The Coming Swarm

"This book examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. The internet is a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, people to organize, many will turn to the internet as a theater for that activity. As familiar and widely accepted activist tools--petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others--find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? Grounding the analysis historically, focusing on early deployments of activist DDOS as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, this book uses activist DDOS actions as the foundation of a larger analysis of the practice of disruptive civil disobedience on the internet"--

Auteur
M.R. Sauter is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies. They are the author of The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. They received their PhD from McGill University in 2020, and they hold a masters degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. They have held research fellowships at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, and New America. Their research has been featured by Popular Mechanics, BoingBoing, the BBC, NPR, the CBC, Der Spiegel, and the Christian Science Monitor. They reside in Montreal, Quebec, and lives on the internet, blogging at oddletters.com and tweeting @oddletters.

Texte du rabat

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. What is Hacktivism? In The Coming Swarm, rising star Molly Sauter examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. The internet is a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, or people to unify, many will turn to the internet as a theater for that activity. As familiar and widely accepted activist tools-petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others-find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? With a historically grounded analysis, and a focus on early deployments of activist DDOS as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, The Coming Swarm uses activist DDOS actions as the foundation of a larger analysis of the practice of disruptive civil disobedience on the internet.

Résumé
Questions about online protest tactics have never been more fraught-as the analog police militarize their response to legitimate dissent, so, too, have the Internet cops decided that any online protest is cyber-terrorism. Sauter's work places one of the most urgent political questions of the 21st century into much-needed context. Cory Doctorow, EFF Fellow and co-editor of Boing Boing

Contenu
Acknowledgments Foreword by Ethan Zuckerman Introduction: Searching for the Digital Street CHAPTER 1: DDoS AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT CHAPTER 2: BLOCKADES AND BLOCKAGES: DDoS AS DIRECT ACTION CHAPTER 3: WHICH WAY TO THE #PRESS CHANNEL? DDoS AS MEDIA MANIPULATION CHAPTER 4: SHOW ME WHAT AN ACTIVIST LOOKS LIKE: DDoS AS A METHOD OF BIOGRAPHICAL IMPACT CHAPTER 5: IDENTITY, ANONYMITY, AND RESPONSIBILITY CHAPTER 6: LOIC WILL TEAR US APART: DDoS TOOL DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN CHAPTER 7: AGAINST THE MAN: STATE AND CORPORATE RESPONSES TO DDoS ACTIONS CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF DDOS Bibliography Index