Hackers as vital disruptors inspiring a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens take
back democracy. Hackers have a bad reputation as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of
infrastructure. In Coding Democracy Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers she argues can
be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice an ethos and a metaphor for a new wave of
activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed decentralized
democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power mass surveillance and
authoritarianism enabled by new technology the hacking movement is trying to build out
democracy into cyberspace.
