by Jeff Shantz
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT
CYBER DISOBEDIENCE
One thing is clear: the Internet is likely the largest decentralized project in all of human history. Shantz and Tomblin hone in on the Internet’s renegades and radicals, who utilize the Internet’s unprecedented power for the purposes of resisting authority, creating international solidarity, and spreading the meme of anarchy. Cyber Disobedience describes hacktivists, the free software and anti-copyright movements, digital whistleblowing, and other efforts to create a freer and more just future, both online and offline. This book truly captures the rebel spirit at the heart of the Internet Age.
Dana M. Williams, California State University, Chico
Beyond the restrictive and narrow politics-as-usual from both left and right, the authors demonstrate the passionate and creative forces of contemporary anarchism that fly in the face of both corporate media and traditional academic accounts alike that perpetrate the mythical popular image of anarchism as utopic and disorderly. Providing discussions on everything from the rise of Anonymous, the Arab Spring, and demonization of whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to the coining of the term “hacktivism” in 1998, Cyber Disobedience explores the role of social media in information-sharing and movement-building possibilities. Activists, students, scholars—anyone interested in anti-capitalist social movements and digital resistance from below—will benefit from reading Shantz and Tomblin’s arguments that are theoretically sophisticated, empirically rigorous and historically significant. A lucid, compelling and provocative account of the potential of the digital revolutionary spirit, the text sets a very high standard for debates in the social studies of power, knowledge and technology. Overall, Cyber Disobedience constitutes a significant and timely contribution—a must-read for anyone concerned with freedom, technology, social justice and state repression in the twenty-first century.
Dr Heidi M. Rimke, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Sociology, The University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
First published by Zero Books, 2014
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Text copyright: Jeff Shantz and Jordon Tomblin 2013
ISBN: 978 1 78279 556 8
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CONTENTS
Webs of Struggle: Introducing Anarchy and Cyber Disobedience
Cyber Disobedience: Hacktivism and Beyond
Organizing Anarchy
Of Plastic Guns, Lulz, and Liberty: Two Struggles over the Communication Commons
And Two on Surveillance
Against the Law
Uncivil Disobedience?: Beyond Politics as Usual
Chapter 1. Re://Presenting Anarchy: Constructing Fear
Fin de Siècle Fears: Constructing the Anarchist Menace at the turn of the Twentieth Century
Writing Anarchism All Wrong: Literary Re://Presentations of Anarchy
Fin de Siècle Fears, Again: The Unabomber and the Dawn of the Internet Age
A Note on “Terrorism”
A Creative Passion
Chapter 2. Finding the Middle Ground in Cyberspace: A Content Analysis of Hackers in Film
Method
Hacker Portrayals
Revolutionary & Political – Shaping the World
Advanced Understanding of Computers
Terrorist–Anarchist Enemy of the State
Malicious, Harmful Intentions and Fearless of Punishment
Fun and Entertainment Seeking
Curiosity
Lack of Malicious Intentions
Financially Motivated
Vengeful
Chapter 3. Sailing the Cyber Sea: Hacktivism and a Capitalist Response to Piracy
Chapter 4. Applying For Netizenship: Foucault, Cybercrime and the Digital Age
Chapter 5. Walking the Plank: Inciting Change through Whistleblowing
Legislative Nodes: Sometimes Conducive, Sometimes Disparaging
Opaque Webs: Exposing Health and its Consequences
Transparency and Heresy: Inciting Change through Struggle
Whistleblower Inception and Legal Deception
Piracy and Privy: A Tentative Dispute
Conclusion
Chapter 6. Against the Online Enclosures: For a Cyber Commonism
On the Commons: Common Resources, Common Struggles
DIY Production: Challenging Capital
Future Possibilities/Potenza?: Complexity, Networks, and Change
Control Matters
Against Authoritarianism
Rethinking Democracy
Immediatism: Theorizing Resistance to Enclosure and the “One World” of Capitalism
Conclusion?
Chapter 7. Beyond Hacktivism: Toward Cyber Syndicalism?
Floating Signifiers: Into the Ether
Counterpower
Return to the Roots: On Cyber Syndicalism and Workers’ Control
Endnotes
References
For Molly, Saoirse, and p.j. For all who seek anarchy, online and off. (J. S.)
Jordon Tomblin would like to acknowledge his family and best friend, Preeti, for their continuous support over the years. And my eternal gratitude goes to Greg, colleague, supervisor, mentor, and friend.
Webs of Struggle: Introducing Anarchy and Cyber Disobedience
The development and spread of the internet over decades to become perhaps the mass medium of the twenty-first century, has been marked by struggles, which have often been hidden behind the screen of cyber mania. Yet these struggles are those that have always marked the development of capitalism, and capitalist means of production from steam to the assembly line to robotization and on—the struggle between producers/consumers and owners.
In the early days of the web, way back in the 1990s, there was great wariness of and opposition to the privatization and commercialization of the internet which was viewed as an important shared resource—a collective consciousness of sorts. Marxist theorists John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney note that those engaged with the internet worked on the general belief that “[c]ommercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere did not mix. Corporate media were the problem, and the Internet was the solution. Good Internet citizens needed to be on the level; they should not hustle for profit by any means necessary. Although not entirely free and democratic – it was, after all, based on military technology – the early internet was seen by its users as ‘theirs’” (2011, n.p.). Indeed early commentators on the developing webworld, such as Richard Barbrook, clearly viewed and identified the internet as a communications commons. Even more, movements of tech activists were seen as commonists (asserting the sharing o
f web resources and the need for alternatives to capitalist ownership and control but in a way that avoided, or refuted, the authoritarian or statist examples of communism).
At the same time some segments of capital readily grasped the enormous commercial potential of this untapped channel of profitability. To do so fully the cyber commons, like the land commons on England in the late feudal period, would have to be enclosed, brought within the purview of private property owners, as commodities. Many early cyber activists recognized this too and tried to mobilize users and producers to defend the free net and extend the spheres of openness, through tech worker collectives and open source technologies.
Over the last decade, of course, the enclosure of the internet as commercial space has expanded massively. The internet has gone from being viewed as a medium of mass communication or interchange to become a mass market (for exchange value). Corporations have used the internet to advance global trade in an immediate fashion, collapsing space and time for commerce. At the same time corporations have found entirely new commodities and spaces for profit making. As Squire suggests:
It has allowed a space in which data have become a valuable commodity at the same time as allowing data to be more accessible than ever to potential consumers. Corporations that hope to capitalise on data try to clear out the online commons and subjugate internet users to the ever encroaching profit motive of online companies. In many ways, hacktivism is a response to this contestation of rights. (2013, n.p.)
Despite claims to neutrality and proclamations of disinterested concern for privacy and rules of access, states of all political stripes globally have been highly interested players, intervening to ensure the legal enclosure of the web. Government bills, laws, and treaties have consistently restricted the rights of internet users and tech workers while affirming or asserting special rights of capital (owners and investors who seek a privately commodified web).
Marxist analysts Bellamy Foster and McChesney argue that governments routinely serve the interests if cyber capital over and against users and workers:
In the realm of the Internet, a state-corporate alliance has developed that is matched perhaps only in finance and militarism. It makes a mockery of traditional economics, with its emphasis on an independent private sector responding to a competitive market…[The] stories of how Amazon and PayPal cooperated with the government in the WikiLeaks affair…point to the demise of the separation of public and private interests. (2011, n.p.)
Commodification of social resources, of information as for materials or lands, occurs through processes of privatization or enclosure by which access to otherwise available goods or services is restricted by and/or to those who have enclosed or privatized. By rendering goods and services as “private property” they are made relatively scarce or inaccessible. This allows for profit-making by controllers of the resources. Such is the process at the heart of capitalist development from the start, what Marx called so-called “primitive accumulation.” Notably, it is the process at the heart of contests over the commercialization, or commodification, of the internet, of information, of the online commons.
As in the case of earlier processes of capitalist commodification, the efforts to commodify the internet or communications commons are being met with resistance. As the enclosures of common lands gave rise to the Diggers, Levelers, and Ranters, communities that took direct action to reclaim the commons, so the efforts to privatize and corporatize the web have given rise to hacktivists and cyber disobedients who take action for a free and open webworld. These new Diggers, Levelers, and Ranters take names such as Anonymous, Lulzsec, Riseup, and TAO (The Anarchy Organization).
As in previous periods, the resistance is criminalized by states acting on behalf of propertied interests that profit from enclosure. Cyber disobedients are criminalized because they seek, or succeed, to give away that which capital seeks to own, and sell, for a profit (Squire 2013). Restricting access to readily available information is a way to maintain and extend the commodification of data. And the key way in which this commodification can be achieved is by making information a scarce resource, by limiting its accessibility.
Cyber Disobedience: Hacktivism and Beyond
Cyber disobedience becomes a central means for engaging in action to defend free and open access to information and the sharing of information, the basis of an online commons. As Jo Squire (2013, n.p.) suggests, contemporary hacktivism serves as both an adjunct to more traditional activism on behalf of more familiar issues as well as being a cause in its own right. Perhaps the most notable convergence of cyber disobedience and street demonstrations can be seen in the mass uprisings of the Arab Spring.
The term hacktivism is popularly used to describe a range of activist activities, particularly sabotage or disruption, online. These can range from denial of service (DOS) attacks, involving overwhelming amounts of traffic directed at a website causing the server to overload, to the infiltration of computer systems, taking over websites or other actions in which computer based technologies are means and/or targets for political campaigns or actions generally conceived. On the characteristics of hacktivism, Jo Squire notes an interview with information activist Asher Wolf, a former member of the hacker group LulzSec, who described hacktivism as: “the use of computer hacking, the internet, and technology to try to effect social change or spread a message. It’s similar to normal activism except it takes place online. For example, instead of a sit-in, you have a [denial of service] attack. Instead of graffiti, you have website defacements” (quoted in Squire 2013, n.p.). Hacktivism is one action oriented aspect of an overall approach that brings perspectives and practices from more familiar forms of civil disobedience (noncompliance, sit-ins and occupations, trespassing, public witnessing, and so on) to the webworld. This overall approach is one of cyber disobedience, merging activism with organizing and movement building—it is an expression of resistance, of disobedience toward institutional authorities.
Cyber disobedience emphasizes direct action, rather than protest, appeals to authority, or simply registering dissent, which directly impedes that capacities of economic and political elites to plan, pursue, or carry out activities that would harm non-elites or restrict the freedoms of people in non-elite communities. Cyber disobedience, unlike much of conventional activism or even civil disobedience, does not restrict actions on the basis of state or corporate acceptance or legitimacy or in terms of legality (which cyber disobedient view largely as biased, corrupt, mechanisms of elites rule).
In many cases recently, people and groups involved in online activism or cyber disobedience are also involving themselves in real world actions and organizing. In other cases people and groups who have only been involved in real world efforts are now moving their activism and organizing online as well.
Many of the people who have participated in cyber disobedience have come to reflect on the relationship of their online actions and movements or campaigns being mobilized in communities, workplaces, and/or the streets. These reflections have led growing numbers to develop strategic or tactical relations with real world organizing and movement activities. As Squire suggests: “This is one of the reasons why Anonymous participated in its own ways in the Arab spring and the Occupy movement, rather than simply dismissing the street protests as ‘old’ or ‘boring,’ a common sentiment in online activism” (2013, n.p.). Clearly, this is a rethinking of political action in ways that engage old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. It is a strategic undertaking rather than a pure pursuit of novelty.
We saw such an intersection with Anonymous’ response to the mass uprisings of the Arab spring. In some ways this has also provided a high water mark for cyber disobedience. Recognizing, perhaps too late, the effectiveness of social media, mobile communications, and online alternative media as organizing tools for people in struggle against the Egyptian dictatorship, Mubarak’s government moved to shut down the web throughout Egypt. Closing down this vital means of communication posed a real threat to
organizers and activists seeking to confront the government, though it should be pointed out that it did not stall the movement which really gained its strength and momentum from face to face discussions and actions in neighborhoods throughout Cairo and elsewhere.
In response to the dictatorship’s actions, Anonymous deployed their tech skills to distribute so-called online care packages to people involved in the resistance “on the ground” in Egypt. Zip files containing instructions and phone numbers for dial up access to the internet along with software allowing online anonymity and firewalls were distributed along with other resources by which the governments censorship efforts could be circumvented (Squire 2013).
The so-called care packages greatly assisted the Egyptian organizers and activists to get back on the web. The online organizing tools that had been important resources for the resistance were back in their hands despite the best efforts of a, somewhat clumsy dictatorship. Notably, similar care packages have been deployed since in other uprisings of the Arab Spring and as part of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza (Squire 20103).
This shows the dual character of cyber disobedience. It has a constructive, solidarian, aspect of mutual aid that circulates knowledge among movements in struggle. At the same time it has a confrontational, direct actionist element that can target opponents, even shutting them down in parts.
One thing that is clear is that cyber disobedience in various forms, from basic DOS attacks to major hacks, will continue to grow, with more innovative and more dramatic actions in store. On one hand the cyber disobedients are becoming more proficient and confident. At the same time more people are drawn to online organizing given successes following the Arab Spring and Occupy. Social movements view it as a more regular or everyday aspect of organizing. On the other hand, economic and political elites, states and capital, are ever more present online. They (and their power) circulate online, enclosing much of online “space,” so there will be an impetus to confront and challenge them online.
