Book of the Week: Barefoot in Cyberspace

Will the internet make us more free? Or will the flood of information that courses across its networks only serve to enslave us to powerful interests that are emerging online? How will the institutions of the old world – politics, the media, corporations – affect the hackers’ dream for a new world populated not by passive consumers but by active participants? And can we ever live up to their vision of technology’s, and its users’, potential?

* Book: Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in search of techno-Utopia. by Becky Hogge

(Purchase copies via http://barefootintocyberspace.com/book/)

To introduce our book of the week, please the publisher’s summary, an excerpt from the introduction, as well as the author’s motivation.

1. The summary:

“Barefoot into Cyberspace is an inside account of radical hacker culture and the forces that shape it, told in the year WikiLeaks took subversive geek politics into the mainstream. Including some of the earliest on-record material with Julian Assange you are likely to read, Barefoot Into Cyberspace is the ultimate guided tour of the hopes and ideals that are increasingly shaping world events.

Beginning at the Chaos Communications Congress of December 2009, where WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg first presented their world-changing plans to a select audience of the planet’s most skilful and motivated hackers, Barefoot Into Cyberspace interweaves an insider’s take on the drama that ensued with a thoughtful mix of personal reflections and conversations with key figures in the community aimed at testing the hopes and dreams of the early internet pioneers against the realities of the web today.

Will the internet make us more free? Or will the flood of information that courses across its networks only serve to enslave us to powerful interests that are emerging online? How will the institutions of the old world – politics, the media, corporations – affect the hackers’ dream for a new world populated not by passive consumers but by active participants? And can we ever live up to their vision of technology’s, and its users’, potential?”

2. Excerpt from the Introduction, by Becky Hogge:

“I first got the idea for Barefoot into Cyberspace at the Folk on the Pier festival on Cromer pier in June 2009. CJ Stone, whom I’ve never met but who I knew lived near Cromer (well, somewhere in Norfolk, at any rate), wrote a book called Fierce Dancing that had a huge influence on me when I was in my teens. Fierce Dancing was about hippies, crusties the free party scene and the road protest movement, a world I was fascinated by but to which I had very little access. I decided to write a book that did the same thing for its readers, but with the geek and hacker scene.

From December 2009 through to June the following year, I interviewed the people I thought would have the most interesting stories to tell. I had a lot of luck along the way. One of the first interviews I did was with a then relatively-unknown Julian Assange (in case you didn’t notice, I released the transcript of that interview yesterday). The next month, Stewart Brand, author of the famous quote “information wants to free” happened to be in town. I also got some killer material from Cory Doctorow, and had some very enlightening conversations with Phil Booth (then still at No2ID) and Ethan Zuckerman.

In Rop Gonggrijp, my very first interlocutor, I found a narrative that carried the whole book along, right to the end or, as he puts it, “the middle of the start of it”. Christopher Scally, the artist who kindly developed the illustrations for the book, struck gold when he decided we should re-use Sir John Tenniel’s now public domain illustrations that accompanied Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass (somewhat inspired by an argument we had about copyright reform during the meeting to get him on board, but that’s another story). If Julian Assange is the Mad Hatter, Rop is my White Rabbit.

The book was in its first draft, minus the last chapter and epilogue, by November 2010, at which point I sent it out to a group of beta readers. Some of them were hardcore geeks, others couldn’t have been less so, and all gave really useful feedback without which I don’t think I would have found my way to the end. At about this time, the book deals started appearing – books about WikiLeaks were being sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds, and in one case a million. I started wondering if I might be able to strike gold, too.

But it wasn’t to be. Barefoot into Cyberspace wasn’t the sort of book the publishers wanted. It’s not a polemic, it’s intentionally pulpy and open-ended, and I liked it that way. So in March, I approached Felix Cohen, who had just helped openDemocracy.net get their book Fight Back! out the door, if he’d like to lend me a hand publishing Barefoot.”

Becky Hogge on her motivation:

“Barefoot into Cyberspace is not a futurist polemic. It’s an invitation to understand hacker culture in a completely different frame. When I was writing it, I concentrated on the aspects of hacker culture that make being involved in it so liberating and fun – the vibe at the Chaos Communications Congress each year in Berlin, or the strong connections that the history of the personal computer and the internet have with the history of the sixties counter-culture. And of course I was lucky that the story of WikiLeaks in 2010 began to trespass on the story I was writing from my very first research trip. That lent the book’s narrative some of the drama that captured the world’s attention last year – driven as much by the stories of the people behind WikiLeaks as by the material WikiLeaks released.

The book isn’t just flim-flam and high drama though. I spent two years at the Open Rights Group, a UK digital rights campaign group, and that left me with a lot of questions about our political system. So writing Barefoot was also an attempt to answer those questions. 2010 was the year the Digital Economy Act was passed in the UK – a pernicious and wrong-headed piece of legislation in the “three strikes” mold that was the result of really high levels of lobbying from the rightsholding industries. How can it be that governments across the world remain so complicit in the agenda to regulate one of the most potentially liberating technologies to have come about in centuries as if it were just a way of delivering Lily Allen’s latest hit? Behind that question lie some uncomfortable truths about the state of democracy in the 21st century.”

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