From the University of California Press 2025 catalogue:
Advances in information technology have made it easier for shadowy groups to organize collective action. Using military-grade encryption, re-routing software, and cryptocurrencies, they move through cyberspace like digital nomads, often with law enforcement and other powerful actors on their tails. This book reveals how the same technology enables these groups to communicate and collaborate in public and semi-public spaces, making them both open and secret at the same time—and efforts to stop them provoke countermeasures with unintended, far-reaching consequences.
Ladegaard begins by taking readers inside a digital economy for banned drugs that has survived numerous police crackdowns and is still thriving, nearly fifteen years after its genesis. He then examines how, in roughly the same time period, a community of activist software developers in China and other countries has been able to maintain paths to the open internet, again despite police interventions. Finally, he explains how the American far-right uses the same tools to build movements based on paranoia and hate. Timely and perceptive, Open Secrecy helps readers understand how information technology, for better and worse, undermines state control.