Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online Anarchy

by Jeff Shantz

  As Deibert notes, this metadata does not simply evaporate. Rather “it moves through the filters and chokepoints of the Internet, and sits indefinitely, there to be mined, on the servers of the companies that own and operate the infrastructure: the telecommunications and Internet service providers like AT&T and Verizon in the United States, and Bell, Telus and Rogers here in Canada” (2013, A11). And vast resources have been devoted to the tasks of mining.

  Access to metadata, when combined with powerful computers and algorithms, can also allow entire social networks to be mapped in space and time with a degree of precision that is extraordinarily unprecedented, and extraordinarily powerful. Once analyzed, metadata can pinpoint not only who you are, but with whom you meet, with what frequency and duration, and at which locations. And it’s now big business for that very reason. A growing complex of top secret data analysis companies orbit the law enforcement, military, and intelligence communities offering Big Data analysis, further driving the need for yet more data. (Deibert 2013, A11)

  The NSA has built an enormous new $1.2 billion facility in Utah to handle and process the data. Estimates are that it can process around one hundred years worth of all of the world’s communications (Deibert 2013, A11). CSEC too has new $900 million headquarters in Ottawa right next to the Canadian spy agency (Canadian Security and Intelligence Services, CSIS) headquarters. Interestingly, the CSEC complex does not show up on Google maps (Deibert 2013, A11).

  These programs amount to constant, ongoing surveillance of people without suspicions, cause, or justification. Wire tap warrants would never be approved by the courts under such circumstances.

  Under cover of the “war on terror” governments have been monitoring the personal, private communications of their citizens. The invasions of privacy have occurred with no public or parliamentary debate or discussion and with no limits or parameters on how, when, or what is collected, who gets to see it and how long it can be held by governments. Indeed, in those cases in Canada where the wholesale collection of private data has been debated publicly, public opinion, and mobilization, has killed proposed legislation (Globe and Mail 2013, A16).

  Behind the banner of security and war (on terror, on piracy, on whatever is needed for political ends) the public is not permitted to know. The public is told to trust the spooks. Responsible people are said to be in charge. “Trust us,” they say. “Information is gathered only to stop the bad guys,” they promise. But who watches the watchers? Who really calls the shots? Who determines the threat? It is all a state-capital secret.

  In the 1950s, the sociologist C.W. Mills warned of a power elite of unelected military, corporate, and state managers who really called the shots and made the fundamental decisions in society behind the screen of democracy. They were the actual power-holders in society, the ones who determined political policy, not the elected officials who provided the face, or rather the mask, of democratic governance. Power and authority are wielded from an unacknowledged and unaccountable network.

  Notably, Mills argued that this power elite (or military-industrial-complex to use the term popularized by Eisenhower) views the world and everything in it according to a military metaphysic. All of society is, for the power elite, a war zone in which rules of war apply. Social issues are viewed as acts of war—requiring and justifying a military response—complete with a suspension of civil liberties. States of exception rule everyday life—martial law becomes law. A little loss of liberty or privacy is a small sacrifice to be kept safe—a fair tradeoff for security in a time of perpetual war.

  Against the Law

  It should be noted that the attempts to criminalize, and demonize, cyber disobedients have not been the only manifestations of government efforts to target and halt resistance or break up oppositional groups and actions in the current period. Since the emergence and spread of the alternative globalization movements in the global North during and following the Seattle protests that shut down the meetings of the World Trade Organization, governments in various neoliberal democracies, including the Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, and the US, have enacted a range of policies and practices to restrict or eliminate street protests (see Shantz 2012). State efforts have ranged from the openly repressive and violent, including the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, armored vehicles, and mass arrests, to the legislative, including legislative absurdities like laws against the wearing of masks of any kind during protests.

  In this repressive context many activists in liberal democracies have concluded simply being present in the streets is treated as a criminal act during times of protest. This has been borne out in recent protest events like Miami, London, Toronto, and Athens. During the time of the protests against the G20 meetings of global elites in Toronto in 2010, more than a thousand people were subjected to the discredited practice of kettling, in which all people on the streets in an area are rounded up in side streets by police and forbidden to leave. They are all then arrested, regardless of their actions, reasons for being there, or demeanor or perceived threat. Under such circumstances activists have come to question the value, efficiency, or legitimacy of civil disobedience as a means to voice dissent, let alone to effect any real social change.

  As some suggest, when protest becomes criminal, only criminals will protest. Some activists have concluded that the only means by which to stop harmful corporate or government practices is, not by appeal to the conscience of economic or political elites who seem, in any event, to have no conscience, or to shame them, they also seem to have no shame, but rather to act directly to make it impossible to carry out their plans. This is the approach advocated by anarchists. The approach of direct action—on the streets, or online.

  This direct action impetus characterizes cyber disobedients acting in the webworld. Such direct action has long been a manifestation of producers, going back to the earliest working class, or syndicalist, movements against capital rather than of “citizens” or dissidents or protesters as the civil disobedience of the streets has been.

  Uncivil Disobedience?: Beyond Politics as Usual

  Cyber anarchists deploying practices of cyber disobedience affirm a break with everyday politics. They refuse the norms that govern political consensus. In particular, they reject notions taken up by much of the political Left (even as alternative globalization movements grow) that revolutionary politics, radical social transformations, are no longer possible. While union leaders and even community activists, who should know better, scream for legality of protest, and seek to comfort police and politicians with apologies for direct action or anti-corporate property damage, the cyber disobedients identify legality as what it is—the screen that hides and protects power. In this their analysis coincides with the works of critical criminologists who have pointed out that legal systems and the police have always been mechanisms of elite rule and class domination. Shantz (2010b) notes that the modern police were conceived to maintain people in their station and roles within a social hierarchy. Numerous commentators, including those in Shantz (2012), have analyzed evolving policing practices during protests as efforts to halt dissent and protect global capital. Cyber disobedients reject Leftist defeatism, despair, and deference to authority—the obedience of the movements.

  Struggles, in fact, can, and do, shift the context in which political norms are understood. As Corcoran suggests: “In times when the count of the state is unchallenged, the effective ontological closure means that the sphere of politics will always consensually appear to be localized in the State, as a matter of looking after the affairs of the ‘political community’” (2011, xiv). Activists must contest and challenge, rather than accept and extend this fake and false consensus. Even more than this, anarchists have always rejected the limitation of the realm of politics to the terrain of the state.

  The cyber struggles of the twenty-first century have changed the context for understanding politics and political norms, not only of action but of outcomes. They have helped to dissolve
longstanding perspective and practices of politics.

  The stakes in the struggles over the communications commons are massive. The outcome will determine whether free and open access to knowledge is maintained and expanded as a shared social resource, or whether knowledge will become further privatized and commodified, accessible only to those who can pay the price demanded by capital. In some ways this is a struggle over the development of state capitalism. As a consequence of the enormous stakes in play, it is perhaps predictable that states and capital have launched a range of offensives, ideological and material, against proponents and defenders of the communication commons.

  On the one hand this offensive has been carried out through legislative and repressive means, such as criminalization of cyber disobedience and laws restricting access. On the other hand have been ideological campaigns designed to portray cyber anarchists and hacktivists not as political actors or community advocates but as terrorists. In many ways the current demonization of cyber anarchists echoes the demonization of anarchists carried out a century ago in the various “red scares.” These politicized processes of demonization and negative labeling are examined in the next chapters as they have applied to anarchists historically and cyber disobedients today.

  Chapter 1

  Re://Presenting Anarchy: Constructing Fear

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, during the heat of the revolutionary wave of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously wrote of the revolutionary spectre haunting the combined powers of Europe. That phantom was none other than the spirit of socialism, which at the time was (a fact generally forgotten) largely an anarchist one. Today, in the twenty-first century, while the ghost of Marxist communism has been exorcised (thanks largely to the monstrous failures that took the name of Communism in the various Soviet or Stalinist regimes), the old and seemingly vanquished revolutionary spectre is once again haunting culture and politics—this time by its proper name, anarchism. Since the early 1990s, even before the rise of the alternative globalization movements in the global North would make anarchism a household word again, anarchism as a self-aware force has enjoyed a rather stunning resurgence. Indeed, the resurgence of anarchism has paralleled the emergence of cyber activism. Both have struck a chord with a new generation of organizers and activists seeking an alternative to state capitalism but wary of the limitations and pitfalls of previous forms of progressive radicalism, whether Leninist centralism in organization or activist protest in practice.

  While anarchism and cyber disobedience have struck a resonant, and hopeful, chord with people seeking to challenge social injustice, they have been met with rather more negative reactions from corporate mass media. Few social groupings have stirred such an aggressive response from authorities as anarchists who are often presented as synonymous with another great scourge of the twenty-first century, terrorists. In the past few years condemnatory media coverage of angry, black-clad, balaclava wearing demonstrators mobilizing outside of the global meetings of government and corporate power-holders, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank (WB) has raised memories of the moral panic over anarchism which marked the beginning of the twentieth century. The “uncivil” disobedience, especially where it concerns damage to corporate property, attributed to so-called “black bloc” anarchists at global capitalist summits since the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle have landed anarchists squarely in the headlines, and crosshairs, and put them on the covers of a range of mainstream media, from the New York Times to the Toronto Star. It has also garnered them feature stories in various television programs, both as news and as entertainment. In addition, police assaults on anarchists during economic summits, including subjecting them to pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and mass arrests, as well as shootings and even killings, have suggested, with little nuance, to the general public that anarchists are a force of chaos and disorder to be feared. That view has been reinforced in mainstream media depictions of anarchists as little more than “thugs” and “hooligans.”

  The fact that public conversations about anarchism have been dominated by states and mass media, which uniformly portray anarchists as violent, destructive, even terroristic, means that there has been a lack of informed analysis of anarchist politics. One consequence of this obscuring of the discussion is that the actual perspectives, desires, and visions of this major, and growing, contemporary movement remain largely misunderstood. Lost in recent sensationalistic accounts are the creative and constructive practices undertaken on a daily basis by anarchists simply seeking to develop a world free from repression, oppression, and exploitation. While an examination of constructive anarchist visions, which provides examples of politics grounded in everyday resistance, offers insights into real world attempts to radically transform social relations in the here and now of everyday life, authorities prefer that this constructive aspect of anarchy remain hidden. The discursive attempts to construct anarchists as social deviants is not too surprising given that authorities typically attempt to portray perceived threats to their authority and privilege in a negative light. Indeed, cultural history in the global North shows longstanding efforts by states and mass media to stir public fear and outrage against anarchists who are rendered as monstrous.

  Fin de Siècle Fears: Constructing the Anarchist Menace at the turn of the Twentieth Century

  The persistent image of the anarchist as violent malcontent or terrorist emerged from a period of social movement desperation in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Following a period of state terror unleashed after the brutal repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the extermination by the state of hundreds of working class activists and organizers, some radical activists turned to individual acts of vengeance against perceived agents of the ruling classes. The result was a series of high profile attempted and completed assassinations of politicians and industrialists in North America and Europe.

  Mounting frustration with the lack of progressive social change, the continuing conditions of poverty and exploitation for the working classes, and the often brutal violence directed against unionists and striking workers led some to turn towards more aggressive strategies of insurrection. The term “propaganda of the deed” became part of public discourse during this period to describe acts f violence carried out against the wealthy and politicians. Perhaps the most infamous moment during the period came on September 6, 1901 when an unemployed worker and anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley. In Europe the most impactful among these was the bomb heaved into the House of Parliament in France by one anarchist by the nom de plume of Ravachol. There were also a variety of public acts of violence against symbols of capitalist society, especially supposed bourgeois clubs and other cultural establishments in which elites were believed to pass the time. Most notable among these was the bomb tossed into a busy café by Emile Henry.

  These episodes of attentat provided rich fodder for petit bourgeois commentators and novelists of the day and led to the development of a subgenre of literature on anarchist assassin that titillated a generation of anxious readers in an early period of “war on terror” panic. Curiously, the anarchist bomber myth has served as creative inspiration for some of the finest novels ever written in the English language. Prime works include: The Man who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, The Princess Casamassima by Henry James, and The Bomb by Frank Harris. It says something, too, that such prominent authors have turned their energies to writing about the specter of anarchy.

  The fin de siècle panic over anarchism was not limited to Europe. The social struggles of the late 1800s and early 1900s gave rise to often intense, and highly charged, public discussions of anarchism. In the US, government efforts to criminalize social resistance culminated in the passage of an immigration law of 1903 that sought to prohibit anarchists from entering the US (Hong 1992). As Hong (1992, 111) notes: “The anarchist was the constructed devil of the American civic reli
gion of the late nineteenth century. It was made the bogeyman to guard the borders of the political allegiances, loyalties, and obedience of American citizens.” The first North American anarchist Red Scare introduced a durable theme in American political life, not only as a justification for state ideologies and the construction of capitalist social consensus, but also to express and institute acceptable features of American political culture as elites desired them (Hong, 1992, 110). This was a process that Hong identifies as (creating and) caging the anarchist beast that forms the opposition to state capitalism.

  The popular portrayal of the anarchist as terrorist made a comeback in North America in the period of the Red Scare of 1919. Indeed, most have forgotten that, despite the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917, that Red Scare was targeted not at Communists but at anarchists and syndicalists (or anarchist unionists). The Red Scare and the state repression enacted under the Palmer raids, initiated by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, which included the deportation of foreign born activists, decimated the radical movements of the day, in particular the anarchists and the Industrial Workers of the World. Indeed, in some ways, these movements never recovered to reach the levels of influence and achievement they previously enjoyed.

  The trope of anarchist monstrosity has been particularly prevalent during periods of great social upheaval, as characterizes the present period. The era between the first Red Scare and the second Red Scare of 1919 was one of intense social conflict and dislocation as social relations and values were highly contested. As Hong suggests:

  Lurking behind the attack on one kind of revolution of social relations was a different revolution: the appropriation and concentration of power in corporate capitalism and in the strong nation-state. A common interest with the ideology of the latter revolution was cultivated in inverse proportion to the anxiety created about the challenger. (1992, 111)