Blown to Bits

Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis is the textbook used for the social implications labs in BJC. The book is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license; see the Blown to Bits home page for additional context.

Locally hosted copies of the PDFs are listed below. Page anchors (e.g., blown-to-bits.pdf#page=19) jump directly to a numbered page of the full book.

BJC currently uses the first edition (2008). A second edition (2021, with Wendy Seltzer added as a co-author) is also available; if you’d like a physical copy of the second edition, you can buy it from Bookshop.org or Amazon.

Full book

• Blown to Bits (complete book, PDF)
• Appendix — The Internet as System and Spirit

Chapters

• Chapter 1 — Digital Explosion: Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake?
• Chapter 2 — Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned
• Chapter 3 — Ghosts in the Machine: Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents
• Chapter 4 — Needles in the Haystack: Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar
• Chapter 5 — Secret Bits: How Codes Became Unbreakable
• Chapter 6 — Balance Toppled: Who Owns the Bits?
• Chapter 7 — You Can’t Say That on the Internet
• Chapter 8 — Bits in the Air: Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech
• Conclusion