The Coming Swarm
DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet
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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.
About this Author
Molly Sauter is a doctoral student at McGill University in Montreal in the department of Art History and Communication Studies. She holds a masters degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, and is an affiliate researcher at the Center for Civic Media at the Media Lab and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her research is situated in socio-political analyses of technology and technological culture, and is broadly focused on hacker culture, transgressive digital activism, and depictions of technology in the media. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, HiLow Brow, io9, The American Behavioral Scientist, and the MIT Technology Review. Her research has been featured by Popular Mechanics, BoingBoing, the BBC, NPR, the CBC, Der Spiegel, and the Christian Science Monitor. She resides in Montreal, Quebec, and lives on the internet, blogging at oddletters.com and tweeting @oddletters.
Reviews
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.
Do two wrongs ever make a right? Sauter deftly shows how the injustices of our asymmetrical media landscape motivate and in some ways justify illegal online attacks. How much collateral damage to the network, if any, is ethical when lives are at stake in the real world? And how does public perception of hackers both inhibit and enhance the effectiveness of their efforts? While there may be no easy answers, The Coming Swarm is a landmark contribution to a conversation that needs to be initiated right now.
While DDOS actions have only recently entered the public consciousness, they have a vibrant history in the realm of political activism. Drawing on disciplines from political philosophy to social movement theory, Molly Sauter illuminates the importance of DDOS actions to modern democratic discourse, and contextualizes them in the evolution of political activism as it has moved from the streets to their elusive online counterparts.
The Internet has increasingly attracted passionate citizens who engage in disruptive acts of direct action to voice dissent. Erudite in its analysis and written with grace and style, The Coming Swarm is the definitive account on the DDoS campaign. Sauter's compact book covers vast ground to advance a compelling argument: the political use of DDoS merits recognition as civil disobedience. She deftly considers the tactic's history, the technological and cultural changes underwriting its contemporary manifestation, and the laws seeking to stamp out its existence. Theoretically informed and empirically rich her book is essential reading to understand the veritable explosion of online dissent today and why, given multiple threats, its future stands in peril.
The Internet is changing the nature of civil disobedience. Molly Sauter's book is an interesting and important discussion of political denial-of-service attacks: what has come before, and what's likely to come in the future.
In The Coming Swarm, Molly Sauter provides deep historical and philosophical context to online .denial of service. attacks, examining the participants' motivations and their portrayals in the media, whether as terrorist, hacker, artist, or nuisance.
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