Coding Democracy: How a Growing Hacking Movement Is Disrupting Concentrations of Power, Mass Surveillance, and Authoritarianism in the Digital Age - Maureen Webb, Cory Doctorow - foreword

Category: Adults, Political
Language: English
Keywords: Democracy Elections Law Political Science

Written by Maureen Webb, Cory Doctorow - foreword
Read by Wendy Tremont King
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Some of the file names are truncated.

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 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.
©2020 Maureen Webb (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
mit press

Dr. Maureen Webb

Maureen Webb is a labour, human rights and constitutional lawyer. Her book, Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance and Authoritarianism, published 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, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, the Gray Area (San Francisco) and most recently the Goethe Institute’s One Zero Society/Zeitgeister forum. Maureen has testified before Commons and Senate committees ontechnology and national security matters, taught comparative national security law at UBC Law School, and written numerous articles for peer-reviewed legal journals, including one on the review of the Canadian Anti-terrorism Act that was cited extensively in the trial judgment in R. v. Khawaja.