Jeremy Hammond says: “Read Darlingtonia, a badass anarchist tech dystopia.”

PS: Don’t buy from Amazon, buy it from the publisher [Detritus Books]

Another obstacle for the hacker movement, as every new meeting of the Chaos Computer Club demonstrates, is in managing to draw a front line in its own ranks between those working for a better government, or even the government, and those working for its destitution. The time has come for taking sides. It’s this basic question that eludes Julian Assange when he says: “We high-tech workers are a class and it’s time we recognize ourselves as such.” France has recently exploited the defect to the point of opening a university for molding “ethical hackers”. Under DCRI supervision, it will train people to fight against the real hackers, those who haven’t abandoned the hacker ethic.

These two problems merged in a case affecting us. After so many attacks that so many of us applauded, Anonymous/LulzSec hackers found themselves, like Jeremy Hammond, nearly alone facing repression upon getting arrested. On Christmas day, 2011, LulzSec defaced the site of Strafor, a “private intelligence” multinational. By way of a homepage, there was now the scrolling text of The Coming Insurrection in English, and $700,000 was transferred from the accounts of Stratfor customers to a set of charitable associations – a Christmas present. And we weren’t able to do anything, either before or after their arrest. Of course, it’s safer to operate alone or in a small group – which obviously won’t protect you from infiltrators – when one goes after such targets, but it’s disastrous for attacks that are so political, and so clearly within the purview of global action by our party, to be reduced by the police to some private crime, punishable by decades of prison or used as a lever for pressuring this or that “Internet pirate” to turn into a government snitch.

Invisible Committee, October 2014

An Anarchist Mystery for the Millennials

from Works in Progress

Darlingtonia is a mystery re-imagined for the 21st Century. There’s a classic opening with a dead body and a person who doesn’t figure in the story. The main character, Dylan, is a graphic artist in the advertising department of OingoBoingo, a company with a suspicious product – electronic mind games. In place of continuously lighting up a “smoke” (though there is some of that), Dylan constantly scrolls down her twitter account, her facebook account, her instagram accont – not to mention her iphone, her gmail and other media. The Bay Area setting, a favorite for many mystery novels, has new opportunities as Dylan navigates through landmarks of the tech world.

Dylan’s colleague Ricky has gone missing. Ricky’s job at OingoBoingo involved working on data for special images and when he doesn’t turn up one morning, things start getting weird. Dylan hooks up with a funny – maybe homeless – friend of Ricky’s and embarks on a search that’s interrupted by migraine headaches, immigrants, gentrification, police brutality, hacking, tracking with eventual excursions into the secrets of the internet and the possibilities of algorithms. But as the bookseller informed this reader – the heroine does not suffer violent indignities, and that’s a plus.

It turns out that this book was written by “an anonymous collective of individuals strewn along the west coast.” That might explain why some of Dylan’s actions are described in a detail that contributes to the flavor but might seem a little too much: “…Dylan opens the freezer and starts eating ice cream out of a container. She removes her makeup with an apricot scented wipe while holding a plastic jar of organic pistachio gelato.” Nonetheless, it’s a fun read.