Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy
The Many Faces of Anonymous

May all academics aspire to write such a book as Biella has here. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is a remarkably accessible work of ethnography on a technically and ethically seeming inaccessible community and subject matter: Anonymous and its politics. Biella's account is absolutely gripping—I......more

This book tells how hacker collective Anonymous turned from arseholes to activists. It could have done with a good edit. There are plenty of mundane chat logs that could have been halved and there is a typo on almost every page, which is often confusing. When the author spells people's names three d......more

This book could have been half the size. The organization of the book is impossible to follow. It feels often like random ramblings. It seems hard to find the main point in chunks of text. I remember at one point she spend 3+ pages explaining ‘lulz’ (I nearly quit there). Got over halfway through, k......more

(I got a copy courtesy of NetGalley, in exchange for a honest review.) An interesting read, but one that I found rather hard to read all at once—probably because it felt pretty dense and dry, with a lot of information that seemed to meander at times. I guess this was kind of unavoidable, because ther......more

This is a meticulously researched and documented book about the group Anonymous, including several notorious hackers. The author in an anthropologist and wrote the book in a style (I can only assume) that would be what fellow anthropologists would expect to read. It is very dry and detailed. When I g......more