13 November 2007

In Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (2002), Graham Meikle delineates three objectives:

1) to test early claims regarding the democratic potential of the net,

2) to examine projects that use the net to effect social, cultural, and political change, and

3) to look at some representative approaches to online politics and how it relates to established politics in a sort of dialogue between old and new media (Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0).

Meikle's is a profoundly instrumental book and global snapshot of electronic civil disobedience circa 2002. He defines tactical media as hit-and-run guerrilla media campaigns, culture-jamming, and online sabotage. Examples of tactical media he discusses are:

1) www.gwbush.com - created by Boston computer consultant Zack Exley and Corporate/Cultural specialists ®™ark, this web site is a mimicry of President Bush's official site (www.georgewbush.com). At a press conference on 21 May 1999, Bush responded to the site by stating, "there ought to be limits to freedom".
2) ®™ark - an online center for sabotage funding, it seeks to draw attention to the systems of corporate power and is famous for its involvement with the Barbie Liberation Organization in 1993. It gave $8,000 in funding to a group that switched the voice boxes of about 300 Barbie and GI Joe dolls so they would have to be returned because they were programmed to say, "vengeance is mine". (You have to extend them kudos for blending humor and political activism on this one.)
3) Adbusters - this Vancouver-based media foundation coordinated "Buy Nothing Day" by interrupting CNN Headline News on 19 November 2001, with the cartoon of a burping pig superimposed on a map of the United States asking all to buy nothing on 23 November 2001. Founded by Kalle Lasn in 1989, Adbusters releases subvertisements against advertising in a show of cultural sabotage or culture jamming.
4) Disinformation - this is a website created by Richard Metzger. In a blend of activism and paranoia, it touts itself as "anti-CNN". As an activist project, Metzger uses the site to question the status and means of delivery of information and wages an all-out assault on the journalistic conceit of objectivity.
5) Electronic Disturbance Theatre - in September 1998, this organization used FloodNet software to blockade the Paragon website in protest against the way demonstrators were treated by the military during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations on 21 October 1967. (If you recall, the demonstrators were unduly quashed by 8,500 military personnel.)

On 20 January 2001, Filipino President Joseph Estrada became the first head of state in history to be ousted by a smart mob (Vicente Rafael, "The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in Recent Philippine History"). Through SMS technology, a Filipino crowd brought down a government without firing a single shot. At once, they transformed into a social instrument with the effective telecommunicative power to bring distance up-close by allowing nodes to reach across social space and temporal divides. This is how the legend of Generation Text was born.

In a similar move to Meikle, Howard Rheingold documents his accounts of global electronic protests by what he calls "smart mobs" circa 2002 (Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, 2002).

Three are most striking:

1) 1992 - Present - In San Francisco and New York, bicycle activists tele-coordinate groups for "Critical Mass" using linked networks, mobile phones, and electronic mail trees.
2) 30 November 1999 - With the help of the Direct Action Network, the Ruckus Society, and Nextel, N30 led the "Battle of Seattle" as autonomous networked squads of demonstrators protesting the WTO and globalization. They used swarming tactics, mobile phones, web sites, laptops, and handheld computers to bring the meeting to a grinding halt.
3) September 2000 - Outraged by the rising price of fuel, citizens in the UK used mobile phones, SMS, electronic mail, and CB radios in taxis to coordinate the blockage of fuel deliveries at selected service stations.

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Woody Allen once said, in perpetrating a revolution, two requirements are needed:

1) someone or something to revolt against and
2) someone to show up to do the revolting.

With virtuality, we no longer need physical presence. Furthermore, individuals really can be at more than two places simultaneously to effect political change with nothing more than electronic technology and digital presence.

Virno used the multitude to redefine One. Today, individuals are not merely redefining, they are defying the traditional concept of that One through their mediated virtual presence. This is not limited to the political sphere alone.

In the public, private, real, and virtual spheres, traditional limitations to sense, perception, and experience are being obviated by electronic technologies. Individuals are enabling their own 'islands' and forcing re-evaluation, re-definition, and dynamic change to erstwhile norms and constants.

Culture in the Roman sense needs remediation (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation) to bring it accurately to the current (virtual) reality. Perhaps somewhere in-between culture as cultivation and culture as fabrication, we can realize the culture experienced, lived, and shared (in dynamic virtuality) and relevant today.

After culture of the past is destroyed, consumed, and withered away in decay as Arendt and Adorno claim, perhaps a culture of today and tomorrow will emerge in its full potentiality and with the relevant accuracy of statement and purposeful legacy.