Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism

Coding Democracy

Coding Democracy

How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism

Maureen Webb

Foreword by Cory Doctorow

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2020 Maureen Webb

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone and Avenir by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Webb, Maureen, author. | Doctorow, Cory, writer of foreword.

Title: Coding democracy : how hackers are disrupting power, surveillance, and authoritarianism / Maureen Webb.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018826 | ISBN 9780262043557 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Hacktivism. | Cyberspace--Political aspects. |

Internet--Social aspects. | Hacktivism. | Computer security. |

Internet--Social aspects. | Democratization.

Classification: LCC HV6773 .W427 2020 | DDC 364.16/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018826

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

To those in precarious situations

Contents

Foreword by Cory Doctorow

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Acknowledgments

1 The Hacker Ethic: Germany’s Chaos Computer Club and the Genealogy of the Hacker Ethos

In Berlin

Getting to the Chaos Commmunication Camp

First-Wave Hackers: Hacking Culture in the US from the Late 1950s, including the Hands-On Imperative and Other Principles of a Hacker Ethos

Second-Wave Hackers: Computers and Code for the People, including the People’s Computer Company, The WELL, Homebrew, Silicon Valley, RMS, and Free Software

First-Wave Europe: The Early Development of European Hacker Culture in the 1970s and 1980s

The Early Days of the Chaos Computer Club

1989: A Watershed Year for Germany and the CCC

The Fall of the Wall

The 1990s: Hackerdom Expands, Silicon Valley Takes Off, and a Schism Develops between the Philosophies of Proprietary Software and Free Software

First Impressions: Be Excellent to Each Other

2 The Hacker Challenge: Cypherpunks on the Electronic Frontier

Third-Wave Hackers: The Cypherpunks

Fellow Travelers, Reluctant Heroes, and the Cryptowars of the 1990s

The Smart-Ass Antipodean

3 A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century: Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful

Code Is Law, and the Onion Router Proves It

WikiLeaks

A New Kind of Cypherpunk

Snowden

A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century and the Concept of Popular Sovereignty

4 The Burden of Security: The Challenges for the Ordinary User

Security 101

The Sakharovs

Berlin: City of Freedom, City of Exiles

A Cryptoparty

5 Democracy in Cyberspace: First, the Governance Problems

Harry

Internet Governance: Loraxes Who Speak for the Trees

Harry Redux

Of Trees and Tongues

What Is Democracy? Or How to Govern Democratically in a World That Is No Longer Flat?

Hacker Governance: Noisy Square

6 Culture Clash: Hermes and the Italian HackingTeam

The Italian Embassy

Black, White, and Gray

7 Democracy in Cyberspace: Then the Design Problems

The Problem of Provable Security

The Problem of Designing Privacy-Preserving Protocols

Email: A Case in Point

Remaking the Internet for the Twenty-first Century

8 The Gathering Storm: The New Crypto—and Information and Net Neutrality and Free Software and Trust-Busting—Wars

A New Digital Era Civics Is Necessary

The New Cryptowars

The New Information Wars

The New Net Neutrality Wars

The New Free Software Wars

The New Trust-Busting Wars and the Unsustainability of Current Digital Capitalism

The Gathering Storm

9 Hacker Occupy: Bringing Occupy into Cyberspace and the Digital Era

The Occupy Movement

A Multitude of Diverse Experiments

Hacking Experiments Using Federated Technology, or the Basic Internet Structure

Hacking Experiments Using P2P Distributed Technology

Hacking Experiments Using the Blockchain

Solid?

The Blockchain Reality Check

The Next System

10 Distributed Democracy: Experiments in Spain, Italy, and Canada

Getting Control of Democratic Processes: The Indignant of Barcelona

Hacking Corruption: Xnet’s 15MpaRato

Hazte Banquero (Become a Banker)

Maddish: Platforms for the People

PartidoX

Homage to Catalonia

Hacking Electoral Politics in Italy: A New Politics Is Possible

Hacking Democratic Decision Making Itself: A Canadian Algorithm for Global Democracy

No More Wrecking Balls

11 The Value and Risk of Transgressive Acts: Corrective Feedback

Berlin’s Graffiti

The Value of Transgressive Acts

The Risk of Transgressive Acts

Hacker Crackdown 3.0

Where Power Meets Its Limits: The Making of Martyrs

Democratic Constitutionalism as Conversation Leading to Rough Consensus

12 Mainstreaming Hackerdom: A New Condition of Freedom

A City upon a Hill

Libre Planet, the Heart of Free Software

Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation Awards

Pros, Cons, and Disobedience Awards

MIT’s Media Lab

Harvard and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

Emergence

Enlivening a Moral Imagination

The Epicenter of a Civilization

Coda

Notes

Index

Foreword: There Are Two Kinds of People

Cory Doctorow

When you’re small, you’re taught that there are two kinds of people:

1. good ones, and

2. bad ones.

As you get older, if you’re lucky enough to have the right kinds of teachers and the right opportunities for learning, you realize that there are indeed two kinds of people:

1. people who think there are two kinds of people (good ones and bad ones), and

2. people who think that people are pretty much a mixed bag, prone to venality and capable of nobility, fallible and self-deceiving; and that the goodness or badness of a person from moment to moment has more to do with the structures we build to act as a check on fallibility than it does with the intrinsic virtues or wickedness of any one of us.

The name for the systems we build to elevate virtue and check vice is politics, and, practiced correctly, it can produce a sum that is greater than the whole of its parts: a superhuman machine capable of superhuman feats. Literally: welding together more than one person to accomplish a common end enables outcomes that are more than one person could ever hope for. Superhuman.

For a quarter-century, dreamers, theorists, schemers, builders, optimists, pessimists, crackpots, and geniuses have run a series of experiments in connecting people using networked computers, experimenting with governance structures (ICANN, github, Unix file permissions, standards development organizations, Reddit upvotes, statutes, treaties, regulations), normative frameworks (manifesti, terms of service, moderator guidelines), tools (encryption, error correction, ranking algorithms), and businesses (eBay, Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, the Silk Road), trying to find ways to upregulate desirable behaviors and downregulate the bad ones.

The societal view of this project has been a mess: at first, it was widely dismissed as a distraction, a toy for nerds who believed that somehow their Star Trek message-boards had some political consequence. Then, in a hot second, the outside world pivoted to mock tech activists for their supposed techno-optimism and alleged indifference to the ways in which tech had become a dominant political force in the world.

These two points of view—tech doesn’t matter versus tech matters too much to listen to nerds—have one thing in common: they’re both most commonly evinced by people who don’t understand tech very well. This is a book that aims to bridge that divide in understanding, and at this political moment that’s an important contribution.

I don’t mean that critics lack an appreciation of how tech businesses work (although many do), or of the human frailties of technologists themselves (these are often self-evident): I mean that, at a nuts-and-bolts level, they tend not to understand what’s going on when they sit in front of a computer and make it do things, or have things done to them. When better-informed activists point out the technical incoherence of some critiques (e.g. Why can’t YouTube just use an algorithm to block hate speech?), they are accused of a mulish intransigence dressed up as technical objections. All too often, the answer to that’s just not possible, is NERD HARDER!

The thing is, technology activists are, in fact, enthusiastic about technology. They really do believe that with technology, we can create structures that upregulate the angels of our better nature and downregulate the venal, cowardly, and unworthy impulses. If that was all that tech activists believed, then it would be totally fair to call them monsters of hubris, the unwitting handmaidens of technological oppression through ubiquitous surveillance and control.

But that’s not all tech activists believe. They believe that everything could be so great but only if we don’t screw it up. After all, if you’re an information security person, your whole job is to sit around and think of how terrible people will abuse the systems you’re charged with protecting. If you’re an information security specialist, you have to both love and fear tech—the way that a demolitions expert loves and fears dynamite.

The hacker way has its problems: move fast and break things was always self-serving bullshit fronted by overgrown toddlers who wanted to grift their way to millions (billions!) without adult supervision.

But the way hackers do policy—deploying deep, hard-won technical expertise to build and modify systems with some real concern for systems’ societal effects and an approach that reduces how much agreement we need before we can work together—is admirable. It is animated by a profound understanding of the perils of tech gone wrong as much as by an exuberance at the transformative power of tech.

This is a book about hackers and hacker politics: the nuts-and-bolts and the big picture. The people who appear in it (including, briefly, me) are, like our fellow human beings—deeply flawed, cracked vessels who struggle to contain bad impulses and to let the pure water of our noble ones pour out freely.

Hacker politics are anti-authoritarian because hackers know that authorities are just as damaged as they are. Hacker politics are pluralistic because hackers know that unchecked power is a catastrophe in the making, because without those checks, the bugs in the system will run wild and brick the device before you even know there’s something wrong there. It is a political ethos that accounts for the fallibility of human beings as much as for their unlimited potential. It is designed to avoid making things worse, even if doesn’t always know how to make them better.

Hacker politics may not solve our problems, but as this book makes clear, they are going to be part of the solution.

Author’s Note

As this book was well into production, in August 2019, a series of allegations began to emerge against a number of people and institutions featured in the text. These allegations linked sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to MIT and to Harvard, and also to faculty and donors at those institutions, including MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito and MIT professor Marvin Minsky (now deceased). In early September, The New Yorker reported that Ito had accepted numerous donations to the Media Lab from Epstein after the latter’s conviction in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor, as well as more than $1 million for Ito’s own personal investments. It alleged that Ito had concealed the donations. Around the same time, the President of MIT, Rafael Reif, admitted that he had approved a donation from Epstein to a University faculty member in 2012 and had signed a thank-you note to him. Marvin Minsky, meanwhile, was accused of sexually exploiting a 17-year-old female (more than 55 years his junior) allegedly trafficked by Epstein.

LinkedIn cofounder and MIT Media Lab donor Reid Hoffman defended Ito, and Free Software Foundation founder and MIT research scientist Richard Stallman defended Minsky in ways that drew immediate public condemnation and disgust. In September, Ito resigned as Director of the Media Lab, and Richard Stallman resigned from his positions at the Free Software Foundation and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). The allegations against Ito and the Media Lab led to the departures of associate professor Ethan Zuckerman and visiting scholar J. Nathan Matias from the Lab, who stated that they could no longer be associated with the institution. Ito’s failure to respond, and Hoffman’s defensive response when questioned by Anand Giridharadas, led to the resignation of that journalist and author from the board overseeing the Media Lab Disobedience Award.

I first started reading about these stories huddled in a tent at the 2019 Chaos Communication Camp, the freezing black night illuminated only by the light of the news articles displayed on my cell phone. It was a lot to take in over the high-decibel punk music and partying that were shaking the ground outside.

Dismay was my initial emotion. My book reports, among many other things, on these individuals’ contributions to the history of hacking. What was the proper course of action? Even if I could have excised passages about the impugned individuals entirely from the book at that late stage of the production process, I would not have done it. I don’t believe it’s fair or wise to erase people and their accomplishments from history in order to serve one’s own professional interests. We miss the opportunity to process difficult lessons when we self-righteously rush to scrub someone from the face of an institution, a movement, a profession, or the public record. And as a lawyer I believe that each individual’s case must be examined and judged on its own set of facts in the appropriate forums. Everyone is entitled to due process.

Granted, each individual may be judged, too, in the forum of public opinion. But when we make our own judgments we need to think, not just about individual culpability but about the systems in which individuals are embedded, too.

For me, these stories underline the overwhelming gender imbalance in the computing and high-tech worlds. It’s an imbalance that poses real challenges for holistic tech solutions for our societies. The stories show the danger of universities being corrupted by private and corporate money, and losing sight of their public mandates. They show privileged elites making terrible decisions. By their depressing mulitiplicity, the stories suggest a general moral crisis. In my view the takeaway is clear: we need to rebuild our societies and institutions with a new ethos of distributed power. It is our collective responsibility. That is what this book is about.

At this time, too, it is important to mention that Julian Assange is in prison in the United Kingdom, having been turned out of his sanctuary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and forcibly extracted from the building by police. Sweden’s investigation against him for sexual crimes has been dropped, reopened by prosecutors, and recently put on hold by a Swedish court, but he is now serving prison time in the United Kingdom for skipping bail (in 2012) and might be extradited to the United States. There is heavy disapprobation of him in the hacker scene. I experienced this firsthand at the recent Chaos Communication Camp in 2019. However, regardless of what one thinks of each of Assange’s many actions, his personality, his mental state, his motivations, and his treatment of other people, especially women, over the years, it is important to recognize that his case is, above all, a case about press freedom. What the UK and US governments decide to do with him will set the course for press freedom in this century. In that respect we should all be speaking up and getting involved in the matter because as this book describes, we won’t be living in democracies if we don’t have a free press.

I imagine many more developments will unfold before and after the publication of this book to highlight the pressing relevance of its subject matter. My one hope is that you will feel that you understand what’s going on better once you’ve read it. That is the public service I have aimed to provide.

In solidarity,

Maureen Webb

Fall 2019

Vancouver

Acknowledgments

This book was truly a journey, and many people helped me on my way.

First, I would like to thank all of the people I interviewed: Andy Müller Maguhn, Peter from Sweden, Andrew Clement, Lucy Suchman, Christian Heck, Harry Halpin, Sacha van Geffen, Cindy Cohn, Corrado Primier, Matteo Ruina, Gianluca Gilardi, Andreas Ghirardini, Matteo Flora, Simona Levi, Rubén Sáez, Maddalena Falzoni, Alfa Sanchez, Sergio Salgado, Danilo Toninelli, Riccardo Fraccaro, John Richardson, Samer Hassan, and Yochai Benkler. Meeting each of you and learning about your contributions to the contemporary democratic struggle was like stepping onto new land. O brave new world, That has such people in’t, enthuses Miranda in act 5 of Shakespeare’s Tempest. I feel the same way.

Warm thanks to the many other wonderful people I spoke with who gave me important leads, insights, and introductions: Wolfgang Kaleck, Gabriella Coleman, Guillaume Rochefort, Amir Attaran, Holger Krekel, Markus Beckedahl, Irina Bolyshevski, Sean O’Brien, Paul Allen (of Toronto), Kate Milberry, Andrea Neuman, the Fellows and librarians at the American Academy in Rome, Peter Benson Miller, director at the American Academy, and Ilaria Loquenzi, to name a few. Thanks to Silvia Virgulti for translation at the Cinque Stelle offices.

There are people I did not interview but whose work I cover in the book at some length because of its power in the genealogy of hacker ideas. Thank you to Larry Lessig for his exposition of the insight that code is law, Eben Moglen for his affecting oratory, John Clippinger for his thoughts on a digital common law, John Perry Barlow for his poetic intuition, and Richard Stallman, for his vision in starting the free software movement.

I must thank Richard Stallman, too, for his generosity in reading this book’s manuscript. His patience in offering information and clarifications was critical to improving the final text.

Special thanks for the altruism of other people who read and vetted parts of the manuscript: to the anonymous reviewers whose valuable comments helped me to articulate the intent of the book and to recalibrate when I went astray in the vast geography of disciplines I was foolhardy enough to traverse; to the interviewees who reviewed their chapters, several of whom painstakingly explained technical matters so that I could write about them intelligently; and to David Weinberger (Senior Researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center), Patrick Henry Winston (Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at MIT), Ellen Hoffman (Director of Communications at the MIT Media Lab), and Janine Liberty, Chia Evers and Joi Ito at MIT Media Lab for their fact-checking and comments on chapter twelve. In May 2019, as this book was going into copyediting, I had the opportunity to interview Joi Ito, then Director of the MIT Media Lab, by telephone and would like to thank him for his time and graciousness.

Harry Halpin was like a Hermes to me, appearing as a magical guide at the Chaos Communication Camp and reappearing months later to point out the continuation of the path; he did not let me down despite his heavy travel schedule. Andrew Clement, my fellow Canadian, set me straight on a lot of technical and tonal matters. And it was lovely to start the book in a friendly place, with the warmth of his and Lucy Suchman’s hospitality in the Gulf Islands. Andy Müller Maguhn and Christian Heck were also generous with their time and technical advice, Christian taking time away from his own family to help. Thank you to Simona Levi, Sergio Salgado, and the other members of XNet for eloquently describing the social implications of hacking. Any errors or misconceptions lingering in the text are my own.

I would like to thank Heidi Boghosian and Peter Prontzos, who each gave me great support and encouragement in the early stages of this project—Heidi, in New York, for reading and commenting generously on outlines and draft chapters, and traveling to Germany despite her fear of flying; Peter, in Vancouver, for his articles as well as for his love and hugs. Thanks to Greg Ruggiero for suggesting a book about hackers.

I owe the largest debt of gratitude to two women without whom this book would not have happened. Gita Devi Manaktala, the MIT Press’s editorial director, picked up the proposal for the book within days of receiving it, when only a handful of chapters had been drafted, and she did not waver in her support of it. In a world that is hurtling along at high speed these days, it was a brave choice. She knew much could change between the time of writing and the time of publication, and yet the topic urgently needed to be covered. Her advice, assistance, and sheer goodness over the course of this project have been a boon to me. Jackie Kaiser, president of Westwood Creative Artists and the other person without whom this book would not have happened, picked me up as a writer and gave me help and attention I will always be grateful for. Working at the top of the book industry for many years she is an alchemical miracle of business acumen and book love, professionalism and heart. Always taking account of my circumstances, she was there at each turn to smooth the way and allow me to write. I have been lucky to have her as my agent.

Thank you to Tessa McWatt for her generous introduction to Jackie. Thanks to Liz Culotti, Pia Singhal and the other staff at Westwood Creative Artists. Thank you to Alex Shultz, a consummate editor. It was a pleasure and privilege to work with you and a comfort to rely on your good taste and unerring judgment.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the MIT Press are institutions that are woven like gold thread throughout the fabric of this book’s story. Their part in the genealogy of innovation and civic acts I describe reminds one of the importance of public institutions. I would like to acknowledge the MIT Press’s institutional support of me as an author and also that of the American Academy in Rome and the Canada Council for the Arts. The latter gave me a grant at a crucial point to travel down to Boston and Cambridge and write about what was happening there. Thanks to all the staff at the MIT Press, including the ever patient and positive Nhora Lucia Serrano (thanks, Nhora), Kyle Gipson, and those I worked with in the production and marketing process. Deborah Cantor-Adams and Rosemary Winfield were responsible for the final copyediting and fine polishing of the manuscript, a task they executed deftly and with amazing speed. Susan Clark wrote wonderful copy for the catalog.

Writer friends—Monia Mazigh, Rick Salutin, Mark Danner, and Stephanie Young—thank you for your camaraderie and influence. And thank you to friends Professor Mary Chapman for her discerning advice offered generously over so many years and her network intelligence, Gail Davidson (for her example), Tom Sandborn (for his example), Lori Kozub Hodgkinson (for her tips on audio books) and Jose Rodrigues (for his insights into the political complexity of the Catalan independence movement).

Thank you to my dear family, Connie Webb, and Michael and Joanne Webb, who have always been there for me. And thank you to my brothers and sisters in the labor movement, and at the Hospital Employees’ Union in particular. This struggle to recover our dignity as citizens has many links with the struggle for dignity in work.

To my children: You have put up with the extra burden of this book’s writing for four years with sterling kindness. Thank you for that. I know it has not always been easy. Michele, my sweet son, you gave me insights on memes and fake news that I had not heard elsewhere. You are the digital native and philosopher of the family. Lucia, my light, thank you for taking an interest, now you are grown, in what I’ve been writing. There could be no better reward for the effort, especially as I watch you begin to formulate your own ideas about the world.

Reader, thank you. As we go forward, let us make it a sweet habit of solidarity to call each other citizen.

1

The Hacker Ethic

Germany’s Chaos Computer Club and the Genealogy of the Hacker Ethos

In Berlin

Berlin still has many bombed-out lots. If you peer in behind the mesh fences, you see deep craters that sink precipitously under a cover of decades-old trees. These holes seem to perforate the psyche as well as the landscape of the city. Some are the size of city blocks, some the size of small neighborhoods, and some are just green spaces where large tracts of city and inhabitants have ceased to exist as geographic facts.

In photos of the postwar period, the Reichstag building is often visible, with Germans picking their way around its large, defeated hulk on foot and on bicycles, the road a track of mud. The seat of German democratic government in Berlin, the Reichstag was notoriously set on fire in 1933, then scorned by Adolf Hitler (he never used it), and badly bombed by Allied planes. The Germans left it unreconstructed until well into peacetime, living with its wreckage until it was finally patched up for use in the 1960s and fully renovated in the 1990s. The dome of the renovated Reichstag echoes the burned-out, twisted dome of the old building and is encased in glass—a symbol, perhaps, of both contrition and transparency.¹

Walking around the bomb sites, the broken wall, and the sooty, uncared-for imperial buildings of Berlin, a visitor might wonder whether these two values, contrition and transparency, can exorcise the dark history of the place, which in the twentieth century went through multiple paroxysms—two wars of aggression, wild excess and inflation, mass deportations and murder, totalitarian surveillance, and a grim physical division. Despite a new German narrative of economic recovery and openness, Berliners still live amid the ruins of their elites’ many bad decisions. They tend to be people with few illusions.

It’s no coincidence that a strong hacker culture has taken root here and flourished.

Getting to the Chaos Communication Camp

The Chaos Communication Camp happens every four years. The trouble is, every four years its attendance seems to double. In 2015, its organizers are struggling to accommodate 4,500 camping hackers. The website of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), the group that organizes the camp, still says,

The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. It provides a relaxed atmosphere for free exchange of technical, social, and political ideas. The Camp has everything you need: power, internet, food and fun. Bring your tent and participate!

But it also says:

Verpeiler friends’ request? If you don’t get your ticket on Friday, you will have one very last, very tiny chance. Go to the ticket system and convince us that you are one of our dearest verpeiler friends. There won’t be many of those tickets available. Also you need to be very patient waiting for a reply … We are sold out!

I’ve come to Berlin on the fly. I’ve failed to obtain tickets to the camp by any means, but through an American lawyer I know, who knows a prominent German lawyer, who knows one of the main organizers of the camp, I’ve managed to score a ride this late afternoon of the first day of the event, and that’s a relief.

I’m here to do research, to talk to people in the hacking world, and I’m keenly aware I’m starting this book project with only a moderate amount of knowledge about what hacking and code are. I wrote a book on mass surveillance, Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World (2007), which came out six years before Edward Snowden made his disclosures of highly classified National Security Agency (NSA) materials. The book predicted much of what Snowden’s leaks revealed about the scope of government and private-sector surveillance and its dangers for democracy. At the time, I had hoped constitutions in Western democracies would be strong enough to roll back these abuses once they were uncovered. But lately, I’ve become convinced this is not going to happen. When you take stock of the pervasive illegality states and corporations are engaged in with their uses of digital tech, it is manifest the law is collapsing.

In this era of rising instability, a digital revolution is unleashing forces that are not well understood by citizens and their elected officials. As the mass surveillance, concentrations of power, and authoritarianism enabled by digital tech grow around the globe, millions have begun to worry where this new century is taking us. Can societies hold onto and, indeed, build out democracy into cyberspace in the digital age?

Code, more than law, will soon determine what kind of societies we live in and whether they end up resembling democracies at all. Yet code is incomprehensible to most people, myself included. Computer users, for the most part, are at the mercy of the code makers.

Who controls code? This is the urgent civics question that’s spurred the journey I am about to make through the world of hackers and hacking, a journey that, before I am done, will take me to Berlin and the Chaos Communication Camp and also to Barcelona, Rome, Boston, Cambridge, San Francisco, Vancouver, and the Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. In many respects, it is an everyperson’s journey, and I am that everyperson—not a hacker, technologist, or academic who studies hackers but rather a labor and constitutional lawyer, a Canadian, a trade unionist, a parent trying to raise children and hold down a regular job, and one of millions of ordinary citizens in Western countries concerned about our democracies in this new century. Although this journey might prove challenging for someone like myself without tech expertise, I’m convinced it’s a journey every citizen must make to understand what is happening to democracy in the twenty-first century.

A struggle is taking place right now as corporations, states, criminal elements, and parts of civil society vie to build the coded environment around us. Hackers are savants in this world. But their identity is protean. Sought after for their talents, almost folkloric in status, they’ve been recruited and reviled, celebrated and thrown into prison.

I’m familiar with the stereotype of hackers as dangerous, nihilistic elements in society who are capable of bringing down critical infrastructure and sowing strife between nations. These are real threats, not to be minimized. Yet I know enough to believe hackers might also be vital disruptors in the emerging digital environment, with its dystopic, antidemocratic tendencies. There is an astounding array of hacker experiments underway right now that could fundamentally change the current political economy.

More than this, I see hacking becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a growing social movement in which ordinary citizens are taking things into their own hands when reform seems out of sight. At a time when people’s faith in elites to govern has never been lower, I see hacking inspiring a new wave of activism, a new way of thinking and acting, as citizens fight to take back their democracies.

As I wait on the sidewalk for the ride that will take me to the hacker camp this summer day in Berlin, I feel strongly that I’m writing this book for tech insiders as well, for them to reflect on where hacking has come from and where it might be going, and on the processes by which the knowledge they possess might urgently be transferred to the mind of the ordinary citizen. My intent on this journey is not to valorize the hacker, Silicon Valley visionary, counterculture guys’ club, Harvard professor, or MIT hotshot—necessary as it is to situate their remarkable stories and credit their innovations in the genealogy of hacking. My intent is to celebrate the hacking ethos, the collective intelligence of people, and the spirit in all of us to resist domination and unfairness. The stories at the heart of this book will be about citizen hackers who are inventing new forms of distributed democracy. Its central question will be how we ordinary citizens and tech insiders go forward together to accomplish the hard work of democracy in the digital age. It won’t be easy, but we’ve got to try.

My ride today is with Andy Müller-Maguhn. People have told me that Andy is the ur German hacker—meaning the earliest, the original, the prototypical German hacker. He pulls up behind the wheel of a black diplomatic series Mercedes sedan, complete with automated curtains on the windows. He doesn’t stop right at the curb but askew to it, like someone on the move. He’s wearing a vinyl version of a hipster’s pork pie hat. The man beside him in the passenger seat introduces himself as Peter, from Sweden. I climb in and am immediately enveloped by the Mercedes’s sound system, pulsing with ’90s techno music.

The Chaos Computer Club, which Andy has been associated with since its early days, was founded in 1982. It has been involved in all the major digital tech debates of the last four decades, and its role in the unfolding story of hacking in the early part of the twenty-first century is central. The club began, so the story goes, around a table that once belonged to the notorious counterculture group Kommune 1. A communal group in West Germany in the 1960s, Kommune 1 practiced performance politics, free sex, and experimental drug use, attracting a glamorous entourage that included the late Jimi Hendrix. The table belonged to the German Green Party at one point, and by the time it entered the self-conscious mythology of the hacker group, it was in the rooms of the progressive newspaper Die Tageszeitung. The Chaos Computer Club’s founder, Herwart Holland-Moritz, also known as Wau Holland, wrote occasionally for the paper and was an early digital rights pioneer in Germany.

The CCC’s first annual Congress was held, aptly, in 1984. A few hundred people were present. Today, the Chaos Computer Club is Europe’s largest association of hackers, and close to ten thousand people attended its congress in 2014.² Like Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, its reputation has morphed over time from suspected criminality to fashionable respectability.

Andy, Peter from Sweden, and others have been working for the past year to organize the camp, but Andy doesn’t like camping and will not be staying over. Tough-minded and politically sophisticated, Andy has been in the thick of things for a long time. Just how much in the thick, I sense, he might not want to say, and it might be bad form to ask.

First-Wave Hackers: Hacking Culture in the US from the Late 1950s, including the Hands-On Imperative and Other Principles of a Hacker Ethos

Hacker culture’s earliest origins were not in Europe but in the United States, where hacker culture began in the 1950s at academic institutions that had early, mainframe computers. That might seem a long-ago place to start a story about contemporary hacking, but hacking is a story about a genealogy of ideas as much as anything—ideas as they are lived, distilled, built on, repurposed, and disseminated by hackers, just as code is. In this chapter, I give a brief history of the beginnings of hacking and the hacking ethos in the United States and Europe from the 1950s through the 1990s and attempt to leave the reader with a first impression of the Chaos Communication Camp, too.

The story begins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Wired magazine journalist Steven Levy wrote a seminal book in the mid-1980s on the history of hacking called Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.³ It is a dense yet entertaining book that everyone who hacks or writes about hacking references yet seldom revisits and unpacks. Levy’s descriptions of the early MIT hackers and the ethic he ascribed to them are worth recounting in detail because Levy’s distillation of that ethic has been picked up, verbatim, by progressive political hacker scenes in the twenty-first century, including the burgeoning scene coalescing around the Chaos Computer Club. While Levy’s distillation may not be universally subscribed to, it’s been very influential in contemporary hacking. Insiders who know the early history of American hacking, which Levy recorded, may want to skip forward to my exposition of early hacking in Europe or to my detailed account later in this chapter of the Chaos Computer Club’s history. But for ordinary computer users trying to understand contemporary hacking, the next few pages will be foundational.

Levy described how a hacking culture first grew at MIT among engineering and physics students coalescing around a club that built an elaborate model train set in MIT’s Building 20. As the electronic routers the club designed became ever more complicated and the group scrounged around the halls of MIT at night looking for parts, they discovered early keypunch machines in the basement of Building 26. These machines produced the punch cards that were the programming medium for an early IBM 704 computer housed on the building’s first floor. Thirty tons and nine feet tall, the IBM computer was off limits to students, but they managed to sneak into the basement room at night and play with the keypunch machines, inventing new programming solutions for their railway system. In 1959, when MIT offered the first computer programming course for freshmen, these enthusiasts signed up. What they really wanted was to get their hands on the IBM computer itself. But there was an elaborate bureaucratic system of rules around these bigger machines to keep tinkering-obsessed students from tampering with them.

The most proficient tinkerers in the model railroad club called themselves, self-deprecatingly, hackers. They might call a clever patch they had made a mere hack or say that they were hacking away at the railway routing system—hacking in the dictionary sense meaning to cut or sever with repeated irregular or unskillful blows; to cut or shape by, or as if by, crude or ruthless strokes; … to play inexpert golf. Early radio geeks had called themselves hackers, and there was a long tradition at MIT (which persists today) of students engineering elaborate, playful pranks, called hacks (such as covering the great dome of Building 10 with tin foil or building a police patrol car on the dome, replete with flashing lights and a box of donuts).

When one of the first transistor-run computers in the world, the TX-0, was loaned to MIT, it was housed on the second floor of Building 26, and the model railroad club hackers were allowed to sign up for time to work with the machine, which was run around the clock. As their obsession with the TX-0 deepened, they began calling themselves TX-0 hackers. They discovered that the best hours to book, or vulture, time on the machine were in the middle of the night. First, you used a machine called a Flexowriter to punch the programming instructions into a long, thin paper tape, and then you fed those instructions into the TX-0. The TX-0 made sounds as you did so—a kind of low, out-of-tune organ music that changed according to the data the machine was reading. You could hear what part of your program was going through—that is, if you could hear anything over the din of your friends’ clacking Flexowriters, which would make you think you were in the middle of a machine gun battle.⁴ You got the results of your programming immediately. For these budding pioneer programmers, the process was addictive.

The culture that coalesced around the model railroad club and the TX-0 hackers embodied precepts that, although only silently agreed on among themselves, would be distilled by Steven Levy into a hacker ethic:

1. Access to computers—and anything that might teach you how the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the hands-on imperative! Hackers, Levy explained, believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and more interesting things. They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.

2. All information should be free. If you [don’t] have access to the information you [need] to improve things, how [can] you fix them? A free exchange of information … [allows] for greater overall creativity.

3. Mistrust authority. Promote decentralization.Bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers … [which these institutions] perceive … as a threat.

4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not by bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. Hackers [care] less about someone’s superficial characteristics than they [do] about his potential to advance the general state of hacking, to create new programs to admire, to talk about that new feature in the system.

5. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Code … [holds] a beauty of its own. Among the TX-0 hackers, Levy explained, A certain esthetic of programming style … emerged. Because of the limited memory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques that allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions.

6. Computers can change your life for the better.This belief was subtly manifest, Levy wrote. Surely the computer had changed [these early hackers’] lives, enriched their lives, given their lives focus, made their lives adventurous. It had made them masters of a certain slice of fate.⁵

The professors who led the artificial intelligence (AI) work at MIT—Jack Dennis, John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky—were early proselytizers of computers’ potential to better the lot of the human race.⁶ Minsky, more than others, understood the genius of the hacker approach and encouraged hackerism in any way he could.⁷ The golden age of hacking at MIT developed through the 1960s under Minsky’s tutelage, with hackers like Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, and Stewart Nelson joining the student ranks in the early part of the decade. This group of hackers worked on operating systems, programming language, distributed systems, and the theory of computation. They ate copious amounts of Chinese food, worked all hours, and led a monastic lifestyle. There were a few women programmers at MIT at the time, but they were not within the hacker ranks. Computing was then, and remains today, a field dominated by Western white males. (This demographic is certainly a concern, considering computing’s profound effects on society. It is not a direct focus of this book, although in the second half I show that as hacking proliferates and merges with social movements, diversity and inclusiveness are seeping into the field and beginning to have their effects.)

Soon, the MIT hackers began working with a much more exciting machine—the PDP series. Joseph Weizenbaum, author of the well-known ethical treatise Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation⁸ and an MIT student during this time, vividly described hackers’ fevered lifestyle:

Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles. … They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they can arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers.⁹

The golden age hackers were even more hard core in their embrace of the hacker ethic than their TX-0 predecessors had been. Fighting the university bureaucracy to gain access to systems and tools, they developed a transgressive approach to rules. Richard Stallman, who came to the AI group at the tail end of this era, not long after Minsky established it as the AI Lab in 1970, recalled later in an interview,

I don’t know if there actually is a hacker’s ethic as such, but there sure was an M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab ethic. This was that bureaucracy should not be allowed to get in the way of doing anything useful. Rules did not matter—results mattered. Rules, in the form of computer security or locks on doors, were held in total, absolute disrespect. We would be proud of how quickly we would sweep away whatever little piece of bureaucracy was getting in the way, how little time it forced you to waste. Anyone who dared to lock a terminal in his office, say because he was a professor and thought he was more important than other people, would likely find his door left open the next morning. I would just climb over the ceiling or under the