Call them what you will: hactivists, cypherpunks, phone phreaks, e-bandits… these digital vigilantes may be the last bastions of hope in an Information Age where information is not dispersed equally. Growing from a group of pranksters at MIT in the 50s to the “ultra-coordinated mother-f*ckery” of Anonymous and WikiLeaks today, hactivism uses information technologies to achieve political objectives. With their hyper-sophisticated coding skills, hacktivists do everything from leaking classified documents, to providing oppressed citizenry with military grade encryption. They believe that access to computers should be total, that information should be free, and that anarchy reigns supreme. But ever since Chelsea Manning was discovered smuggling over 400k U.S military documents in a Lady Gaga CD case on behalf of WikiLeaks and governments really began cracking down on these hackers, it became clear that maybe the internet wasn’t the anarchic utopia we thought it was. Tangents include: Maia’s primal hatred of Spotify wrapped, The internet’s unfounded hatred of Geese, and Hannah’s dream of putting Maia on WikiFeet.

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SOURCES:

Maya Jasanoff, “Revenge of the Quiet American,” Foreign Policy, No. 185 (March/April 2011).

Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, O’Reilley (1984).

Peter Ludlow, “WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture,” The Nation (2010).

Ty McCormick, “Anthropology of An Idea: Hacktivism,” Foreign Policy, No. 200 (2013).

Alasdair Roberts, “The WikiLeaks Illusion,” The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (SUMMER 2011).

Wendy H. Wong and Peter A. Brown, “E-Bandits in Global Activism: WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Politics of No One,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 2013).

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