[iDC] A Reflection on the Activist Strategies in the Web 2.0 Era

[Curt Cloninger]

Hi Tatiana (and all),

It seems less important to adopt a new theoretical language of 
resistance. If all that differentiates hacktivists from corporate 
entrepeneurs is the nomenclature they use, then perhaps the original 
tenets of such hacktivism were not as resistant as they could have 
been.

de Certeau's critique of the ways in which modern academics analyse 
media seems relevant. He observed that media was either analysed in 
terms of its content ("information") or in terms of its delivery 
mechanisms ("television" in his case, in our case "networks.") What 
was lacking was a way to talk about the creative 
reception/consumption/use happening at the consumer end of the line 
-- how were the "users/consumers" modulating institutional input in 
the practice of their lives? They weren't merely passive receivers.

youTube and mySpace aren't so radical in their underlying 
architecture. As you point out, the interweb has always been 2.0. If 
anything, these corporate instantiations of that technical truth only 
serve to commodify and capitalize on the utopian "dream" of 
many-to-many publishing freedom. So maybe that "dream" in and of 
itself wasn't all that tactically resistant (since it's now being 
marketed back to us with limited banner-ad interruptions.) youTube 
and mySpace are radical in their mass distribution and ease of use. 
They shift the "tactical" conversation away from 
specialist/artist/hacktivist as strategic producer (of code, 
platforms, networks, distributed communities) and back toward 
everyone as tactical consumers/useres. The wrinkle since de Certeau's 
time is  that a youTube "consumer"  has a lot more media agency than 
de Certeau's television "consumer." The youTube "consumer" finally 
begins to possess at least the potential agency of a proper "user" 
(hobbyist, prosumer, or whatever). cf: http://oliverlaric.com/5050.htm

So I don't think we need new nomenclature as much as we need a new 
realization that tactical "resistance" on the corporate 2.0 web may 
look a whole lot more like tactical consumption than it looks like a 
denial of service attack on a government server (although that is 
still possible). de Certeau provided early net theorists with a model 
and a vocabulary of "tactical media." But early net activists weren't 
ever really consumers. de Certeau's model was just an analogy. Now we 
have actual consumers that have been afforded the agency of 
"reading," reblogging, and remixing their various memex trails of 
consumption through the "information" of the network. de Certeau is 
no longer applicable merely by analogy.

This new platying field can lead to a different kind of "hacktivist" 
work -- work that (in the nomenclature of Galloway/Thacker) relies 
more on hypertrophy than overt (or even covert) "resistance." The 
danger of this new kind of work (massively distributed "weak" tactics 
of consumption) is that it can act as a kind of placebo. As Nato 
Thompson warns, "The problem with accepting this sensibility is that 
it can lead to fairly privileged forms of resistance, like slacking 
at work or taking a meandering walk home. I am a fan of these more 
benign tactics, but not convinced they lead to anything but personal 
therapy."

Hopefully we will get to work out some of the details here in March:
http://medialab-prado.es/article/3er_encuentro_inclusiva-net_comunicaciones_seleccionadas

Best,
Curt


Curt Cloninger
Assistant Professor of Multimedia Arts & Sciences
The University of North Carolina Asheville

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School: http://mmas.unca.edu



At 3:16 PM +0100 1/14/09, Tatiana Bazzichelli wrote:
>My position is not to refuse
>the very popular social networking platforms because commercial and
>closed; rather, it is to try to construct new artistic and activist
>experiments at the core of their system. It is necessary to criticize
>the media, applying the Hands-On hacker attitude in new territories
>of intervention. Tim O'Reilly is learning from hackers, but hackers
>should be able to reinvent their strategies once again.
>
>A new language criticism is needed!

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