Daniel Malone, Ralph Paine: Autonomous Anonymous: On Becoming Whatever (2008)

Publisher Gambia Castle Press
ISBN 9780473139735
28 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR)

Julian Assange, et al.: Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (2012)

Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the widespread use of strong cryptography (writing in code) as a route to progressive change. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of and visionary behind WikiLeaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since its inception in the 1980s.

Now, in what is sure to be a wave-making new book, Assange brings together a small group of cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyber-space to discuss whether electronic communications will emancipate or enslave us. Among the topics addressed are: Do Facebook and Google constitute “the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed,” perpetually tracking our location, our contacts and our lives? Far from being victims of that surveillance, are most of us willing collaborators? Are there legitimate forms of surveillance, for instance in relation to the “Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse” (money laundering, drugs, terrorism and pornography)? And do we have the ability, through conscious action and technological savvy, to resist this tide and secure a world where freedom is something which the Internet helps bring about?

The harassment of WikiLeaks and other Internet activists, together with attempts to introduce anti-file sharing legislation such as SOPA and ACTA, indicate that the politics of the Internet have reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future that guarantees, in the watchwords of the cypherpunks, “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful”; in the other lies an Internet that allows government and large corporations to discover ever more about internet users while hiding their own activities. Assange and his co-discussants unpick the complex issues surrounding this crucial choice with clarity and engaging enthusiasm.

With Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann
Publisher OR Books, New York/London, November 2012
ISBN 9781939293008
192 pages

Interview with Assange where he also speaks about the book (video, DemocracyNow!, 29 November 2012)
Commentary (The Guardian)
Review (Cryptome.org)

Publisher

PDF (PDF)
PDF (EPUB)
PDF (MOBI)
PDF (torrent, all 3 formats)
Video of Assange’s TV show The World Tomorrow interview the book is based on, Part 1, Part 2 (Youtube.com)

Andreas Broeckmann, Knowbotic Research (eds.): Opaque Presence: Manual of Latent Invisibilities (2010)

In the society of late capitalism – whether we understand it as a society of consumption, of control, or as a cybernetic society -, visibility and transparency are no longer signs of democratic openness, but rather of administrative availability. Spaces of agency and spaces of social friction are absorbed into the surfaces of technical processes. Even when the games of visibility, of attention, and of the mechanisms of subjectivation, may not always be a matter of bare survival, they are still a matter of maintaining and appropriating heterotopic zones in which resistance, if not freedom, can be postulated.

This book deals with questions of public visibility and strategic camouflage. It hinges on the public performance project ›macghillie – just a void‹ by the artist group knowbotic research, in which urban sites are visited by a figure, clad in a camouflage suit. The so-called ›Ghillie Suit‹ was originally invented in the 19th century for hunting and has since the First World War been used in military contexts all over the world. When worn in a contemporary public environment, its camouflage effects the anonymisation and the neutralisation of the person wearing it. The figure of the ›MacGhillie‹ oscillates between the hyperpresence of a mask, and visual redundancy. It traverses the modern urban environment in which conspicuity holds ambivalent currency, wavering between cumbersome affirmation and visual arbitrariness. In the project, the suit is made available to members of the public who can thus become macghillie for a while, testing the boundaries of subjectivity and identity.

With texts by Eva Meyer, Matthew Fuller, Andreas Broeckmann, Marcus Steinweg, knowbotic research, Tiqqun

Publisher Diaphanes, 2010
Edition Jardins des Pilotes
ISBN 3037341084, 9783037341087
156 pages

publisher
google books

PDF