The American way of life, built on individual liberty and limited government, is on life support.

American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government—not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, “Try to fight this, and we’ll ruin you.”

In this provocative book, acclaimed social scientist and bestselling author Charles Murray shows us why we can no longer hope to roll back the power of the federal government through the normal political process. The Constitution is broken in ways that cannot be fixed even by a sympathetic Supreme Court. Our legal system is increasingly lawless, unmoored from traditional ideas of “the rule of law.” The legislative process has become systemically corrupt no matter which party is in control.

But there’s good news beyond the Beltway. Technology is siphoning power from sclerotic government agencies and putting it in the hands of individuals and communities. The rediversification of American culture is making local freedom attractive to liberals as well as conservatives. People across the political spectrum are increasingly alienated from a regulatory state that nakedly serves its own interests rather than those of ordinary Americans.

The even better news is that federal government has a fatal weakness: It can get away with its thousands of laws and regulations only if the overwhelming majority of Americans voluntarily comply with them. Murray describes how civil disobedience backstopped by legal defense funds can make large portions of the 180,000-page Federal Code of Regulations unenforceable, through a targeted program that identifies regulations that arbitrarily and capriciously tell us what to do. Americans have it within their power to make the federal government an insurable hazard like hurricanes and floods, leaving us once again free to live our lives as we see fit.

By the People’s hopeful message is that rebuilding our traditional freedoms does not require electing a right-thinking Congress or president, nor does it require five right-thinking justices on the Supreme Court. It can be done by we the people, using America’s unique civil society to put government back in its proper box.

Adobe Flash began as a simple animation tool and grew into a multimedia platform thatoffered a generation of creators and innovators an astonishing range of opportunities to develop anddistribute new kinds of digital content. For the better part of a decade, Flash was the de factostandard for dynamic online media, empowering amateur and professional developers to shape thefuture of the interactive Web. In this book, Anastasia Salter and John Murray trace the evolution ofFlash into one of the engines of participatory culture.

Salter and Murrayinvestigate Flash as both a fundamental force that shaped perceptions of the web and a keytechnology that enabled innovative interactive experiences and new forms of gaming. They examine aseries of works that exemplify Flash's role in shaping the experience and expectations of webmultimedia. Topics include Flash as a platform for developing animation (and the'Flashimation' aesthetic); its capacities for scripting and interactive design; games andgenres enabled by the reconstruction of the browser as a games portal; forms and genres of media artthat use Flash; and Flash's stance on openness and standards--including its platform-defining battleover the ability to participate in Apple's own proprietary platforms.

Flash'sexit from the mobile environment in 2011 led some to declare that Flash was dead. But, as Salter andMurray show, not only does Flash live, but its role as a definitive cross-platform tool continues toinfluence web experience.