Digital Activism

Digital activism is a form of activism that uses digital media, mainly the Internet, as a key platform for mass mobilization and political action. From the early experiments of the 1980s to the current smart mobs and blogs, activists and computer specialists have approached digital networks as a channel for militant action. Initially, online activists used the Internet as a [Page 456]medium for information distribution, given its capacity to reach massive audiences across borders instantaneously. A more developed undertaking of digital activism or cyberactivism approaches the World Wide Web as a site of protest, turning virtual space into a ground that mirrors and amplifies street (or offline) demonstrations.

This use of the Web as a valid terrain for social antagonism comes from an understanding of the nomadic nature of the current configuration of hegemonic power. In this scenario, transnational labor and capital flow are indicators of how power is not tied to particular physical spaces but circulates smoothly through the information highway. Digital activists claim that, in order to disrupt the capitalist structures that are favored by the process of globalization, an effective activist action must confront power in its nomadic being by, among other tactics, blocking its free circulation across nation-state borders.

One of the fundamental goals of online activism is to make the body digitally active and not just the passive receptor of power's ubiquitous interpellation that confines individuals to different kinds of data banks. E-mail campaigning is one of the simplest ways in which activists use the Internet as a complement to street action. On the other extreme, hacktivism (a form of digital activism that comes out of the hacker culture of the 1980s) aims at breaking in and disrupting web-sites by altering the patterns of code arrangement. Hacktivists, such as the group Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), operate based on the philosophy of freedom of information and the rights of people to have unrestricted access to digital resources.

Different digital tactics entail diverse uses of the electronic networks. Text-based practices include e-mail campaigns, text messaging, Web postings, and online petitions to advocate for a determined cause and to generate massive support. Web defacing or cybergraffiti, a more complex text-based online practice, is an action in which a specialized group of cyberactivists or hacktivists alters the home page of an organization by posting information that holds it accountable for its role in a given conflict. Another way of generating text to create awareness of a political matter is known as HTML conceptualism. It consists of an action in which a group's request of nonexistent pages within an organization's website makes the server return error pages with a message reading, for example, “human rights not found on this server.”More performative actions, like “virtual sitins” and “e-mail bombs,” push the possibilities of online activism a little further, provoking a concrete disruption of the servers' functionality through the concerted action of participants around the world.

Although online political participation always brings up the issue of the digital divide, that is, of the unequal access that different social actors have to technological devices, in many cases online activists narrow the distance between both ends of this division by collaborating with disenfranchised groups in a networked manner. Ricardo Dominguez and his group the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) take traditional civil disobedience tactics to the Net in support of social movements like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico;the immigrants subjected to border patrol brutality on the border between Mexico and the United States;or the families of the murdered young women of Ciudad Juárez. In 1998, EDT automated the virtual sit-in, a form of online demonstration in which a networked community gathers on one or several sites to carry out an act of digital dissent. The action is undertaken through a Web-based program, FloodNet, that sends repetitive requests to the targeted Web pages. The protestors' automated “clickings,”simultaneously enacted from multiple computers around the world, provoke such an excess of traffic that the targeted site's server is unable to handle it. By clogging the bandwidth, the action affects the site's technological efficiency, slowing down its capacity to retrieve information and eventually provoking its shutting down. In this way, the action combines the activists' appearance in virtual space with their intervention in time, because, as a result of this massive presence, the action disrupts the server's pace. In contrast with hack-tivism, which achieves technological efficiency by operating at a syntactical level;that is, at the level of code programming, Dominguez locates the efficiency reached by EDT's virtual actions on a semantic level. In EDT's actions, myriad symbolic gestures—tied more to the politics of the question and utopia than to a revolutionary overthrowing of power—create disturbance [Page 457]through a poetic reformulation of the link between the real and the virtual. EDT's activism takes much of its symbolic force from the Zapatistas, the Mexican indigenous insurrectionary movement who, through the communiqués delivered by their leader, the Subcomandante Marcos, unfolded a creative use of language and technology as powerful weapons against hegemonic power. EDT's actions fall into the category of electronic civil disobedience, and, to dissociate them from acts of cyberterrorism or regular hacking, activists ask that these online political gestures comply to certain rules: The actions should always represent a communal interest and not an individual agenda, their motifs and agents should be publicly exposed, they should also include a “live”element linking them to some sort of street action, and they should be easily appropriated and replicated by groups with little or no technological knowledge.

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