@ Is For Activism

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Interview

Author interview by James Quinney:

There’s often a lot of hype surrounding the potential of new technologies. How significant do you think computer mediated communication has really been for activists?

In many ways activists are no different from anybody else in our media saturated society – computer mediated communication (CMC) is of profound importance for them as for anyone else, in that it offers new modes of interaction, new opportunities for cooperation and new resources for action, and has even shifted the nature of subjectivity and what it means to be ‘together’. The question as far as activism goes then becomes: does it change things in a way that can increase the capacity to hold state and corporate power to account, to build new forms of resistance and to construct alternative ways of producing and living beyond the ever more oppressive and exploitative grip of neo-liberalism? There is a strand of critical thought which very much answers that question in the negative. For example the political theorist Jodi Dean (2009) argues that much of the communication online functions in the way of what she calls, taking the phrase from Slavoj Zizek, ‘interpassivity’: that is, it is a form of communication that actually reduces action by creating the illusion of doing something, when in fact nothing is being done. Signing online petitions, blogging or tweeting about one’s outrage amounts only to adding more and more to an endlessly circulating stream of messages that reach nobody and affect nothing – but give the persons sending them a chance to salve their conscience without actually risking anything.

This is a broad view that has recently been reflected by Malcolm Gladwell, in an article that created quite a stir in online circles and represents much online activism as mere ‘clicktivism’. While it is no doubt true that a lot of what passes for activism online might be defined as such clicktivism, and that the impact of much clicktivist style activism is limited in its impact, I believe such pessimism is overstated. For one thing the act of making an effort to write something, click a link, tweet or sign a petition – even if the message itself is lost or goes unread – the commitment, however small, of reinforcing and restating ones own principles or point of view represents some kind of act of social solidarity that may otherwise never happen, and that is not nothing. And that is the worst-case scenario: some messages surely do get through, even if to a small number of people, but the interconnected distributed nature of the web means that small circles can soon expand.

Yet beyond this not all activism online is clicktivism or anything like it. The clicktivism thesis appears only to take into account immediately obvious forms of online only practices. But of course most activism, like the networks of CMC more broadly, interlaces the online and offline worlds to the point at which it makes little sense to try andJa think of them as completely separate entities, given that digital computer networks are now an inextricable part of our everyday reality. Over the last decade we have seen a great many movements and causes enhanced by CMC. The most famous of these has been the Zapatistas, whose supporters used the Internet to turn a local struggle into a global movement. But we also see this in smaller ways in everyday struggles – we have witnessed UKUncut move from a network of social media sympathies into concrete actions springing up across the whole country in unpredictable and effective ways. Not to mention the more than impressive student mobilisation and occupations – much of which has been coordinated on-line and indeed orchestrated in action via social media, and also mediated and re-mediated to huge secondary audiences, bypassing the usual constraints and filters of the corporate media system. This kind of CMC enabled action has a lot of resonance with the idea of ‘Multitude’ proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004); that is, the intelligent new collectives of technically informed ‘singularities’ can come together, coordinate themselves, and act with a kind of collective intelligence against globalized capital wherever it is present, and the fact that capital is so ubiquitous means it is also uniquely vulnerable to such action. Of course one should also resist getting too carried away. Shutting down Vodafone stores for an afternoon will not seriously undermine a corporation of such a scale and reach as Vodafone, but it can shift public opinion and in that sense contribute to political solutions - but if such a protest were generalised and widened, who knows what could be achieved. As we have seen with the scale and swiftness of manoeuvre of the students protests this has, at the very least, put the issues of public sector cuts, student fees and the corporatisation of higher education at the centre of the political agenda, as well as entailing a refusal of the usual official media narrative.

As your question hints, one should resist the temptation to see the introduction of a new technology or media as a magic bullet – this was evident in the hype surrounding Twitter in the Iranian uprisings, which turned out to have far less significance than was reported at the time. But the aggregation of many movements and causes, working independently but also overlapping where necessary – finding links, articulating new forms and evolving through the discovery of shared interests and practices – has the capacity, I believe, to effect significant change.

Recently the Government’s outlined a proposal for far-reaching powers to snoop on email and web traffic, which the London School of Economics has said will lead to “a tipping of the balance in favour of state power and away from the individual”. How do you think this will affect activists?

It shouldn’t affect them at all, at least to the extent that they don’t allow it to intimidate or control them. That’s not to say it should be accepted or not resisted, but in notionally free societies the power of surveillance is in its capacity to discipline individuals into internalising a set of rules or norms to which they would not otherwise subscribe, to isolate them and integrate them into a particular structure of authority. This includes, I think most significantly when it comes to the kind of data mining the question implies, what Greg Elmer (2004) has referred to as ‘profiling’. Here databases use accumulated data mining techniques to predict behaviour, and in the case of activists to pre-empt and curtail dissent. However, this is not so much about individuals and their loss of personal privacy but about the creation of generalised patterns of social control. Thus the threat is actually about reducing the power of the collective, the multitude - the aim is to isolate individuals until they are totally privatised self-contained units, just as capital requires. This is an evolution of the logic of the prison and of its perpetual surveillance. Clearly surveillance in the context of digital communications is not desirable, and should be fought against, but at the same time it should not lead to self-censorship, to withdrawing from online social interaction or from seeing digital communication as a realm of hostility and risk, which is precisely what such schemes are designed to inculcate.

As Noam Chomsky has argued in the past, there is no point in activists trying to hide their views, given that one of the central aims of activism is to make the case for them, especially in democratic societies where free speech and assembly are, at least notionally, still protected. In an age when the boundaries of private and public have become so eroded, the porous line between networked spaces of communication, the public arena, and action need to be treated as zones of contestation rather than retreat. In that context counter surveillance has come to be a significant and useful tactic – we can see this in the way that digital cameras, video recorders and mobile phones have been used to capture the behaviour of the police and other groups, and has then been circulated online to great effect. The kinds of events that have previously been invisible can longer be kept so – most notably the police involvement in the death of Ian Tomlinson at the London 2009 G20 protests, which become public. So making things as public and open as possible is one way of simply ignoring the threat of surveillance, and in so doing to undermining its power. We can see this in the use of Twitter and Facebook during the student protests and occupations – the communication is mostly out there for all to see, but that hasn’t meant the students have been at a disadvantage. On the contrary their intelligence and speed of manoeuvre has led to inspiring scenes in which they have been outwitting the police, avoiding attempts to contain them with pre-emptive kettles and cordons, learning collectively as they go." (http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/activism_in_a_digital_culture/)