Cryptomorphosis (2012)

This is a basic intro to hacktivism, the surveillance industry, online anonymity, encryption, filesharing, and darknets mainly intended for activists, occupiers, and all others passionate about using code and information for social change or just avoiding the seemingly all-seeing eye of the authorities.

Published in January 2012
BY-NC license
54 pages

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Hyde, Perez, Safadi, Adams, Fuzz, Phillips, Thorne: An Open Web (2011)

This book was created in a Book Sprint over 5 days between January 17 and January 21, 2011 in Berlin. It was an enormous achievement by the handful of people brought together to write a Book about the ‘Open Web’. The event was hosted by transmediale.11 and the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (CHB), based on an idea and concept initiated by transmediale artistic director Stephen Kovats and Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals. To write the book the authors used the FLOSS Manuals installation of Booki.

The book takes the view that the Open Web is an essential technology and cultural practice for the future of the Internet and human society. The Web as we know it has had a positive and even revolutionary impact on key areas of science, technology, politics and culture. It has opened up new fields of individual rights and responsibilities, in terms of legal structures, community standards, privacy and the control of data. The rapid pace of technological change is bringing ever more powerful threats (and opportunities) to the Open Web.

Written by Adam Hyde, Alejandra Perez, Bassel Safadi, Christopher Adams, Mick Fuzz, Jon Phillips,
Michelle Thorne
Publisher in 2011
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
63 pages

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Andrew Famiglietti: Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians: The Political Economy and Cultural History of Wikipedia (2011)

“This dissertation explores the political economy and cultural history of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It demonstrates how Wikipedia, an influential and popular site of knowledge production and distribution, was influenced by its heritage from the hacker communities of the late twentieth century. More specifically, Wikipedia was shaped by an ideal I call, “the cyborg individual,” which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers.

I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines. I go on to demonstrate how this ideal influenced how Wikipedia was understood both those involved in the early history of the site, and those writing about it. In particular, legal scholar Yochai Benkler seems to base his understanding of Wikipedia and its strengths on the cyborg individual ideal. Having established this, I then move on to show how the cyborg individual ideal misunderstands Wikipedia’s actual method of production. Most importantly, it overlooks the importance of how the boundaries drawn around communities and shared technological resources shape Wikipedia’s content. I then proceed to begin the process of building what I believe is a better way of understanding Wikipedia, by tracing how communities and shared resources shape the production of recent Wikipedia articles.”

Doctor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies / Communication, 2011
Dissertation Committee: V. Ekstrand, N. Patterson, R. Gajjala, D. McQuarie, D. Parry
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
290 pages

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