From Indymedia to Anonymous: rethinking action and identity in digital cultures (original) (raw)

Being networks: the digital formism of net-activist movements

Matrizes, 2013

For the last few years online social movements have spread through several latitudes creating important theoretical challenges for several areas of knowledge, concerning the nature of such actions, given the connective and technological quality of its acts as well as concerning the creation of a new kind of locality, simultaneously informative and material expression of an unprecedented dwelling condition that brings humans together, informative circuits and territorialities. Finally, the necessity that imposes rethinking the composition of human collectives beyond the perspective of modern sociology, since it presents itself as expression of a reticular interactive ecology that is no longer political, that is, anthropomorphic and ideologically oriented.

The Politics of Networks Using Actor Network Theory to Trace Techniques Collectives and Space Times

The progressive unfolding of the internet into all spheres of life brings forward new types of publics which question prevalent notions of technology, the social, and spatiotemporality. These network publics pose a problem to social science because they escape the traditional projection of a social sphere populated by actors and a natural/technical sphere populated by objects. Therefore, to analyse the politics of networks, researchers need a projection capable of examining hybrid actors questioning the very conceptualisation of the social used in social science.

The Network Society, Private-Public Sphere(s) and the ‘Soviets of the Multitude’

This paper will claim that changes in ICT have fundamental implications for the private/ public distinction in contemporary social life, rendering such a distinction increasingly permeable. As a consequence of such permeability it is contended that the issue traditionally understood as that of the ‘Free Rider’, a central problematic in collective action theory since Mancur Olson (Olson, 1965) no longer necessitates organisations in expediting contentious collective action in order to engage with other actors for public goods. Instead this paper claims that such permeability opens up the possibility for something akin to a non-state mediated public sphere, different to that articulated by Habermas which is understood as an interlocutor between private relations and the state apparatus (Habermas, 1962). Consequently it is claimed that the work of Paolo Virno in particular (Virno, 1996) offers a meaningful lens to understand ICT-mediated public space which moves beyond existing categories and engages with new realities observable in numerous examples of contemporary collective action. Such change in collective action, while not inherently ‘emancipatory’, does offer a set of possibilities for political action that transcends traditional theoretical frameworks and methods of practical organisation, while embodying political practices adverse to delegation, representation and the arbitrary imperative of ‘command’. To conclude, the paper will argue that it is increasingly this new IT-mediated public space that is the site of political action as understood by Hannah Arendt, while the traditionally understood Habermasian sphere is increasingly rendered one of ‘information war’ (Arquila and Ronfeldt, 1996) and biopolitical control (Foucault, 1979).

The Network Synthesis of Social Action I: Towards a Sociological Theory of Next Society

Sociological theory has always been a theory on the network synthesis of social action. In this age of society intrigued by the introduction of computers, this has to become explicit. To know about the form of the network synthesis of social action means to know how the society, which will cease to be modern and become, instead, the next one, a knowledge society, deals with its inherent dynamics by generating specific structures able to sustain social action. This paper attempts to look more closely at the network synthesis of social action from two perspectives. Firstly it goes back to Niklas Luhmann's conjecture about the structures of society depending mainly on culture forms able to deal with the surplus meaning, or overflow, produced by the introduction of new media for the dissemination of communication. This is a conjecture about the structures of society being the outcome of it having to find a solution to new kinds of overflow by switching from one culture form, and the concomitant social structure, order, and understanding , to another. The morphogenesis of society depends on these dissemination media eclipsing one another, while all however persisting, even if changed in scope, scale, and range. The paper, then, tries to develop a model of social action which takes into account the culture form possibly able to deal with the surplus meaning brought about by the introduction of the computer as a medium for the dissemination of communication. This model proposes a form integrating ideas from sociological systems theory and sociological network theory. It tries to be simple enough to accommodate the complexity of social action. The paper begins by presenting some general ideas on a sociological theory of social action. And it concludes by proposing a shift from objects and subjects of social action to what we will call the catjects of social action. Such a shift actually proposes looking at categories which are able to describe and explain what kind of underlying reality is produced and reproduced by the eigen-values of social action. These catjects combine reference with self-reference, and further incorporates some means of accounting for the unknowable by unfolding, exploring, and synthesizing a network of variables, whose values social action brings about, exploits, and subverts.

A new cultural logic? Network culture and the implications for social change

UnMediated, 2019

O f all our clichés of the digital, there are surely none more pervasive than the doctrine of disruption. Haunted by the past and too preoccupied with the future to deal with the present, disruption finds expression as a gleeful prophecy more concerned with when than how. Disrupt politics; disrupt work; disrupt your diet; disrupt rental agreements. Against this backdrop, to stand still is to falter. (And who has the time, anyway?). But every now and then, something intervenes, something which forces us to take stock of our surroundings.