Exploring New Configurations of Network Politics

During the French general strike on 7 September 2010 the slogan ‘Je Lutte Des Classes’ could be seen and heard throughout the massive protest marches.
 
‘I class struggle’ recognised anew the collective interests in challenging an increasingly vehement and savage neo-liberal and anti-democratic tendency in Europe and North America. There had been no such inkling of a movement in the UK until two extremely important events occurred in the last two months of 2010 that indicate a renewal of the collective sprit – but in the UK this is one that has emerged not through the French route of organised unions but has sprung up with the aid of a new political reality, and that is the capacity for political and social activism to be cooperatively generated on line. The events are, of course, the demonstrations against the cuts in funding to further and higher education and the ‘cablegate’ documents release by Wikileaks. What is also compelling is the reaction to these events by states and corporations, which has clarified the nature of the struggle for democracy and human rights and how it is likely to be fought over the coming years.  This is all about structure, control, movement and speed.
 
In the case of the emergent student movement, with its core claim for a basic right to an education, the Internet has meant it has been able to organise horizontally and without leaders, to communicative many to many, to think together when it needs to, to act in concert or break apart into small clusters or individuals. This is largely reflecting the form of the many to many distributed computer network that comprises the Internet, one that is now accessible through mobile communications devices and any number of the platforms that run on them. The authorities cannot counter this fluidity of movement and reaction because they cannot predict and direct protest within the boundaries they find convenient. The response is to kettle – if you cannot compete in speed and intelligence you can only respond with force, to lock down and throttle back.
 
This is also true of Wikileaks, which has used the capacity of digital networks to move information around at will and circumvent the previously centralised media system. It is this distributed structure that has enabled movement, and crucially speed of movement, both within and without the network itself. Data can be replicated and shared at the speed of light around the world – just as persons, groups, crowds, can orchestrate on the streets, they can be each others eyes and ears, collective cognition - mindshare – as the corporations like to call it.
 
Yet at the same time there is a tension between this distributed topology, as is seen in these cases, and the Internet’s capacity for control. The domain name system (DNS) which links web addresses (URLs) in human readable language to their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (the strings numbers that allow computers to actually locate each other), is hierarchical, centralised and easily switched off. Thus the Wikileaks domain can be removed, no problem, the information is still there, but becomes unreachable, trapped – this is effectively data kettling.
 
The kettle is the natural tactic to counter the capacities of intelligence, movement and speed, whether digital or embodied – it hinders, slows and finally freezes movement, it counteracts thought’s capacity to turn into act and in so doing it stupefies, it is profoundly dehumanising – and it is hardly surprising that it produces an oscillation between rage and despair. The much witnessed act of blocking space, shutting off movement, crushing bodies or decapitating web sites is the act of a static spent power, acting against the power of creativity, of the power to do.  The response to this is, unsurprisingly, to try and break free – to break the kettle, or to run like hell the other way, or in the Wikileaks case, for sympathisers to hit back at those that enable the kettling. Amazon.com, that had immediately caved to pressure to withdraw their supporting services from Wikileaks, became the target of hacktivists’ directed denial of service attacks, as did other organisations such as MasterCard, who were seen to be complicit, if you can’t break the kettle then you hit out where you can.
 
            While this tactic, and the countermeasures adopted to try and resist it, have come to prominence in the current wave of student unrest the logic is that of an increasingly authoritarian consumer capitalism, emblematic of the early 21st century. The relentless call to shop in which all human life is reduced to the choice between brands, the tyranny of workplaces and public spaces that are surveilled for every second of the day, the university where the sum total of human knowledge and ingenuity is boiled down into learning outcomes and employability statistics. All of these employ variations on the logic of the kettle, that is, to dislocate and enclose the network, to hinder the capacity to manoeuvre, to slow and nullify thought, to contain real choice. The events of the last few weeks have told us, if they’ve told us nothing else, that the struggle for the coming years will be to maintain the freedom to connect, to share, to move and to produce our own space as we see fit – we are the kettled – and the struggle will be to break the kettle, both digital and embodied.