Contents

Foreword by Cory Doctorow

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Acknowledgments

1 The Hacker Ethic: Germany’s Chaos Computer Club and the Genealogy of the Hacker Ethos

In Berlin

Getting to the Chaos Commmunication Camp

First-Wave Hackers: Hacking Culture in the US from the Late 1950s, including the Hands-On Imperative and Other Principles of a Hacker Ethos

Second-Wave Hackers: Computers and Code for the People, including the People’s Computer Company, The WELL, Homebrew, Silicon Valley, RMS, and Free Software

First-Wave Europe: The Early Development of European Hacker Culture in the 1970s and 1980s

The Early Days of the Chaos Computer Club

1989: A Watershed Year for Germany and the CCC

The Fall of the Wall

The 1990s: Hackerdom Expands, Silicon Valley Takes Off, and a Schism Develops between the Philosophies of Proprietary Software and Free Software

First Impressions: Be Excellent to Each Other

2 The Hacker Challenge: Cypherpunks on the Electronic Frontier

Third-Wave Hackers: The Cypherpunks

Fellow Travelers, Reluctant Heroes, and the Cryptowars of the 1990s

The Smart-Ass Antipodean

3 A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century: Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful

Code Is Law, and the Onion Router Proves It

WikiLeaks

A New Kind of Cypherpunk

Snowden

A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century and the Concept of Popular Sovereignty

4 The Burden of Security: The Challenges for the Ordinary User

Security 101

The Sakharovs

Berlin: City of Freedom, City of Exiles

A Cryptoparty

5 Democracy in Cyberspace: First, the Governance Problems

Harry

Internet Governance: “Loraxes Who Speak for the Trees”

Harry Redux

Of Trees and Tongues

What Is Democracy? Or How to Govern Democratically in a World That Is No Longer Flat?

Hacker Governance: Noisy Square

6 Culture Clash: Hermes and the Italian HackingTeam

The Italian Embassy

Black, White, and Gray

7 Democracy in Cyberspace: Then the Design Problems

The Problem of Provable Security

The Problem of Designing Privacy-Preserving Protocols

Email: A Case in Point

Remaking the Internet for the Twenty-first Century

8 The Gathering Storm: The New Crypto—and Information and Net Neutrality and Free Software and Trust-Busting—Wars

A New Digital Era Civics Is Necessary

The New Cryptowars

The New Information Wars

The New Net Neutrality Wars

The New Free Software Wars

The New Trust-Busting Wars and the Unsustainability of Current Digital Capitalism

The Gathering Storm

9 Hacker Occupy: Bringing Occupy into Cyberspace and the Digital Era

The Occupy Movement

A Multitude of Diverse Experiments

Hacking Experiments Using Federated Technology, or the Basic Internet Structure

Hacking Experiments Using P2P Distributed Technology

Hacking Experiments Using the Blockchain

Solid?

The Blockchain Reality Check

“The Next System”

10 Distributed Democracy: Experiments in Spain, Italy, and Canada

Getting Control of Democratic Processes: The Indignant of Barcelona

Hacking Corruption: Xnet’s 15MpaRato

Hazte Banquero (Become a Banker)

Maddish: Platforms for the People

PartidoX

Homage to Catalonia

Hacking Electoral Politics in Italy: “A New Politics Is Possible”

Hacking Democratic Decision Making Itself: A Canadian Algorithm for Global Democracy

No More Wrecking Balls

11 The Value and Risk of Transgressive Acts: Corrective Feedback

Berlin’s Graffiti

The Value of Transgressive Acts

The Risk of Transgressive Acts

Hacker Crackdown 3.0

Where Power Meets Its Limits: The Making of Martyrs

Democratic Constitutionalism as Conversation Leading to Rough Consensus

12 Mainstreaming Hackerdom: A New Condition of Freedom

A City upon a Hill

Libre Planet, the Heart of Free Software

Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation Awards

Pros, Cons, and Disobedience Awards

MIT’s Media Lab

Harvard and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

Emergence

Enlivening a Moral Imagination

The Epicenter of a Civilization

Coda

Notes

Index