What would it take to hack a human? How exploitable are we? In the cybersecurity industry, professionals know that the weakest component of any system sits between the chair and the keyboard. This book looks to speculative fiction, cyberpunk and the digital humanities to bring a human - and humanistic - perspective to the issue of cybersecurity. It argues that through these stories we are able to predict the future political, cultural, and social realities emerging from technological change.
Making the case for a security-minded humanities education, this book examines pressing issues of data security, privacy, social engineering and more, illustrating how the humanities offer the critical, technical, and ethical insights needed to oppose the normalization of surveillance, disinformation, and coercion.
Within this counter-cultural approach to technology, this book offers a model of activism to intervene and meaningfully resist government and corporate oversight online. In doing so, it argues for a wider notion of literacy, which includes the ability to write and fight the computer code that shapes our lives.
Author(s): Aaron Mauro
Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 224
City: London
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Human Exploits: An Introduction to Hacking and the Humanities
The Darkest Timeline
Don’t Be Evil
Claiming the Future
A Mischievous Spirit
1 “Hack the Planet”: Pop Hackers and the Demands of a Real World Resistance
Parler Tricks
Anthological Freedom
Street-Level Anarchy
Polymorphic Protest Culture
2 Academic Attack Surfaces: Culture Jamming the Future and XML Bombs
Prescient Pessimism
A Jussive Mood
sudo rm -rf /
A Billion Laughs
3 Supply Chain Attacks and Knowledge Networks: Network Sovereignty and the Interplanetary Internet
A Consensual Hallucination
El Paquete
Sovereign Networks
Don’t Worry, We’re from the Internet
4 Cryptographic Agility and the Right to Privacy: Secret Writing and the Cypherpunks
Tales from the Crypt
The Enemy Knows the System
Happy Birthday
Ignoti et quasi occulti
5 Biohacking and the Autonomous Androids: Human Evolution and Biometric Data
Vital Machines
The Selfish Ledger
Virtual Influencers
Cindy Mayweather—ArchAndroid
6 Gray Hat Humanities: Surveillance Capitalism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Design Fiction
Selected Bibliography
Index
