Coding Democracy reports on a phenomenon in the political landscape that many have been missing: the rapid spread of hacker culture and its potency to disrupt the concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and growing authoritarianism that have become the defining features of these first decades of the 21st century.
The book provides a comprehensive history of hackers and the genealogy of hacker ideas in America and Europe, and documents the growth of an important social movement. At its heart is the burgeoning, progressive hacker scene coalescing around the German Chaos Computer Club. “Hacking,” the book describes, is being embraced by citizens in many places around the world as a practice, an ethos and a metaphor. In this sense, “hacking” is a new kind of social activism which is all about distributed decision-making, distributed power, and distributed democracy.
The book links the hacker scene to Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados movement, and the current popular revolt against neoliberal policies. Explaining potential uses of federated, peer-to-peer, and blockchain technology, it canvasses a whole array of hacking experiments underway right now that could fundamentally change the present political economy. However, the book does not take a utopian or deterministic view of tech. Rather, it asks the very complex question, “What do citizens need to set in place in the digital age to make democracies work? How can societies hold onto and build out democracy with digital technology?”
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