Here are some more comments on digital activism and my book I wrote for the peer to peer foundation wiki, reproduced from here
"When I first began working on the project that was to become ‘@ is For Activism’, my motivation was as much for my own curiosity as anything, and that was to try and get a sense of the inherent capacity, or at least potential, for digital communication technology to be democratically directed and to function - at the risk of being overly grand - towards emancipatory ends. The inherent flexibility of the microchip to process information in innumerable ways seems to lend itself to such ends, in particular the capacity for distributed computer-mediated-communication to enable dialogical forms of interaction. However, at the same time there are many thinkers who have understood, not just digital technology, but technology in general, to do precisely the opposite. The notion of modern technology as producing what Martin Heidegger refers to as enframing, broadly entailing a process that captures human beings in an inescapable technological alienation, is just one such theory. While this may be true of an industrial lathe or a Fordist production line it seems to miss the potential of certain individual technologies, the Internet being one such, that have emancipatory potential. So it is that when looking at various different approaches and variants of philosophy of technology, at different ends of the utopian/dystopian binary, one is led, I believe, and I argue in the book, to the conclusion that we need to think about technology as a social product, but also one that has the capacity the shape the social in equal measure – neither utopian nor dystopian but embedded in our deeper social, political and economic practices.
Given the context of a capitalist society and economy it is this technocapitalist framework within which the potential for digital communications must be understood. In the book I explore this framework, and having asked the question of what activism can mean in that context, the book then works through a range of specific technologies and circumstances, looking into the technical opportunities available therein, and the practical activities actually undertaken. For example, I explore the possibilities for digital broadcasting to contribute towards the Benjaminian ideal of the author as producer, and look at examples of production and distribution that challenge the traditional model of mass broadcast centre-to-periphery media. Here, what becomes apparent is the fundamental significance of widely available computer power and networks – and in particular distributed networks – for such challenges to dominant media systems, and accordingly to capitalist patterns of production that rely on maintaining exclusivity of access to productive capacity and the means of distribution. In that regard I further explore the specific nature of the Internet and the Web, drawing on the work of a range of media theorists, including Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, who emphasise the importance of protocol in enabling both control and freedom in networks. I have also been interested in how this articulates with social and political norms, in particular with theories of discourse ethics and radical democracy, which I explore in more detail in subsequent chapters.
What I was also particularly intent on exploring in the book was the actual capacities enabled through access to distributed networks, including mobile communications, and what these mean for concrete instances of protest, rebellion and the building of new commons, for which of course the tradition of peer production is of great interest. Here the book looks at a range of examples from the anti-war movement, alter-globalisation movement and the reclaimed factory movement. I also have tried to reflect on these examples in relation to recent theories developing from the tradition of autonomous Marxism, in the work John Holloway, Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, amongst others.
Indeed much of what I was writing about has been come to the fore in the last few weeks with the distinct, but related examples, of the student movement and the Wikileaks ‘cablegate’ events. The two things seem to me to bring into broader public awareness the increasing centrality of digital activism to politics. In the first instance we have an effectively leaderless student protest movement springing up, circumventing traditional political structures, including the student’s union, which has simply been unable to keep pace with developments. The use of commonly available social media for organisation has been prevalent, and enabled a great deal of flexibility and speed of manoeuvre - yet at the same time offers a weak spot, given that these are still commercial and privately owned platforms whose ‘users’ can very easily be thrown off. We see with Wikileaks a cat and mouse game in which the struggle for open information sharing has been traced out in struggles between protocols, where the hierarchical DNS has been the weak point, just as Galloway and Thacker argue and I discuss in the book. Domain names are being cut off at source, while TCP/IP is able to maintain distributed access to documents, as new domains and mirrors pop up around the world. I don’t think anyone could fail to see these two events as variants of the consequences of the proliferation of digital communication, and that they should happen to take place at exactly the same moment really brings this point home. While these particular events happened soon after the book went to press, by bringing some of the debates and previous examples together - and attempting to develop a theoretical framework for thinking about the ethics and politics of digital activism - I hope the book offers some useful ideas that prove to be relevant in this ongoing situation."