The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet
First Reviewed December 2014
I want to move this book from goodreads because my Hacker, Hoaxer post cites it. I want to migrate Hacker, Hoaxer because Kill All Normies cites that one. Nested, insular, irritating: those were my bywords in 2014-15.
The digital humanities books that felt big and important to me a decade ago have faded into the aether; either I’m frequenting different bookstores that don’t suggest interesting material in this space or the public desire for such things has waned—whenever I look at the computer sections now, all the books have titles and subtitles like ROBOT: HOW WE GOT HERE AND WHY ITS BAD or INTERNET: WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS STUPID AND I WILL FIX YOU.
Treating the internet as a new, unique thing has sort of faded after parceling it off into little corporate playgrounds. Maybe the next communication revolution will last longer before it is captured and walled off.
book by Molly Sauter
…[T]he danger of the digital public sphere is not exclusion but invisibility. As Herbert Simon observed, a surplus of information leads to a surfeit of attention; in a digital public sphere, anyone can speak, but not everyone can be heard.
I am constantly stunned by my rush of endorphins when an update says, “So-and-so [note from 2026: this link got 404’d] likes your review on Goodreads!” I know it is a trap. Variable-interval reward schedules—randomness, or patterns so complex as to appear incomprehensibly random—can become habitual (it is likely why people, never knowing when they’ll be rewarded with a stimulus, check email so often. [note from 2026: since email is now usually a notification, I would change this to be more like “why people pick up their phone so often” or “refresh the endless scroll”. Technology does change!) Random or seemingly random rewards are insidious. Brains are constantly trying to weave a cohesive tapestry from a patternless tangle and are primed to create patterns from all sorts of suggestive strangeness.
To create on the internet is to cry in a rainstorm: who’s to know, excepting those in such close proximity as to be able to distinguish the source? There’s too much internet to analogize it to the real-world, but analogizing is (probably) [note from 2026: this link is dead and I don’t know what I was trying to cite ¯\_(ツ)_/¯] the way the brain works; go with what you know. So while the “the Great Firewall of China” doesn’t actually apply, it is too clever not to use when talking about online censorship in China. It hits that part of our brain that—just because it is cute—makes the phrase seem so accurate as to reform the contours of the object. Another analogy we deal with daily is that of “time”; it isn’t an object, nor can it be saved. We speak of it that way, plan our lives like time can be “spent.” Time has become a resource that, unsurprisingly in our hypercapitalist era, has re-formed itself around the concept of our sacred fiat currency.
Phrases like the “Great Firewall of China” position the internet as a real physical space that can be circumscribed, protected. And the longer people think about the internet as a digital representation of reality, the more it will be shaped into the metaphor itself. It has different lines and limits: ebooks are infinitely reproducible, so why cap how many people can borrow a “copy” from the library? Habit, mostly, and a stubborn clinging belief that the a priori system—a system designed and built around finite, physical books—has some mystical power because of the momentum of a past era.
This moves in both directions: expecting digital space to grant the same rights and benefits as have been carved out through generations of hardship, civil disobedience, and revolution is the same delusion as the “old guard” of creative media publishing assuming their cost-of-creation expenses and real-world overhead fees should extend into a basically zeroed-out production line:
Infringement on the property rights of private actors is often brought up as a criticism of DDOS actions, as if there was a space online that wasn’t controlled by one private entity or another. Charges of censorship are usually thrown into the mix as well, because (ironically) of the inter’s overwhelming use as an outlet for speech, by individuals, corporations, states, and everyone else. “Why,” the critique goes, “can’t you come up with a way to protest that doesn’t step on somebody else’s toes?” But the internet, as it were, is all somebody else’s toes.
It might sound tautological, but different things are different, and should be treated as such. We want to analogize DDoS actions as sit-ins, because we know where to position sit-ins in our worldview. But they aren’t sit-ins. The internet isn’t the sidewalk—it’s more like Outer Space. Because no will hear you scream. Except, again, it isn’t like Outer Space either; the trap of the analogizing brain makes everything like something else, even when it isn’t.
So we take shortcuts to make unfamiliar things familiar; maybe from weak analogy, maybe from simplified media compression:
The word “hacker” was, and is still now, used by the news media as a catchall term to apply to any type of criminal or “bad” computer activity, including those that did not break any laws. The hacker figure himself (media depictions of male hackers outnumber those of female hackers by a wide margin) became a type of “folk devil,” a personification of our anxieties about technology, the technologically mediated society, and our increasingly technologically mediated selves. The hacker, as depicted in film and on the 6 o’clock news, is the central deviant of the information society.
Maybe from poetic license. Whatever the case, The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet attempts to frame the internet as its own thing: no bad metaphors or weak analogies clutter the page. The book opens up a conceptual framework that is in danger of being elided before it has a chance to be recognized—the internet, uncoupled from physicality, creating new ways for incorporeal voices to be heard.