Net Activism in the Late 2.0 Era
"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Audre
Lorde
Talkin' about Web 2.0 it is no longer interesting stating the
obvious. Yes, strong organization forms, firmly rooted in real life,
overdetermine weak online commitments. We are bored with the
slacktivism of the millions. Following market predictions we will soon
have to design the interfaces where locality and virtuality
intertwingle (or else others will do it for us). The secret of making
society is allocated in the aesthetics of radical osmosis. As Malcolm
Gladwell already expressed it, the revolution will not twitterized.
Instead, we will to take up our autonomous responsibility and
sculpture the Social ourselves. The inner voice whispers: we ought not
make ourselves too dependent on the biases of some Harvard geeks to
define how revolutionary dynamics can come into being--or are
subsumed, as Facebook exemplifies. In the age of networked digital
exchanges the social is even more fluid than it ever was. No longer
God-given, the protocols of human collaboration are up for grabs. This
task is no longer exclusively in the hands of the Church, the village,
the clan--or the (Leninist) Party for that matter. Show your Social
Design!
This brings the discussion to the question which values exactly should
be translated, and transformed, into software. We are not all
'friends'. This is another truism of the outgoing Web 2.0 era. But
then how would be describe contemporary relationships? It should be
possible to go beyond the friend-foe distinction. Let's dream up
unlikely relations, spontaneous encounters (and how to solidify them)
and technologies that actively derail everyday routines. Smart mobs
were way too innocent. 4chan has radical elements in its very concept
but gets so easily stuck in old school voyeurism. What is missing is
the 'sweet stranger' element, beyond the object strategies that Jean
Baudrillard described and its touching opposite humanist values.
What's out there are random encounters with a cause. Networks are not
just replicates of old ties. They bear the potential of something
other, of becoming society. Let's leave the remediation age behind us
and start to fool around with dangerous social design.
Cyber cascades a la Avaaz.org create blimps in mass awareness but fail
to raise resilience. The trouble with current media activist
strategies in the age of social networking is not so much their
ability to scale up, which they seem to manage quite well, but the
absence of a painful set back in the encounter with the Powers to Be.
Resistance means struggle with the risk of defeat as a real option--
and this sounds profoundly uncool. There is nothing sexy about saying
no. Protesting is party time and provides jobs for event managers. PR
experts of the contemporary reformist movements, with Tony Blair as
their guru, claim the moral high ground in their insistence to remain
positive. Militant fighters that defend rights, attack the system and
fight back are portrayed as 20th century losers. In the past
hacktivist strategies have embodied certain elements of such radical
negativity, with tactical media as its gay and playful counterpart. It
is in this light of the refusal that we could go back to the 1950s
literature on the user as rebel (Camus) and outsider (Ward). The
protesting user is neither the perfect e-citizen nor a pathological,
brain damaged while multi-tasking loner. Games provide us with a
plentitude of subcultural figures and identities. Yet, going post-pop,
how would we define the aesthetics of online protest?