Cyber Disobedience Re://Presenting Online Anarchy

Description

Few activities have captured the contemporary popular imagination as hacking and online activism, from Anonymous and beyond. Few political ideas have gained more notoriety recently than anarchism. Yet both remain misunderstood and much maligned. /Cyber Disobedience/ provides the most engaging and detailed analysis of online civil disobedience and anarchism today.

REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS

One thing is clear: the Internet is likely the largest decentralized project in all of human history. Shantz and Tomblin hone in on the Internet’s renegades and radicals, who utilize the Internet’s unprecedented power for the purposes of resisting authority, creating international solidarity, and spreading the meme of anarchy. /Cyber Disobedience/ describes hacktivists, the free software and anti-copyright movements, digital whistleblowing, and other efforts to create a freer and more just future, both online and offline. This book truly captures the rebel spirit at the heart of the Internet Age. ~ Dana M. Williams, California State University, Chico.

Beyond the restrictive and narrow politics-as-usual from both left and right, the authors demonstrate the passionate and creative forces of contemporary anarchism that fly in the face of both corporate media and traditional academic accounts alike that perpetrate the mythical popular image of anarchism as utopic and disorderly. Providing discussions on everything from the rise of Anonymous, the Arab Spring, and demonization of whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to the coining of the term “hacktivism” in 1998, Cyber Disobedience explores the role of social media in information-sharing and movement-building possibilities. Activists, students, scholars – anyone interested in anti-capitalist social movements and digital resistance from below – will benefit from reading Shantz and Tomblin’s arguments that are theoretically sophisticated, empirically rigorous and historically significant. A lucid, compelling and provocative account of the potential of the digital revolutionary spirit, the text sets a very high standard for debates in the social studies of power, knowledge and technology. Overall, Cyber Disobedience constitutes a significant and timely contribution – a must-read for anyone concerned with freedom, technology, social justice and state repression in the twenty-first century. ~ Dr. Heidi M. Rimke, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Winnipeg.