Open Secrecy

How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-520-39728-6
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

Examines how the global digital underground is liberated by "open secrecy"—a novel and ominous mix of tools for mass communication and anonymity

Shadowy groups are increasingly capable of collective action. Using military-grade encryption, rerouting software, and cryptocurrencies, anonymous and pseudonymous actors can now communicate, solve problems, recruit members, and manage resources across multiple public and semipublic spaces. This swirling mix of secrecy and openness enables people to move through cyberspace like nomads with verifiable personas, which makes them impossible to stop.

Isak Ladegaard takes readers inside a dark, digital economy for banned drugs that has survived numerous police crackdowns, examines how activist software developers in China and other countries have maintained paths to the open internet, and documents how the American far right uses the same tools to sustain antisocial movements based on paranoia and hate. Timely and perceptive, Open Secrecy argues that although information technology enables mass surveillance, it also undermines state power by boosting groups that evade its rule. These dual forces of control and liberation are propelling us forward, with no one at the wheel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ladegaard, Isak

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Politische Propaganda & Kampagnen, Politik & Medien
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikation & Medien in der Politik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction
1. Invisible Forces of Liberation and Control
2. The Three Acts of the Information Age

I. Drug Trade on the Darknet
3. Illegal Markets Step Out of the Shadows
4. Crackdowns and Adaptations in the Digital Underworld

II. Fighting Censorship
5. Climbing the Great Firewall of China
6. Black Markets for Censorship Circumvention

III. The Digital Far Right
7. Deplatforming the Digital Far Right
8. The Digital Far Right's "Hate Focus"
9. Hyggelig Hate and the Mainstreaming of the Digital Far Right

Outro
10. Resisting Social Change
11. Embracing Ambiguity

Epilogue: The Digital Public Square Is Dead

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Case Selection and Data
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Isak Ladegaard is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.