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Issue 26: Entanglements – Activism and Technology

By ⋅ December 22, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

During the 2009 post-election protests in Iran, YouTube proved useful for raising awareness and mobilising people; but later, the Iranian government used these videos to crowd-source the identification of protesters. Activists used Skype to communicate during the Egyptian uprising thinking it was safer than the terrestrial telephone system; however, when they examined files from the intelligence agency in the chaos after Mubarak’s fall they learnt their Skype calls were being closely monitored by Egypt’s security service . One of the most circulated images appealing for public sympathy and money following the 2015 catastrophic Nepal earthquake turned out to be a ruse—an old image from North Vietnam—its circulation initiated by unknown people with unknown motivations. These examples serve to remind us that while digital technologies are now deeply entangled with activist practices that are focused on contributing to social change, the philosophies and capacities embedded within these technologies often contradict, counteract, […]

FCJMESH-006 From Information Activism to the Politics of Data

By ⋅ December 18, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Maya Indira Ganesh and Stephanie Hankey Tactical Technology Collective doi:10.15307/fcj.mesh.006.2015 Tactical Tech has a decade of experience supporting the use of information and digital technologies to support rights activism. They say that in this time they have witnessed a radically altered information eco-system thanks to an explosion of new technologies, a dramatic rise in technology uptake and a burgeoning government and corporate surveillance system. Here Maya Ganesh and Stephanie Hankey, from Tactical Tech, discuss their analysis of the challenges this new information ecosystem poses for rights activism and they describe the ways in which Tactical Tech are choosing to address these challenges. 
As an organisation that supports activists and journalists to secure their communications to be more effective and more secure, we believe we have some parallels with groups working on a rather different issue: climate change. Environmentally friendly and sustainable lifestyle behaviours often start with having to recognise the […]

FCJ-196 Let’s First Get Things Done! On Division of Labour and Techno-political Practices of Delegation in Times of Crisis

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Miriyam Aouragh Westminster University Seda Gürses New York University Jara Rocha Bau School of Design Femke Snelting Constant Association for Art and Media Introduction This paper emerged from a workshop that formed part of the 2014 Thinking Together Symposium, held at the Osthang Architecture Summer School, Darmstadt, Germany. [1] It draws from conversations between the authors that highlighted how our approaches to brainstorming were eerily similar to the approaches of the tech-activist cultures we were trying to understand and challenge. We recognised that our pre-emptive questioning, pausing, and experimenting were mirroring the ongoing tensions between thinking and doing. Our own occasional utterances of things like ‘Oh, lets first get things done!’ made us realise we were all projecting from our particular—professional, political, personal—contexts. We came to recognise how we mimicked the same logic of what we identified and critiqued as a normative western male-dominated approaches that naturalise hegemonic divisions of […]

FCJ-195 Privacy, Responsibility, and Human Rights Activism

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Becky Kazansky Tactical Technology Collective Introduction Tactical Technology Collective (Tactical Tech) is an international Non-Governmental Organisation focused on supporting the effective use of information in advocacy. Tactical Tech has spent a decade listening to, documenting, and responding to activists’ privacy and digital security needs and challenges across the world, often in contexts where the free flow of information is constrained. This vantage point has allowed Tactical Tech to observe the transnational spread of digital surveillance technologies, and their use against human rights activists (Hankey and O’Clunaigh, 2013; Notley and Hankey, 2013). Stories of monitoring and intrusion facilitated through digital surveillance technologies have been relayed to Tactical Tech in training events, through research and documentation field trips, at conferences and workshops, and via networks and activist media. These stories confirm the kinds of harms described and theorised in surveillance studies literature and in reports by civil society organisations documenting the psychological […]

FCJ-193 Harbouring Dissent: Greek Independent and Social Media and the Antifascist Movement

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Sky Croeser Curtin University Tim Highfield Queensland University of Technology Introduction Activists’ uses of digital technologies are complex, and technologies are not only shaping the available possibilities for social change but are also being changed themselves through activists’ work. In this article we look at Greek activists’ use of a range of communication technologies, including social media like Twitter and Facebook, blogs, citizen journalism sites, Web radio, anonymous networks, and email. We use Anna Tsing’s (2005) model of friction to understand how frictions might productively influence or slow the use of particular digital technologies, examining the intersections between human and non-human actors, ideologies and experiences, in influencing the choices made by activists. Our analysis focuses on the Greek antifascist movement, primarily in Athens, noting that ‘the antifascist movement’ is largely a constructed object. We see Greek anarchist and anti-authoritarian organising as a key element of this movement, and note that […]

FCJ-192 Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and Challenge the Paradigms of Civil Disobedience

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Theresa Züger Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society Stefania Milan University of Amsterdam Leonie Maria Tanczer Queen’s University Belfast Introduction Oscar Wilde (1909) once wrote that ‘[d]isobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.’ In that sense, civil disobedience, which is a dissident form of political protest (Hahn, 2008: 1365), is embedded in a historical context and enables societal advancement while also leading to public friction. As society faces inequality, global mass surveillance and unequal power dynamics, civil disobedience has certainly not lost its importance in the twenty-first century. However, due to the development of the Internet and its broad use and deployment, the tactics and tools of civil disobedience have changed. We are witnessing acts of disobedience in both an offline and online context, which highlight the diversity of mechanisms […]

FCJ-191 Mirroring the Videos of Anonymous: Cloud Activism, Living Networks, and Political Mimesis

By ⋅ December 17, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Adam Fish Lancaster University Introduction In August 2012, Wikileaks was hit with a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from a mysterious group appropriately titled Antileaks. DDoS assaults occur when multiple computers simultaneously ‘refresh’ a website causing it to overload and shutdown. A shaken-up Wikileaks tweeted: ‘The range of IPs used is huge. Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them’ (Kerr, 2012). This is a constant problem for Wikileaks. Their website reads: ‘WikiLeaks is currently under heavy attack. In order to fully protect the CableGate archives, we ask you to mirror it again’ (Wikileaks.org). Eventually repelling the Antileaks attack, Wikileaks again took to Twitter to boast: ‘DDoS proof, financially & geographically diverse. We’re ready to rumble’ (Kerr, 2012). For Wikileaks, mirroring means copying and pasting the CableGate archives in resilient servers so that the content remains visible. Infamous for Guy Fawkes masks, […]

FCJ-188 Disability’s Digital Frictions: Activism, Technology, and Politics

By ⋅ December 16, 2015 ⋅ Post a comment

Katie Ellis Curtin University Gerard Goggin University of Sydney Mike Kent Curtin University Introduction Increasingly, disability is acknowledged as a key part of society, public and private spheres, and everyday life. Moreover, disability has achieved notable recognition and endorsement as an area of inequality, oppression, and discrimination that requires concerted global and local action. We see various markers of this transformation in the social relations of disability. In the legal realm there is the enactment of the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Arnardóttir and Quinn, 2009; Flynn, 2011), and the cumulative effect of many important laws and regulations enacted by governments around the world (Francis and Silver, 2000; Waddington, Quinn and Flynn, 2015). Related positive developments include greater visibility and potency of people with disabilities in public spheres and counter public spheres. There is increasing acknowledgement of the specific gender, class, race, and sexuality dimensions […]

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