Familiar political tools
like petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns now have
online equivalents. But what about protest tactics like street marches, picket
lines, sit-ins, and occupations? Where is the room on the internet for civil
disobedience?
In the
offline United States, civil disobedience is widely respected as a valid form
of political activism. It also has a widely recognized form. Indelible images
of Rosa Parks, lunch counter sit-ins, and street marches from the 1950s and 60s
civil rights era established what civil disobedience looked like. Civil
disobedience looked like an embattled minority bravely standing up in face of
clear injustice. It looked like people taking a stand with their bodies and
their identities, and often getting arrested.
This
pattern of public, performative defiance of injustice, followed by arrest, has
become part of the recognized script for political activism in the United
States. It's how we expect activism to happen: on the streets, in public, where
everyone can see your face. Adhering to a recognized script is essential to
political activism that is reliant on the attention of the media to be
effective.
But
today, civil disobedience often looks very different. Networked technologies
mean our opportunities for effective political activism have increased
exponentially. Where activists once put their physical bodies on the line to
fight for their causes, online activists can engage in digitally-based acts of civil
disobedience from their keyboards. There are three major lines along which
digitally-based civil disobedience is developing: disruption,
information distribution, and infrastructure. Each has its own
particular challenges and benefits.
Disruption
Disruptive
tactics like distributed denial of service (DDOS) actions and website defacements have a
fairly long history in internet terms. Activists groups like the Electronic
Disturbance Theater, the Strano Network, pro-Palestinian groups, and many
others used DDOS and website defacements in their campaigns as early as the
mid-1990s. These tactics aim to upset the status quo by disrupting the normal
flow of information, thereby attracting attention to their cause and message.
Disruptive
tactics are focused on the public: they aim to deliver their message to as many
people as possible, either through exposing them to the disruption and dissent,
recruiting them to take part, or both. To be effective, this type of civil
disobedience needs to attract the attention of masses of people, typically
through the mainstream media. If the media doesn't recognize or cover the
actions as acts of protest, then the activist message will fall flat. (If an activist
defaces a corporate website, and no one sees it, does it have political impact?
Probably not.)
Information
Distribution
Information
distribution-based tactics are built around the acquisition and release of
hidden or secret information. In the past three years, we've seen this kind of
protest take the form of whistleblowing, information exfiltration, doxxing
(posting the names and personal information of targets online), and
crowd-sourced vigilante investigations. These tactics are used by groups like Wikileaks
and Anonymous. The idea is to move information from states of low visibility to
high visibility, putting injustices in the public eye when traditional law
enforcement avenues seem to have failed.
Anonymous
has been developing crowd-sourced vigilante investigations in the US and Canada
with Steubenville
Whistleblowers
and leakers rely on the cooperation of the mainstream media to publicize,
contextualize, and analyze the information they release. However, this may
become easier as more news organization recognize open paths for whistleblowers
and leakers. Wikileaks' five media partners for the Cablegate documents, the New Yorker's Strongbox program, and theGuardian's extensive work with NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden
Infrastructure
Infrastructure-based
activism involves the creation of alternate systems to replace those that have
been compromised by state or corporate information-gathering schemes. In other
words, if the government is snooping on the internet, activists build a tool to
make it harder for them to see everything. Tor, Diaspora, and indenti.ca are some examples of these projects,
as are the guerrilla VPNs and network connections that often spring up to serve
embattled areas, provided by activists in other countries.
Similar
to living off the grid, these projects provide people with options beyond the
default. Open source or FLOSS software and Creative
Commons use a similar
tactic: when the system stops working, create a new system. The challenge is to
bring these new systems into widespread use without allowing them to be
compromised, either politically or technically. However, these new systems
often have to fight network effects as they struggle to attract users away from
dominant systems. Diaspora faced this issue with Facebook. Without being able
to disrupt dominant systems, user migration is often slow and piecemeal,
lacking the impact activists hope for.
Disruption,
information distribution, and infrastructure tactics and strategies are often
practiced by separate groups working independently on different issues.
Sometimes disparate group interests will overlap, as when Anonymous launched
the disruptive Operation Payback in support of Wikileaks during Cablegate, but
there is little inter-group organization.
As the
practice of civil disobedience develops online, those who favor different
styles of activism but who are united in a common cause may begin organizing
themselves into affinity group-style coalitions, building alliances for more
effective activism. Effective digitally-based civil disobedience needs a
diverse, integrated repertoire of contention to draw from. A disruptive action
targeting Facebook could drive users towards alternate, more open, social
networking services. A leak detailing government intelligence abuses could spur
disruptive protests, consumer flight to uncompromised services, or further
leaks.
On the
street, activists at major events like political conventions or meetings of
groups like the WTO or G8 often use a variety of tactics to provide support
within affinity groups, and to make it harder for protest to be neutralized by
law enforcement. Street marches are counter balanced by occupations and
lock-ins. Posters and pamphlets will be augmented by street art, puppets, and
ad hoc street theater. Jail solidarity actions are helped by speeches on the
courthouse steps. Though one action may get shut down, others can still make an
impact. Digital activists will want to emulate this coalition-building in
online spaces too.
As
digital activism develops, civil disobedience will continue to a be vital tool
for expressing dissent. The internet could be the tomorrow's best zone for free
speech and activism, a place where protesters can challenge structures of power
that threaten human rights and freedoms. The future of digital civil
disobedience will grow out of new online tactics, augmented by the internet's
ability to bring people together across geographical boundaries.
Protest
in the information age may not look exactly like Rosa Parks on that bus half a
century ago. But it will still carry on our ongoing struggle to change the
world for the better, and to bring justice to the oppressed.
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