Hacking in the Humanities: Cybersecurity, Speculative Fiction, and Navigating a Digital Future

Description

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. 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