Cyberactive Resistance?

The next (and last for this conference) session is about to begin, titled simply 'resistance?' Still a good turnout for the session even though people are now starting to leave the University of Sussex to catch their various planes. Andrew Ó Baoill starts this session with a study of MoveOn.org, a political group which started in 1998 around the Clinton impeachment campaign and enables participation in political action by members of the public - especially in the congressional process and election campaigns. Andrew's project here is to analyse the tools and to contextualise the work of MoveOn. He points out that there are some differences to Putnam's work on social movement organisation here.

MoveOn asks individuals for donation of time and money for well-defined purposes, in an effort to involve people who wouldn't otherwise be involved and feel they usually don't have time for politics. They offer targetted knowledge ('bite-sized chunks') enabling timely action, thus managing their membership to prevent volunteer burnout and provide templates for activities (e.g. a 'bake sale for democracy'). They also investigate their gathered data on previous successful actions to identify the potential and approaches for further action. Bite-sized chunks here might include online petitions, emails for forwarding, congress members' contact details (email, phone), or money donation facilities.

There are some shortcomings in this approach, however: large volume in political actions might decrease their value (many congress members now no longer accept email from members of the public), so that the right to petition the government is affected - 'precisely because it is so cheap, it is worthless'. Form emails are often discarded out of hand, so that MoveOn now suggests that people using their templates personalise them to look less standard; otherwise due to the high volume complaints by members of the public appear simply as 'noise' to the decision-makers. Also, MoveOn action templates appear to favour desk-bound individuals with always-on Internet connections as they might suggest action at a specific pre-set time, meaning that only highly connected people might be able to receive this suggestion in time to act.

Individual actions are not necessarily visible to those who are not directly involved themselves; they might be visible only in aggregation ('500 calls were received today' - commanding the biggest number becomes more important than the content of the message). In other words, we might be dealing here with public action in a private space. Actions, then, work perhaps largely as a show of force, relying on the power of numbers (and overall using military metaphors in the conceptualisation of the action). To a certain extent, these actions also rely on 'water-cooler politics'; they don't build on social capital as much as focus on currently 'hot' topics which enable a mobilisation of large numbers.

Victor Pickard is up next, speaking on the cooption of the Internet for cooperation. He gave a paper on Internet governance on Monday, looking at the structures of Internet governance, while this talk will focus on the use of the Net to challenge existing power structures. There may be McLuhanesque design biases in the Net which allow for the ready use of the Net for subversive approaches; at the same time, however, there remains an ongoing tendency towards commercial encroachment on the Internet, of course. Victor notes ideas for the use of oppressors' tools against them, however, such as Hakim Bey's idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ).

Rheingold's idea of 'smart mobs' is also relevant here. Victor offers a number of case studies here, such as the Indymedia-led protests around the Republican National Convention in New York. This used a variety of technologies - Websites, automated phone information lines, streaming media, etc. MoveOn in their most recent campaign suggested the idea of 'vote mobs' to coordinate voter registration events on university campuses, while FreeRepublic.com picked up a story from a blog by 'Buckhead' that suggests that the documents claiming favourable treatment for George W. Bush in the army (in a 60 Minutes piece by Dan Rather) were falsified.

Victor proposes a technology which studies such exemplars of cyberactivism for more than their use of Internet technology, instead focussing on democratic theory. The decision-making processes, the mission statements, and the actions facilitated here are most important in such a study. For Indymedia, Victor suggests that there is a very radical democratic model with open publishing features and radical politics processes behind the scenes (consensus basis, levelling of all power hierarchies). This isn't just a traditional Marxist approach against class structures, but also attacks gender-based and other power hierarchies. For MoveOn, there is a very liberal pluralist model; its actions are based on the idea that in society there are competing interest groups of constituencies, of which a progressive constituency is being harnessed. There is little attempt to fundamentally change society, so the uneven playing field isn't challenged here. FreeRepublic (whose members are sometimes taunted as 'Freepers'), which may be the right-wing version of Democratic Underground, offers a partisan public sphere in which access and the power to speak is very limited. Following each news story on this site there are discussions through which occasionally political action is organised.

Indymedia remains hamstrung to some extent by people who fight amongst themselves about what action processes to engage in rather than presenting a united front against the problems that all members agree exist. It wouldn't take too much for Indymedia to engage in certain policy interventions, but the radical democratic approach makes effective coordination very difficult. MoveOn, on the other hand, is much better organised, and remains with a fairly top-down decision-making approach. Also, what happens with MoveOn if it is successful in helping defeat Bush, and is it simply fuelling the 'arms race' of political advertising and perpetuating traditional approaches? In FreeRepublic (and Democratic Underground) there are certain totalitarian tendencies where members are speaking to the converted and really only have a say if they're already on the 'right' side - a kind of self-ghettoisation.

Finally, Ted Coopman and Clifford Tatum, speaking on 'resistance for the rest of us' in a filesharing context. For them, the sharing of digital media files represents a new form of distributed social resistance. Online music sharing is a mature form of online interaction which is a kind of digital resistance. The dominant paradigm is challenged, with catalysis by new technology, and there is a cycle between cognitive praxis and new knowledge and its diffusion (e.g. through the semi-legal filesharing as it is now done via iPods/iTunes). Indeed, Apple has always been a kind of rebellious subculture. What has changed, then, are the means of production., distribution, consumption, and as a result the industry structure and legal frameworks have been affected.

More Americans than voted for George Bush in 2000 use filesharing networks on the Internet. 29% of Internet users download music files to their computers. Supposedly, the music industry is suffering heavy losses in sales as a result (but of course these figures are highly questionable), and even in spite of the industry's legal actions against filesharers, filesharing levels have rebounded again in 2003. Filesharers have a kind of cosmology which focusses on the unreasonable consumer cost of music, the rejection of new copyright/fair use interpretations, the essential failure of the artist compensation system, and the failure of the industry to meet consumer needs. The associated technological dimension includes the rise of the Internet and filesharing technology and the move from utopian practice to feasible business models; the organisational side focusses on the anarchic/non-hierarchical approach in this phenomenon, the distributed and collective model of filesharing, and affinity relationships.

The core identity of filesharers is the idea of empowered independent actors distributing culture in opposition to powerful commercial interests. Resistance occurs through everyday small acts and is emboldened through 'collective' cover (the odds of getting busted are fairly low); the removal of consent as dissent leads to larger effects over time. The violation of established social norms, of the public transcript, the elites' breach of rules allows others to follow suit as well; cries for fair price for fair product and movements towards the idea of creative commons etc. have also emerged.

Such movements challenge codes and signal a deep transformation of complex societies: there is a capacity to modernise and create social reform, and networks are social movements in complex societies. A whole identity (related to life politics or life style politics) arises, and collective identity is dependent on the recognition by other political or social actors (related to the idea of 'you are who you link'). Is this consumer-based resistance equivalent to a social movement - after all, it is leaderless and self-organising? Is the market (now that Apple has entered the fray) a viable channel for social change? What about the role of ideology here?