much of the key ideas and books that either booster or criticize the internet’s potential for more, better, and freer exchange of culture and ideas. Her summaries help establish her legitimacy entering this space—she knows the literature. But the “he said this” and “he said that” is across such a broad array of issues and areas that her core argument gets lost in the middle of the book as she tries to connect the dots and touch everything relevant.

Finally, I wish the suggestions in the end for addressing the problems were more concrete and less hand-wavy. The title and subtitle suggest a radical proposal for democratic technology is forthcoming, but it’s not there. As a primer for like-minded activists and culture creators, this book could be very useful. But the audience of scholars embedded in this space will have to search for the nuggets of helpful new perspectives and arguments amidst a lot of rehashed summaries of Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr.

Glad it was written, her voice is important, but it left me wanting.

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The Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance by Tim Maly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Emily Horne and Tim Maly offer a contemporary tour through the carceral city and disciplinary society. Their “field guide” to the “conceptual terrain” of modern surveillance is a tour through prisons, ports, and financial centers—places where surveillance have encroached on their inhabitants beyond their expectations and certainly beyond the expectations of those whose idea it was to put it in place.

This field guide is mostly a tour through the ideas of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and the post-structuralist Michel Foucault. Using Bentham’s idea of the panopticon (or “inspection house”) prison design, Horne and Maly with the help of Foucault show us how the concept of asymmetrical surveillance has become the standard by which society polices itself.

Most critics point to ubiquitous cameras and the data collection involved with every digital transaction as the full realization of a panoptic society we are resigned to now live in. But this book only briefly talks about CCTV cameras and iPhones. The priority is given to Foucault’s concepts of the carceral city and disciplinary society. In the interest of security, we have adopted the design principles of prisons and brought them into every city to control the flow and behavior of people. Furthermore, these rules, norms, and fears have been internalized: we discipline ourselves.

This is not a wholly bad thing. We hope that others feel certain restrictions on their activities that might harm others. It means we are able to produce sophisticated technologies like the iPhone. And Bentham wanted this kind of self-discipline in prisons in order to reduce the need for corporal punishment. However, there might be psychological traumas unforeseen by these efforts. And now that this physical surveillance and carceral structures are less visible—subsumed in gardens that block explosive-laden trucks or passively tracking our moves through the city—what does this mean to our power to resist: how do we understand the power being wielded?

Unfortunately, this short book doesn’t let us dive deep on these questions. They are left as questions, sometimes not even fully articulated. Horne and Maly offer us a guide through some key ideas and ways they have become real and pervasive in modern society. But I wish they didn’t limit themselves to conceptual terrain. This book would have benefited from photos of the architectures of modern surveillance and a more comprehensive set of activities that walk us through the ideas in order to question and reflect on the society we have created—where we are pleased with it and where we find it lacking or even abhorrent.

Read it for the Bentham and Foucault and for the clever examples. Find a reading group for the rest.

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In Mistrust We Trust by Ivan Krastev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ivan Krastev paints a bleak picture of the current state of democracy around the world. He argues that we so deeply mistrust our democratic institutions that it’s unclear what a corrective path forward looks like.

In Mistrust We Trust builds off Ivan’s 2012 TED talk in which he makes an abbreviated version of his argument based on five revolutions he identifies as contributing to the transformation of democratic society. First, the cultural and social revolution of the sixties destroyed the idea of a collective purpose by increasing individualism. This was followed by the market revolution of the 1980s whereby we saw a huge increase in inequality—decoupling the reduction of inequality with the spread of democracy for the first time. Then there was the end of Communism and the Cold War, which tore social contract between elites and the people in Eastern Europe. Then, the internet revolution, which brought echo chambers and political ghettoes—making it more difficult to understand people who aren’t you. Finally, Ivan points to the brain sciences revolution as arming political consultants with the knowledge that emotional manipulation is more powerful than ideas.

While the theory of revolutions is interesting and worth reflecting on, the most compelling part of the book is Ivan’s critique of transparency as a political religion riddled with inaccurate assumptions of how to “manage mistrust” in government. He argues that in fact we are fostering mistrust by trying to keep our representatives honest through monitoring, in other words we are assuming that control over others is equal to trust.

Without public trust democracy doesn’t work and a sustained campaign of transparency will only make it worse. We can’t simply design a foolproof system of good governance because that’s insufficient to convince us it is foolproof; it will merely press us to inspect it closer, confident we will find corruption lurking.

Ivan warns readers at the beginning of the book that it will not offer answers or solutions. It is a provocation. And I think it is an important one, especially for the civic activists and technologists in my circles. In some ways, Ivan is calling for the community-based and community-building efforts we celebrate in participatory design. BUT, if those efforts are always in opposition to and alternative from public institutions, rather than attempts to build them up into something we can believe in again, will things just keep getting worse?

A short, thought-provoking “must” read.

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