Gabriella Coleman: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (2014)

“A book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists that operates under the non-name Anonymous.

Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and disruption (before Anonymous emerged as a player in the battles over WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street). She ended up becoming closely connected to Anonymous and the story of her inside-outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this engrossing book.

The narrative brims with details unearthed from within a notoriously mysterious subculture, whose best-known tricksters – such as Topiary, tflow, Anachaos, and Sabu – emerge as complex, diverse, politically and culturally sophisticated people. Propelled by years of chats and encounters with a multitude of hackers, including imprisoned activist Jeremy Hammond and the double agent who helped put him away, Hector Monsegur, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is filled with insights about digital activism and little understood facets of culture in the Internet age, including the history of “trolling,” the ethics and metaphysics of hacking, and the origins and manifold meanings of “the lulz.””

Publisher Verso Books, London and New York, November 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license
ISBN 1781685835, 9781781685839
452 pages
via Marcell

Reviews: Astra Taylor (Bookforum, 2014), Jamie Bartlett (Guardian, 2014), Hannah Kuchler (Financial Times, 2014), David Gilbert (IB Business Times, 2014), Haley Mlotek (National Post, 2014), Publishers Weekly (2014), Kirkus Reviews (2014), Nathalie Maréchal (Int’l J of Communication, 2015), Maxigas (Krisis, 2015).

Commentary: João Biehl & Naomi Zucker, Haidy Geismar, Adam Fish & Luca Follis, Tom Boellstorff, Gabriella Coleman (J Ethnographic Theory book symposium, 2015).

Debate with Gabriella Coleman, Cory Doctorow and James Bridle, London, 4 Nov

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF
EPUB

Domenico Quaranta, Geraldine Juárez (eds.): The F.A.T. Manual (2013)

“In more than five years of activity, the Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) produced an impressive series of projects, all developed with open source software, shared online and documented in a way that allows everybody to copy, improve, abuse or simply use them. This approach situates F.A.T. Lab in a long tradition of DIY, processual, sharable artistic practices based on instructionals, and reveals a democratic idea of art where Fluxus scores meet hacker culture (and rap music).

Featuring texts by Régine Debatty, Evan Roth, Domenico Quaranta, Geraldine Juárez and Randy Sarafan, The F.A.T. Manual is a selection of more that 100 projects, done in the belief that printing these bits on paper will allow them to spread in a different way, infiltrate other contexts, and germinate. An archive, a catalogue, a user manual and a software handbook documenting five years of thug life, pop culture and research and development.”

Publisher Link Editions, Brescia, 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781291577914
224 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (36 MB, updated on 2024-2-3)

Thomas Pynchon: Bleeding Edge (2013)

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but theres no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of whats left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethicscarry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into peoples bank accountswithout having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working momtwo boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhoodtill Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitlers aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where weve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

Publisher Penguin, 2013
ISBN 0698142683, 9780698142688
496 pages
via tyl3rdurd3n

Review (Evgeny Morozov, Frankfurter Allgemeine)
Review (Justin St. Clair, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Review (Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times)
Review (Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal)
Review (Tim Martin, The Telegraph)
Review (Gary Lippman, The Paris Review)

Publisher
Google books

Download (removed on 2013-10-9 upon request of the publisher)