Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Another year, another Spotify wrapped, another day of me not going on Instagram because I'm really boring. |
| 0:08.8 | I realized they never got your Spotify wrapped. |
| 0:11.2 | You never got my Spotify wrapped because it's fucking random every year. |
| 0:14.2 | Oh, because you may you listen to like ambient electronic music to write to? |
| 0:19.7 | That's so not true. Well, actually, to be honest, my |
| 0:22.4 | algorithms now all just like jazz, because I keep putting on like cozy Christmas jazz, and now |
| 0:26.6 | it thinks that that's all I like. That's all I've been listening to is like vintage jazz. But that's |
| 0:31.6 | not good because now that's all you're going to get, really. But I don't know. I just, I don't need |
| 0:36.5 | to like, I'm scrolling through my stories and every |
| 0:38.5 | story is like, oh my God, Charlie XX is my number one artist. And I'm like, I'm just being really |
| 0:44.8 | crumptionally, but I really just don't need to every single story scroll through and see that you |
| 0:48.9 | all listen to the same five artists. Like that fine, I find that depressing. She feels left out because she didn't like |
| 0:55.4 | Brett. Okay, that's not true. I think Brad is mid, but, and extremely overblown. Do I like |
| 1:01.8 | Charlie? Yes. I don't know. Yeah, part of it is like a saltiness about me feeling left out of the |
| 1:07.0 | conversation because I find my music tastes is a little random and a little bit like, |
| 1:11.7 | it's kind of hard to put into certain artists. |
| 1:14.5 | It's hard to. |
| 1:16.8 | You wouldn't get it. |
| 1:18.8 | No, I will, I just really, I don't understand how we've gotten to a point in culture where we're all listening to five artists at the same. |
| 1:25.1 | Like, I don't know, maybe, maybe this is something I missed out on, but that's just not how I approach my listening. And that's okay. But I just like, my Spotify wrapped, they don't even send it to me half the time. I mean, this year I had to update, and that was why it hadn't been sent to me. But in years past, like, I've never had the banner appear on my homepage, so I do feel a little bit left out. |
| 1:45.1 | I usually have to, like, search it. And then it's always kind of like, oh, okay. They're like, this girl does not want to see her at Spotify wrapped. Kind of. They're kind of like, girl, this is random, mama. You think Spotify's like targeting you for having random taste? Yeah, they're like, you're a loser. Who the fuck is this girl? |
| 2:01.7 | Who the fuck is that girl? |
... |
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