Giovanni Ziccardi: Resistance, Liberation Technology and Human Rights in the Digital Age (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, censorship, crowdsourcing, cyberwar, facebook, hacking, hacktivism, human rights, internet, internet activism, liberation technologies, open data, politics, resistance, social media, surveillance, technology, transparency, twitter, wikileaks
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
Alastair Fuad-Luke: Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, bauhaus, crowdsourcing, design, ecology, environment, graphic design, metadesign, open source, participation, sustainability, sustainable design, technology, wikipedia
Design academics and practitioners are facing a multiplicity of challenges in a dynamic, complex, world moving faster than the current design paradigm which is largely tied to the values and imperatives of commercial enterprise. Current education and practice need to evolve to ensure that the discipline of design meets sustainability drivers and equips students, teachers and professionals for the near-future. New approaches, methods and tools are urgently required as sustainability expands the context for design and what it means to be a ‘designer’. Design activists, who comprise a diverse range of designers, teachers and other actors, are setting new ambitions for design. They seek to fundamentally challenge how, where and when design can catalyse positive impacts to address sustainability. They are also challenging who can utilise the power of the design process. To date, examination of contemporary and emergent design activism is poorly represented in the literature. This book will provide a rigorous exploration of design activism that will re-vitalise the design debate and provide a solid platform for students, teachers, design professionals and other disciplines interested in transformative (design) activism. Design Activism provides a comprehensive study of contemporary and emergent design activism. This activism has a dual aim – to make positive impacts towards more sustainable ways of living and working; and to challenge and reinvigorate design praxis,. It will collate, synthesise and analyse design activist approaches, processes, methods, tools and inspirational examples/outcomes from disparate sources and, in doing so, will create a specific canon of work to illuminate contemporary design discourse. Design Activism reveals the power of design for positive social and environmental change, design with a central activist role in the sustainability challenge. Inspired by past design activists and set against the context of global-local tensions, expressions of design activism are mapped. The nature of contemporary design activism is explored, from individual/collective action to the infrastructure that supports it generating powerful participatory design approaches, a diverse toolbox and inspirational outcomes. This is design as a political and social act, design to enable adaptive societal capacity for co-futuring.
Publisher Earthscan, 2009
ISBN 1844076458, 9781844076451
244 pages
interview with the author (Juha Huuskonen, April 2012)
PDF (updated on 2012-10-30)
Comment (0)Rebecca MacKinnon: Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, censorship, civil society, commons, democracy, facebook, freedom, google, internet, internet activism, liberation technologies, net neutrality, technology
Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook’s obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it is clear that the corporations that rule cyberspace are making decisions that show little or no concern for their impact on political freedom. In Consent of the Networked, internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it’s time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they’re sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. The challenge is that building accountability into the fabric of cyberspace demands radical thinking in a completely new dimension. The corporations that build and operate the technologies that create and shape our digital world are fundamentally different from the Chevrons, Nikes, and Nabiscos whose behavior and standards can be regulated quite effectively by laws, courts, and bureaucracies answerable to voters.The public revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace will be useless if it focuses downstream at the point of law and regulation, long after the software code has already been written, shipped, and embedded itself into the lives of millions of people. The revolution must be focused upstream at the source of the problem. Political innovation—the negotiated relationship between people with power and people whose interests and rights are affected by that power—needs to center around the point of technological conception, experimentation, and early implementation.The purpose of technology—and of the corporations that make it—is to serve humanity, not the other way around. It’s time to wake up and act before the reversal becomes permanent.
Publisher Basic Books, 2012
ISBN 0465024424, 9780465024421
352 pages
review (Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front)
review (John Kampfner, The Guardian)
Let’s take back the Internet! (author’s TED talk)
author
publisher
google books
PDF (EPUB)
Afterword to the Paperback Edition (HTML, added on 2013-4-19)