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:
Ogg: