Last September, Texas’ restrictive new abortion law sparked its share of resistance, some of a new kind. Outraged by the law, a white American feminist activist created a video on TikTok suggesting flooding with Spam the reporting platform set up by this southern US state to temporarily defeat it. To support this call to action, a young black American activist for his part developed a bot, or a small computer script, to automate and amplify the feminist struggle for reproductive justice.
Although the practices of digital resistance have multiplied in recent years, the term is not new. The concept emerges at the dawn of the XXIe century in the wake of solidarity movements with the Zapatistas and the alter-globalization movement. We owe this notion to the researchers and artists of the Critical Arts Ensemble collective, who tried to explain the mobilization of emerging digital technologies in order to disrupt the government, military or corporate institutions in place. The term digital resistance has since been used to refer to practices aimed at uniting freelance journalists, supporting the Palestinian struggle, the #BlackLivesMatter, indigenous struggles such as #LandBack or that for democracy in Zimbabwe.
These protest activities have often been associated with the culture of hackers and in opposition to dominant, market and surveillance technologies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft (GAFAM). But a quick return to history shows us that they are not just a contemporary phenomenon. They are part of the fights waged in pre-industrial and industrial societies. Let us take these Maroon women and men who, in Haiti, Jamaica or elsewhere, destroyed machines in the plantations, in addition to creating autonomous communities far from the slave system. Let us also think of the Luddits, who during the British Industrial Revolution opposed the replacement of workers by machines by breaking them down or sabotaging them.
Characteristics of practices
In this new issue of the journal Possible, we wanted to define digital resistance around five main characteristics:
The collective aspect. Digital resistance is basically collective action. Resistance revolves around solidarity movements focused on particular causes rather than a posture that pertains to the individual.
Tool or object of resistance. To understand digital resistance, a distinction is needed, either that of resisting by digital or for digital. So there are both struggles over technology and resistance for different technologies.
Strategy or tactics. Another distinction to be made, although with nuance, is that between the strategic and tactical dimension of digital resistance. Strategy refers to an action that can be done from a clean place, outside the adversary’s power environment. Tactics refer rather to actions that can only be done within the adversary’s power environment.
The discursive and the practice. Some forms of digital resistance are more discursive such as the drafting of manifestos that think, for example, of feminist and decolonial infrastructure, data and artificial intelligence. Other forms of resistance are much more practical, such as the development of free software. And of course, some initiatives are halfway there, because although they are anchored in practice, they largely contribute to capturing the imagination and opening up possibilities.
The aspect of autonomy or “sovereignty”. Autonomy often emerges as an important dimension of digital resistance. It can be expressed through the development of so-called non-commercial infrastructure or frugal local development rather than through technology transfer from North to South. The term “technological sovereignty” has also been used for several years by States, but also by social movements and indigenous groups, to mark digital resistance against large digital companies.
In order to combine awareness and incitement to digital resistance, we have created the Laboratory on online rights and alternative technologies (labdelta.ca). The initiative, which is part of a partnership between the University of Montreal and the NGO Alternatives, aims to lay the foundations for a space for research and experimentation in connection with digital rights and resistance.
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