Podcast of Bruce Sterling's HACKER CRACKDOWN has concluded

Since last June, I've been podcasting a weekly reading from Bruce Sterling's 1992 classic journalistic history of the founding of the online civil liberties movement, The Hacker Crackdown, which chronicles the events that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer. Hacker Crackdown was the first book I ever read electronically, the first piece of "literary freeware" I ever met. It's a fantastic book and it was a fantastic read.

Yes, I'm done. It took 28 installments, and included some of the strangest stuff I ever read aloud (for example, a mind-bogglingly bureaucratic phone company document around which a great deal of controversy once swirled). Now that I've finished it, I've put together an XML feed for all 28 parts, as well as direct MP3 and Ogg download links — it's all under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I hope someone'll download all the parts, normalize 'em, trim out the intros, and piece them together into a single file.

I need to thank Bruce Sterling here for his gracious permission in allowing me to read this aloud. Reading Hacker Crackdown back in 1992 — actually, 1991, since I got hold of an advance copy through Bakka, the bookstore I worked at in Toronto — absolutely and permanently transformed my life. Reading it again has made me revisit more than a decade's worth of striving, writing, imaginging, working and agitating. This book's an education and a half.

Thanks, Bruce.

MP3s:

Part 01,

Part 02,

Part 03,

Part 04,

Part 05,

Part 06,

Part 07,

Part 08,

Part 09,

Part 10,

Part 11,

Part 12,

Part 13,

Part 14,

Part 15,

Part 16,

Part 17,

Part 18,

Part 19,

Part 20,

Part 21,

Part 22,

Part 23,

Part 24,

Part 25,

Part 26,

Part 27,

Part 28,

Ogg:

Part 01,

Part 02,

Part 03,

Part 04,

Part 05,

Part 06,

Part 07,

Part 08,

Part 09,

Part 10,

Part 11,

Part 12,

Part 13,

Part 14,

Part 15,

Part 16,

Part 17,

Part 18,

Part 19,

Part 20,

Part 21,

Part 22,

Part 23,

Part 24,

Part 25,

Part 26

Part 27

Part 28

Podcast feed of the whole book

My podcast feed