Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, The Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (2013)

Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back.

Written by the core Internet figures – video gamers, Tea Partiers, tech titans, lefty activists and ordinary Americans among them – who defeated a pair of special interest bills called SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (“Protect IP Act”), Hacking Politics provides the first detailed account of the glorious, grand chaos that led to the demise of that legislation and helped foster an Internet-based network of amateur activists.

Included are more than thirty original contributions from across the political spectrum, featuring writing by Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz; Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School; novelist Cory Doctorow; Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA.); Jamie Laurie (of the alt-rock/hip-hop group The Flobots); Ron Paul; Mike Masnick, CEO and founder of Techdirt; Kim Dotcom, internet entrepreneur; Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future; Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Nicole Powers of Suicide Girls; Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, and many more.

Edited by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, and David Segal
Publisher OR Books, May 2013
ISBN 9781939293046
316 pages
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Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim (eds.): The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad (2010)

A sparkling anthology of revolt and resistance to orthodoxy and repression.

Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest—rallying others around them and inspiring uprisings in eras yet to come. Their echoes reverberate from Ancient Greece, China and Egypt, via the dissident poets and philosophers of Islam and Judaism, through to the Arab slave revolts and anti-Ottoman rebellions of the Middle Ages. These sources were tapped during the Dutch and English revolutions at the outset of the Modern world, and in turn flowed into the French, Haitian, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions. More recently, resistance to war and economic oppression has flared up on battlefields and in public spaces from Beijing and Baghdad to Caracas and Los Angeles.

This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent will become an invaluable resource, reminding today’s citizens that these traditions will never die.

Preface by Tariq Ali
Publisher Verso Books, 2010
ISBN 1844674487, 9781844674480
366 pages

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Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986/2005)

Simone Weil was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century: a philosopher, theologian, critic, sociologist and political activist. This anthology spans the wide range of her thought, and includes an extract from her best-known work The Need for Roots, exploring the ways in which modern society fails the human soul; her thoughts on the misuse of language by those in power; and the essay “Human Personality”, a late, beautiful reflection on the rights and responsibilities of every individual. All are marked by the unique combination of literary eloquence and moral perspicacity that characterised Weil’s ideas and inspired a generation of thinkers and writers both in and outside her native France.

First published by Virago Press, 1986
Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles
Publisher Penguin Books, 2005
Penguin Classics series
ISBN 0141188197, 9780141188195
312 pages

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Patrick Lichty: Variant Analyses: Interrogations of New Media Art and Culture (2013)

Lichty’s range of commentary and analysis dissects nearly two decades of what has now become new media society. Before Facebook’s IPO and Wikileaks’ media storm, artist-as-activists experimented with data gloves, virtual world performance, and anonymous, anarchic disruptions determined to bewilder traditional enclaves of art and political society. In this collection Lichty presents several such experiments in distributed creativity: collaborations across a range of technologies and platforms, where authorship becomes a vague placeholder and sometimes acts as a performance in of itself, and the artwork is equally in flux, always in process, and often disappearing into bits.

These essays provide an extensive and timely overview of critical thought on new media culture, written by an observer-participant who has made major contributions to the sociopolitical movements he archives. Spanning art and new media theory, activism and literary criticism, this assembly seeks to understand the networked society in flux: what it means when the virtual integrates with the physical, and when newer, uncategorized media works prompt major shifts in cultural production and change the very definition of art and protest. As a veteran observer of the technological society, Lichty has produced the ideal guidebook for exploring the wilderness of our digital mediascapes, both past and present.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, April 2013
Theory on Demand series, Vol. 12
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License
ISBN 9789081857543
169 pages

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Giovanni Ziccardi: Resistance, Liberation Technology and Human Rights in the Digital Age (2013)

This book explains strategies, techniques, legal issues and the relationships between digital resistance activities, information warfare actions, liberation technology and human rights. It studies the concept of authority in the digital era and focuses in particular on the actions of so-called digital dissidents. Moving from the difference between hacking and computer crimes, the book explains concepts of hacktivism, the information war between states, a new form of politics (such as open data movements, radical transparency, crowd sourcing and “Twitter Revolutions”), and the hacking of political systems and of state technologies. The book focuses on the protection of human rights in countries with oppressive regimes.

- Deals with digital resistance activities all over the world
- First book to describe political and human rights issues in Egypt, Tunisia, Cuba and Yemen
- A critical analysis of the WikiLeaks case

Publisher Springer, 2013
Volume 7 van Law, Governance and Technology series
ISBN 9400752768, 9789400752764
328 pages
via Marcell Mars via Jaromil

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Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, No 1-27 (1977-1993)

Classic feminist art magazine from the 1970s through the 1990. Collectively produced issues featured a wide variety of artists’ work, essays, prose and poetry.

The founding members of the Heresies Collective included Patsy Beckert, Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Elizabeth Hess, Harmony Hammond, Joyce Kozloff, Arlene Ladden, Lucy Lippard, Mary Miss, Marty Pottenger, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Snyder, May Stevens, Michelle Stuart, Susana Torre, Elizabeth Weatherford, and Sally Webster.

Publisher Heresies Collective, New York
ISSN 0146-3411
via Heresies PDF Archive

The Heretics, trailer of documentary film by Joan Braderman, 10 min, 2009
View article index

Heresies 1: Feminism, Art and Politics (Jan 1977)
Heresies 2: Patterns of Communication and Space Among Women (May 1977)
Heresies 3: Lesbian Art and Artists (Fall 1977)
Heresies 4: Women’s Traditional Arts – The Politics of Aesthetics (1978)
Heresies 5: The Great Goddess (1978)
Heresies 6: On Women and Violence (Summer 1978)
Heresies 7: Women Working Together (Spring 1979)
Heresies 8: Third World Women (1979)
Heresies 9: Organized Women Divided (1980)
Heresies 10: Women and Music (1980)
Heresies 11: Making Room – Women and Architecture (1981)
Heresies 12: Sex Issue (1981)
Heresies 13: Earthkeeping / Earthshaking: Feminism & Ecology (1981)
Heresies 14: The Women’s Pages (1982)
Heresies 15: Racism is the Issue (1982)
Heresies 16: Film / Video / Media (1983)
Heresies 17: Acting Up!: Women in Theater and Performance (1984)
Heresies 18: Mothers, Mags, and Movie Stars – Feminism and Class (1985)
Heresies 19: Satire (1985)
Heresies 20: Heresies (1985)
Heresies 21: Food is a Feminist Issue (1987)
Heresies 22: Art in Unestablished Channels (1987)
Heresies 23: Coming of Age (1988)
Heresies 24: 12 Years (Anniversary Issue) (1989)
Heresies 25: The Art of Education (1990)
Heresies 26: A Journal of Feminist Post-Totalitarian Criticism (1992)
Heresies 27: LATINA – A Journal of Ideas (1993)
Download all 27 issues (ZIP’d PDFs)

Jan Cohen-Cruz (ed.): Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (1998)

Radical Street Performance is the first volume to collect together the fascinating array of writings by activists, directors, performers, critics, scholars and journalists who have documented street theatre around the world.

More than thirty essays explore the myriad forms this most public of performances can take: agit-prop, invisible theatre, demonstrations and rallies, direct action, puppetry, parades and pageants, performance art, guerrilla theatre, circuses.

These essays look at performaces in Europe, Africa, China, India and both the Americas. They describe engagement with issues as diverse as abortion, colonialism, the environment and homophobia, to name only a few. Introduced by editor Jan Cohen-Cruz, the essays are organized into thematic sections: Agitating; Witnessing; Involving; Imagining; and Popularizing.

Publisher Routledge, 1998
Performance Theory series
ISBN 0415152313, 9780415152310
302 pages

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