three decades of contention: the roots of contemporary activism · 2018-05-30 · social...

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2Three Decades of Contention: TheRoots of Contemporary Activism

Back in 1999 a trio of scholars who at the turn of the 1970s had been activein the debate around NWICO, announced that

What started, historically, with the proposed restructuring of the interna-tional information and communication order has grown into an allianceof grassroots organizations, women’s groups, ecology networks, socialactivists, and committed academics. Some now call it a media reformmovement, others emphasize media education, and still others focus onthe entire cultural environment, of which the mass media are an impor-tant part. There is a new NWICO in the making which sees itself as anetwork of networks based in civil society.

(Vincent et al., 1999, pp. ix–x)

How did this “network of networks based in civil society” mobilizing onmedia and communication issues come about? How did emancipatory com-munication practices evolve within this “new NWICO in the making”? Thischapter traces the historical evolution of the issue area of communication,media, and technology as it became a field of contention in its own right.It analyzes the political and socio-cultural contexts in which emancipatorycommunication practices emerged, in order to situate them in relation topast struggles.

Contemporary media activism has its roots in the 1970s. Here I reviewthe period of time from 1975 to 2005, following the fil rouge of the politicalopportunities that become available over time. For analytical purposes I haveidentified three decades of contention, each characterized by a specific setof political opportunities and a distinct socio-cultural climate. The decadesrepresent an artificial classification aimed at making order of a very denseperiod of time. Each decade is labeled according to its prevalent feature, asfollows:

• 1975–1985: the “institutional” period. Communication and infor-mation issues enter the development discourse. UNESCO promotes a

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PROOF20 Social Movements and Their Technologies

debate on the NWICO. The MacBride Report, commissioned by UNESCO,denounces severe imbalances in global information flows. The first “freeradio” stations appear in Europe and Latin America, and hacker groupsemerge in industrialized countries.

• 1985–1995: civil society engagement. UNESCO withdraws its supportto NWICO. Faced with fading interest within multilateral organizations,civil society organizes independently around the so-called MacBrideRoundtables, charged with taking forward the debate inaugurated byNWICO. The first national media reform campaigns emerge. The VelletriAgreement marks the beginning of the civil society engagement withcomputer networks.

• 1995–2005: the renaissance of media activism. Multilateral organiza-tions manifest a renewed interest in communication issues. The UN callsfor the first WSIS, organized by the ITU. The “movement of movements”protests global governance organizations. Emancipatory communica-tion practices proliferate, thanks to the diffusion of the internet andcheap, user-friendly technologies, with the Independent Media Center(Indymedia) paving the way to independent online content creation.

The scope of this chapter is to capture the Zeitgeist in each of the decadesto help situate the emergence of activism around media and technologyissues in relation to other contemporary developments. A number of events,debates, and processes spanning the realms of nation states, multilateralorganizations, and organized civil society illustrate the main trends in eachdecade. The list of events is by no means exhaustive, and the geographi-cal span is deliberately mixed, including local, national, world-regional, andtransnational mobilizations and policy processes. In order to detail the mostsalient moments, I rely on a mixture of primary and secondary sources,including official documents.

The analysis brings under the spotlight the interplay between three ele-ments: world politics, characterized by multiple and multifaceted changesaffecting both governance configurations and governance cultures; thetechnology landscape, shaken by an unprecedented innovation spree thatquestioned existing media policy arrangements; and the relation betweeninstitutions and civil society, with a focus on prevailing modes of inter-action and discourses. As a result, each period is explored by focusing onthree elements: political opportunities, technological innovation, and thesocio-political context. First, I identify the prevailing political opportunities,analyzing the transformations in global communications governance andlooking at both the structural features of institutional environments (andtheir organizational cultures) and the informal relations between institu-tions and non-governmental actors (cf., Cammaerts and Padovani, 2006).In particular, I focus on the emergence of a “global” civil society as a newpolitical actor in transnational policy arenas (Rosenau, 1999; Held, 2000;


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Kaldor, 2003; Keane, 2003). I investigate the evolution of institutional andcivil society discourses in the framework of various global debates from the1970s onwards (Nordenstreng, 1992; Vincent et al., 1999; Carlsson, 2003;Padovani, 2005). Second, I trace the evolution of technological innovationand of the related policy arrangements, and reflect on the possibilities thattechnology offers for networking and organizing. I see the evolution of com-munication technology in connection with the types of social relationshipsthey enable, following Bennet (2005), who argues that there is a correla-tion between the organizational code of inclusive diversity of contemporaryactivism and the technology code of ICTs used to structure network inter-actions. Third, I look at the socio-cultural environment, focusing on othersocial mobilizations that might have come into contact with, and influ-enced, media and technology activists. Further, for each decade I identifyan element of “crisis” – that is to say, the “breakdown of the functionaland integrative mechanisms of a given set of social relations” (Melucci,1996, p. 22). Crises have the ability of fostering profound changes in thegovernance system, especially when social actors see them as an opportu-nity for transformation. I argue that decolonization (late 1960s and 1970s),trade globalization (mid-1980s and early 1990s), and the emergence fromthe mid-1990s of what has been labeled as the “post-national constellation”(Habermas, 1998) embedded a transformative potential typical of uncer-tainty situations, offering crucial opportunities for change. Finally, for eachdecade I describe the main features of media and technology activism,focusing on issue framing, action repertoires, and organizational forms.

The historical reconstruction stops at the point where the empiricalresearch begins. I include a section dedicated to the latest developments inthe field, meaning the spread of hacktivism and the role of social media inrecent popular protests, such as the Arab Spring, the Indignad@s and 15-Mmobilization in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. These recent developmentsare not part of this study. However, the empirical findings presented herehelp to understand their emergence, and illuminate many of their features.The chapter ends with an extended description of the case studies exploredin the research.

1975–1985: Post-colonial demands for newworld orders: NWICO

Early international debates about information and communication issuesemerged in the 1970s within the UN. They shed the spotlight on theimbalances in global information flows, and explored the opportunities andchallenges for development brought about by technological innovation.

At that time the world was divided in two spheres of influence, each corre-sponding to one of the two “superpowers” represented by the US (with theallied countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the Soviet

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Table 2.1 offers a timeline of the events illustrated in the chapter.



Union (with its Communist bloc). Nation states were the dominant actorson the global scene but the strategic interests of the two superpowers largelydetermined the international political agenda. Following decolonization,several new independent countries entered the world map, determining anunprecedented shift in the global configuration of power and paving theway to a systemic “crisis” within the international community. The num-ber of countries with membership of the UN grew from the original 51 of1945 to 149 in 1976.1 Although the system remained fundamentally bipo-lar, it could only partially absorb the tensions generated by the strugglesfor independence in Africa and Asia. These struggles spawned new perspec-tives on development and North–South relations, which were supportedby innovative theoretical thinking such as the world-system perspective ofMarxist inspiration (Wallerstein, 1974), and the dependency theory (Amin,1976). The latter claimed that poor nations were deliberately kept so bywealthy countries, since an underdeveloped “periphery” was functional toa prosperous “center”. It provided a counterargument to earlier develop-ment theories claiming that poor countries were just primitive versions ofdeveloped ones, and that Western-style development would eventually bringeveryone to the same level of economic growth. Such perspectives influ-enced also international communication scholars, who proposed the notionof cultural imperialism, linking it to the global patterns of domination anddependence (Nordenstreng and Varis, 1974; Schiller, 1976).

In 1955 some 29 Asian and African states, many of which were newlyindependent, had met in Indonesia in the historic Bandung Conference,credited with having crystallized the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). TheNAM, created in 1961 by those countries refusing to support any of the blocs,aimed to oppose neocolonialism by any imperialistic nation, and to promoteeconomic and cultural cooperation among African and Asian countries. Itpushed for structural changes to the international system, and launchedinnovative proposals in matters of trade and development assistance. In theearly 1970s it promoted the so-called New International Economic Order(NIEO), a set of policy principles seeking to improve international tradeconditions for developing countries.

Around the same time the so-called “new social movements” emerged inEurope and North America (Touraine, 1981; Melucci, 1989). They focusedon “new” issues such as peace and the environment. Affirming immaterialinterests and values, these movements stressed the individual and culturaldimensions of participation, and managed to link the call for justice ofWestern activists to the independence struggles of “Third World” countries.Human rights supporters and feminist groups mobilized on the occasion ofUN global summits, such as the 1975 Mexico City World Conference onWomen, but the political culture within multilateral organizations offeredlittle space for civil society to participate in the actual decision-making.



The mediascape was characterized by tight state control. The airwaveswere typically regulated at the national level; television was slowly migrat-ing from a natural state monopoly to commercial or hybrid systems basedon private competition. The first modern computers appeared at the begin-ning of the 1980s, but for almost a decade they remained confined to smallcircles of US-based research labs and communities of practice. AlthoughWestern news agencies such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse had beenoperating since the 19th century, the first transnational media corpora-tions as we know them emerged around this time, with Bertelsmann pavingthe way (Golding and Harris, 1997). Satellite communication technologies,which had appeared in the late 1950s, posed new challenges as they trans-mitted across national borders, threatening state sovereignty. At the sametime there was the notion that satellites were inherently democratic as theycould potentially allow everyone in the world to communicate with eachother. This humanitarian conception of communication technologies ledJean D’Arcy, a French national and former director of the Radio and VisualServices at the UN Office of Public Information, to write in 1969 an arti-cle entitled “Direct Satellite Broadcasting and the Right to Communicate”.According to him,

The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights willhave to encompass a more extensive right than man’s right to informa-tion, first laid down twenty-one years ago in Article 19. This is the rightof man to communicate. It is the angle from which the future develop-ment of communications will have to be considered if it is to be fullyunderstood.

(D’Arcy 1969, p. 1)

In the same year, UNESCO organized a seminar in Montreal that inaugu-rated the international debate on communication and information issues.To be fair, these issues had already been discussed during the elaborationof the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) but with no concreteoutcome. A first attempt at translating these concerns into principles tookplace at the UNESCO 1972 General Conference in Paris, when a “Declara-tion of the Fundamental Principles Governing the Use of the Mass Mediawith a View to Strengthening Peace and Understanding and Combating WarPropaganda, Racialism and Apartheid” was proposed and discarded follow-ing the opposition of, among others, the US. Parallel to this was the (failed)proposal by the Soviet Union for a binding convention on television trans-mission from satellites, with the intent to regulate direct broadcast satellites(Pavlic and Hamelink, 1985).

In 1973 the NAM began to get involved in the international debate aboutthese issues. In March 1976 it promoted a symposium on information

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in Tunis, followed by a conference of the information ministers in NewDelhi. Mainstream media were accused of playing a crucial role in pushingthe objectives of the transnational power structure by giving unbalancedrepresentations of the developing world (Somavia, 1977). National com-munication policies began to be seen as new arenas for social struggle(Schiller, 1975). Mimicking the NIEO, non-aligned countries promoted adebate on the NWICO, on the grounds that “[a] more just and more effec-tive world communication system is an integral part of the efforts to achievea new international economic order” (UNESCO, 1979, pp. 21–34). Empha-sizing development and human rights concerns, they claimed that existingcommunication channels, such as satellites and news agencies, were thelegacy of the colonial past. They called for, among other things, collec-tive ownership of satellites as a way to challenge cultural domination andtechnological dependence on Western countries, and a means to achievenational sovereignty. The political declaration of the 5th NAM conference(Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1976) read: “The emancipation and development ofnational information media is an integral part of the overall struggle forpolitical, economic and social independence [ . . . ] dependence in the field ofinformation in turn retards the very achievement of political and economicgrowth.” The debate was picked up by UNESCO, which between 1976 and1980 organized a series of intergovernmental conferences on communica-tion policies in various developing regions, including South-East Asia, theCaribbean, and Africa. The resulting documents included references to therights of all countries to have “equal access to all the sources of informationand take part on an equal footing in the control over and use of internationalchannels of dissemination”. They also called for “treat[ing] the communica-tion sector not only as a support to development but as an integral part ofthe development plan itself” (UNESCO, 1976, p. 39).

In 1979 the ITU proposed the so-called Global Domestic Satellite System,an upgrading of the information infrastructure of the developing world. Theproject, however, did not go any further because of the lack of financial sup-port from developed countries (Braman, 2006). In 1980, UNESCO appointedan International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems,chaired by Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Seán MacBride. The commissionwas to analyze communication problems in modern societies, and pro-pose solutions to further human development through communication. Itsbook-length final report, entitled Many Voices, One World, identified commu-nication as a basic individual right, and called for a “right to communicate”as “a prerequisite to many other [rights]” (MacBride, 1980, p. 253):

Communication be no longer regarded merely as an incidental serviceand its development left to chance [ . . . ] Communication needs in ademocratic society should be met by the extension of specific rights suchas the right to be informed, the right to inform, the right to privacy, the



right to participate in public communication – all elements of a new con-cept, the right to communicate. In developing what might be called anew era of social rights, we suggest all the implications of the right tocommunicate to be further explored.

(pp. 254, 265)

In advocating a change “in the nature of relations between and withinnations in the field of communication” (p. 254), and “a better, more just andmore democratic social order, and the realization of fundamental humanrights”, the commission maintained that these goals “can be achieved onlythrough understanding and tolerance, gained in large part by free, open andbalanced communication” (p. 253). It stressed the importance of makingcommunication an investment priority, and called for the integration ofcommunication into development policies and for international coopera-tion in the area. It urged developing countries to reduce their dependenceon the industrialized ones; it stressed the importance of the professionalintegrity of journalists, and of their protection; and it praised the diver-sity of policy solutions adopted in different countries, which “should berespected; there is no place for the universal application of preconceivedmodels” (MacBride, 1980, p. 253). It criticized the free-flow doctrine oninformation flows, accused of reinforcing Western cultural domination indeveloping countries, and the increasing concentration of media, technol-ogy and technical information in the hands of Western companies (Alegreand Ó Siochrú, 2005). The report mentioned also the relevance of non-commercial/non-governmental media, recognizing the role of “group andlocal media”, although understood merely as “small media” (pp. 55–57), andthe importance of “alternative communication” for “liberating people’s ini-tiatives” (p. 113). Finally, it explicitly called for the involvement of all sectorsof society in the development of national communications policies “linkedto overall social, cultural and economic development objectives” (p. 254).

The commission was dissolved after presenting the report. Eventually itsfindings were endorsed by the 1980 UN General Assembly, but it was ashort-lived success. The report sparked controversies within the organiza-tion, which bolstered pre-existing ideological differences between the NAMand Western countries, and the US in particular. The vocal support offered toNWICO by the Soviet bloc, and a turn in the US foreign policy that becamemore critical towards multilateralism, led the UK, the US, and Singaporeto abandon UNESCO in the early 1980s (Valle, 1995; MacBride and Roach,2000). The split is better understood in the context of the advent in the pres-idency of the US of the Republican Ronald Reagan (1981). The new admin-istration embraced an aggressive unilateralism, which led to a resurgence ofthe Cold War and to huge military build-ups in the two superpowers. TheUN, and UNESCO in particular, had seen the rise of vote after vote in theGeneral Assembly isolating the US and its allies. Withdrawing from UNESCO

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(and the International Labor Organization) was a shot across the bows forthe UN itself, given the large US budgetary contributions to UN organi-zations. It was also a victory for the telecoms firms, which could rely oncommercial strategies for developing Third World infrastructure rather thanthe state-centric approach of NWICO. NWICO remained on the UNESCOagenda until 1987, when it was dislodged by the New CommunicationStrategy put forward by the new director, Federico Mayor, in 1989.

Although the UN Charter provided for consultation with non-governmental organizations (Article 71 calls for “suitable arrangements forconsultation with non-governmental organizations which are concernedwith matters within [the UN] competence”), NWICO remained largely out ofthe reach of civil society organizations. In the virtual absence of widespreadmobilization (with the exception of the US-based coordination of media rep-resentatives on freedom of expression), professional associations became themost active non-governmental actors in the international debate. The Con-sultative Club of International and Regional Organizations of Journalists, aswell as the International Association of Journalists, supported proposals for arestructuring of communication flows and for the protection of communica-tion as a fundamental right. But the MacBride Report mobilized conservativecurrents as well. The Inter-American Press and Broadcasters Associationlaunched a campaign against NWICO, while conservative Western mediacorporations and professional associations created the World Press FreedomCommittee, which opposed NWICO on the grounds of possible threats tofreedom of expression (Giffard, 1989; Preston et al., 1989).

By taking part in the NWICO, national and international federations ofjournalists and professional unions encouraged similar expert groups toemerge. The progressive journalist association Media Alliance was foundedin San Francisco in 1976 and the Campaign for Press and BroadcastingFreedom was launched in the UK in 1979 (Richardson and Power, 1986;Hackett and Carroll, 2006). In 1981 a group of computer hackers foundedthe Chaos Computer Club, “a galactic community of life forms, [ . . . ] whichstrives across borders for freedom of information” (Bennett, 2008), in Berlin.Shortly afterwards, on the other side of the Atlantic, Richard Stallmanlaunched the GNU Project. In response to the tightening of copyright laws,it called for software writers to contribute to the compilation of an operat-ing system free from constraints on its source code.2 In his view, if developerswere to release their creation to the public and collaborate, “everyone will beable to obtain good system software free, just like air” (Free Software Foun-dation, 1987). The GNU manifesto inspired the free software movement,which spread across the globe in the mid-1980s, blending in with the hackermovement, a programmer subculture that had emerged in California in the1960s.3

Overall, most of the groups active in this period were single-operationlocal organizations rooted in elitist sectors of society. Advocates adopted a

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double-edged strategy: on the one hand, the production, often with the sup-port of progressive academics, of empirical evidence on the responsibility ofWestern media corporations in cultural imperialism, and, on the other, thepromotion of progressive principles in intergovernmental settings, wherethey had only limited access, however. Issues were framed in terms of imbal-ances in the attempt to highlight the centrality of communication processesin society. Although intellectuals and scholars did contribute to develop acritical discourse on international communication, they did not manage toinfluence policy-makers.

In this period, independent communication projects, mostly local “free”radio stations, began to flourish in Europe and Latin America (Gumucio-Dagron, 2001), inaugurating a process of “decentralization of broadcasting”(Rennie, 2006, p. 78). The movement started in Italy with the so-called radiolibere (free radio stations) following the liberalization of the Italian airwavesin 1976. Italian and later French stations inspired pirates all over the world(Downing, 2001; Ortoleva et al., 2006). A long-term activist illustrated thesedevelopments as follows:

I think civil society started to act before it started to think about this.All these alternative media, for example, was the “right to communicate”put into practice; it was people taking in their own hands the right tocommunicate without even spelling it that way. They were just saying,“we need to talk about our issues, about our problems, and we will do it”[ . . . ] We didn’t use the word right to communicate twenty-five years ago.But it existed, it was already in the ground, people were doing it.4

1985–1995: The civil society agenda on communications reform

By the mid-1980s the idea of a democratic reform of the global informa-tion and communication system had been raised, discussed, and discarded.NWICO proved to be a matter of “high politics”: its determining factors weresocio-economic and geopolitical forces rather than intellectual and moralarguments (Nordenstreng, 2012, p. 36). But, although it did not bring alongthe changes in the media structures and flows that its proponents were hop-ing for, “the debate and its lessons” (p. 38) did mark much of the activismto come.

The Cold War came to an end in 1989, paving the way to democratic tran-sition in former Communist countries and opening up new markets. The endof the bipolar confrontation, alongside processes of deregulation, privatiza-tion, and market integration, led to a redefinition of the role of the nationstate in world politics, and to a shift in the location of authority (Held et al.,1999; Rosenau, 1999). In 1989 the crackdown of student-led demonstra-tions in Beijing resulted in thousands of casualties among unarmed civiliansin what became known as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The transition



to democracy and capitalism, however, was peaceful in the large majorityof cases, with the exception of Yugoslavia and the Caucasus area, whereformer Soviet republics Azerbaijan and Armenia engaged in the bloodyNagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994).

On the other side of the Atlantic, many of the dictatorships that hadplagued Latin American countries came to an end. After Bolivia (1982) andArgentina (1983), Brazil and Uruguay shook off dictatorships in 1985, fol-lowed by Guatemala in 1986 and Paraguay in 1993. In most cases thedemocrats that came to power faced the choice between justice and stability,opting often for the second (with the exception of Argentina, which set up aNational Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, which led to the trialof the military junta). The persistence of military influence and organizedpolitical violence in post-authoritarian Latin America gave rise to “low inten-sity democracies” with a troubled path to democratic consolidation (Kruit,2001). The many hundreds who had fleed to exile returned, which resultedin an unprecedented flourishing of the organized civil society, although thepost-dictatorship generations had to deal with a society in which repressionand horror had brutally harmed solidarity, social bonds, political projects,and individual lives (Chovanec, 2009; Ros, 2012). NWICO-inspired debatesabout national communication policies emerged throughout Latin America,addressing the “democratization of communication relationships withincountries,” in the wake of the “shift in the structural hierarchy of ideologi-cal apparatuses and socialization agencies towards the media” (Roncagliolo,1986/2006, p. 315). These debates addressed the political economy of themedia, and ownership in particular, the impact of media on national culturesand cultural sovereignty, and the connection between freedom of expres-sion and democratization. At the grassroots level, alternative and militantmedia and documentary cinema began to flourish alongside the new protestmovements (see, e.g., Dodaro et al., 2009).

By the mid-1980s, media and telecommunications lobbies had succeededin introducing market dynamics in policy sectors traditionally controlledby states, setting in motion a process of concentration of media ownership.Commercial media played a crucial role in spreading capitalist lifestyle mod-els and values (Herman and McChesney, 1997). Personal computers andcompact disks entered households. In 1984, Apple’s then-chairman, SteveJobs, launched the Macintosh, the first commercially successful desktopcomputer to come with a mouse and a graphical user interface. In 1985,Microsoft launched its Windows operating system, preparing to become themain player on the personal computer market.

The EU Television Without Frontiers directive (1989) marked the firstattempt to regulate media at the regional level by creating a commonEuropean market for audiovisual services. In 1994, the General Agreementon Trade and Tariffs (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), setup in 1946) was replaced by the WTO. The new organization incorporated

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measures on the TRIPS, marking the first steps towards a global regime formedia and telecommunications. Although the US pressured European coun-tries to liberalize audiovisual services, there was no multilateral agreementon this matter (Chakravartty and Sarikakis, 2006).

NGOs grew in number and expanded their scope of action from nationalto international (Smith et al., 1997; Sikkink and Smith, 2002). Their num-ber within the UN grew from 377 in 1969 to 928 in 1992, and to morethan 1500 in 1998 (Dodds, 2002). From civic renewal in Eastern Europeto the Zapatista struggle in Mexico, which opposed indigenous groups inthe remote state of Chiapas to the Mexican government, the day the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect (1994), grassrootsorganizations were increasingly able to represent themselves on the globalscene, while state actors were progressively delegating governance to mar-ket forces. The “crisis” brought about by market globalization providedsome political opportunities for civil society groups, offering “incentives andcauses for resistance” (Tarrow, 2005, p. 5). It contributed to promoting a pro-cess of legitimization of NGOs, as UN conferences offered organized civilsociety an arena for exchange and dialogue (in parallel, however, with thegrowing in prominence of private actors).

With the NWICO failure it became clear that little or no reform of theglobal communication system would come from the media themselves orfrom multilateral organizations. UNESCO adopted a medium-term planfor the period 1990–1995 entitled La communication au service de l’umanitè(“Communication at the service of humanity”). This emphasized plural-ism and the free circulation of information, and it supported alternativemedia. It represented a shift from diplomacy among sovereign states tointernational solidarity and relations among peoples (Raboy, 1991). Start-ing in 1989, UNESCO organized a series of regional roundtables. Thesestressed the role of communication as the foundation of society, and high-lighted the need to develop skills in the use of media technologies. Butthese events offered few political opportunities to media reform advocatesto participate and have a say. Civil society groups then began to orga-nize autonomously, mainly at the national level (White, 1995; Alegre andÓ Siochrú, 2005). Faith-based associations, early internet organizations, andadvocacy groups started addressing issues of media concentration, mediapluralism, and copyright. National initiatives on media issues spread in LatinAmerica as well as in the US, where a democratic media activism move-ment made its voice heard at Congress (Hackett, 2000; McChesney andNichols, 2002). In 1986 the national media watchdog Fairness & Accuracyin Reporting (FAIR) was formed in New York. At the international level, pro-gressive media professionals and some academics began slowly to regrouparound the MacBride Roundtables, an advocacy group that met annuallyfrom 1989 to 1999. But this was not yet a grassroots mobilization, andexperts and progressive intellectuals played a prominent role. A People’s



Communication Charter was first launched in 1993: its 18 articles claimedthat communication systems should serve “human needs and rights” andthat people should be empowered through media access and possibilitiesfor participation5 (Hamelink, 1983). Learning from the NWICO failure, thecharter’s advocates tried to build up support among international networksof civil society organizations. They envisioned a bottom-up strategy, call-ing for cooperation between NGOs and governance institutions. By the1990s, many coalitions for the democratization of communication hademerged, including the coalition Platform for Democratic Communication(later Platform for Communication Rights) and the international campaignVoices 21, an informal association of media activists funded “with a viewtowards building a new social movement around media and communica-tion issues”6 (Nordenstreng and Traber, 1992). This civil society mobilizationhad roots in the cultural and socio-political processes of decolonizationand democratization (White, 1988). Groups organized in reformist coali-tions, and issues were now framed in terms of democratization and rightsrather than development. However, there was still the common perceptionthat, as columnist Katha Pollitt wrote in the US progressive magazine TheNation, “movements need media, but media don’t make a movement”7: inorder to build a strong coalition around communication issues, other move-ments were to understand that media access was relevant to their campaignsas well.

In 1984 a group of grassroots NGOs from four continents active in thehuman AQ1rights, sustainable development and women’s movements signedthe Velletri Agreement, committing to use telephone lines to network theircomputers, thereby recognizing the potential of the new information tech-nologies for the promotion of social justice and development.8 They formeda coalition that would work to “provide the channels for the mutual sharingof skills and knowledge on information handling” (Interdoc, 1984). As aresult, the Canadian International Development Research Centre fundedInterdoc, a series of connection experiments geared towards civil soci-ety organizations (Murphy, 2005). Interdoc was implemented and used byvarious civil society groups across the world, including the Asia MonitorResources Centre, based in Hong Kong, the Instituto Brasileiro de AnálisesSociais e Economicas in Brazil, and People’s Access in the Philippines.It paved the way to many other experiments in computer communica-tion. Between 1985 and 1990, several networks were created to providegrassroots activists with cheap ways of sharing text-based information. Theyincluded Fidonet, which relied on the Bulletin Board System (BBS; a sort offorum allowing users to connect through a common landline and exchangemessages and files); the London-based GreenNet, oriented towards the envi-ronmental activism community; PeaceNet and EcoNet in the US, which latermerged into the Institute for Global Communications; and the EuropeanCounter Network (ECN – Isole nella rete), based in Italy and connected to

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the most radical fringes of European social movements. Some still operatetoday. In 1988, inspired by “the Internet vision of global communicationsunfettered by commercial barriers” (Murphy, 2000), PeaceNet and GreenNetteamed up to create the first NGO-owned transatlantic digital communica-tion network. In 1990, non-profit ISPs joined forces in the Association forProgressive Communications (APC), to ensure that “all people have easy andaffordable access to a free and open internet to improve their lives and createa more just world”.9

The first GNU general public license was released in 1989: it was a“copyleft” license (as opposed to a copyright one), allowing users to pro-duce derivative works provided that such works were to be distributed underthe same sharing agreement. The first Linux operating system, launched byFinnish student Linus Torvalds, was released in 1991: expert users couldmodify, improve, and adapt its source code to their needs. Transnationalforms of cooperation emerged within communities of developers, such asComputer Scientists for Social Responsibility, founded in 1981 with an edu-cation mandate. Meanwhile, electronic disturbance and civil disobediencewere theorized and practiced by groups like the Critical Art Ensemble, aUS-based art and technology collective. Online direct action, such as vir-tual sit-ins, “digital storms”, and DDoSAQ2 attacks aimed at making a websitetemporarily unavailable, were seen as the virtual equivalent of blocking acompany’s headquarters. Practiced as hit-and-run digital interventions, theywere thought to be the most meaningful forms of political resistance in timesof nomadic and decentralized power (Critical Art Ensemble, 1993). In otherwords, the Critical Art Ensemble called for a strategic move away from thestreets towards the online: “Resistance – like power – must withdraw fromthe street. Cyberspace as a location and apparatus for resistance has yet tobe realized. Now it is time to bring a new model of resistant practice intoaction” (Critical Art Ensemble, 1996, p. 20).

The link between social movements and grassroots media was strength-ened. Community radio stations began to organize both nationally andinternationally. The UK Community Radio Association (CRA; later Com-munity Media Association) was founded in 1983; in the same year theAssemblée Mondiale des Artisans de la Radio Communautaire (World Associ-ation of Community Broadcasters, henceforth AMARC) held its first meetingin Canada. A new discourse on tactical media emerged: at the crossroadsbetween arts and activism, it promoted the critical usage of old and newmedia practices for tactical intervention into the social with the aim ofachieving non-commercial and subversive political goals (Critical Art Ensem-ble, 2001; Garcia and Lovink, 1997). The first edition of Next 5 MinutesFestival in Amsterdam in 2003 focused on tactical television: about 300people from Europe and North America gathered to discuss forms of inter-vention in television, and autonomous production under the umbrella ofprogressive political values and social justice.

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distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). However, the acronym has been used before in chapter 1; it is disclosed in the list of abbreviation at the beginning of the book: all in all I do not think it needs to be disclosed here as well.

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1995–2005: The renaissance of communication strugglesand emancipatory practices

In the second half of the 1990s, the neoliberal model was called into ques-tion as a series of financial crises hit South-East Asia in 1997–1998, whileArgentina, which was considered a model country for its responsiveness tothe International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) policy proposals, went bankruptin 2001. Although emerging economies such as India, Brazil, and Chinaplayed a bigger role in global trade and politics, power remained withinthe economic council of the world’s wealthiest economies (the Group ofEight (G8)). Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towersin New York and the Pentagon, the US launched a global “war on terror” thatresulted in the controversial attacks on Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003).

In 1995 the WTO replaced the GATT with the mandate of further liber-alizing international trade. The General Agreement on Trade and Services(GATS), administered by the WTO, entered into force in 1995. It incorpo-rated under the “services” rubric information and its processing and flows(Braman, 2006). Through a series of world conferences addressing globalissues from poverty to the environment, the UN attempted to repositionitself in a “post-national” context where non-state private interests andinformal governance networks were increasingly gaining power (Hale andHeld, 2011). This “crisis” of legitimacy of global governance institutionsturned into an opportunity for civil society. In 1996 the UN directive regu-lating the role of NGOs within the organization was updated (UN Directive,1996/31), increasing the interaction between the UN and organized civilsociety, and paving the way to multistakeholder summits. The multistake-holder approach to governance was tested on the occasion of the WSIS, thefirst UN summit to address communication issues and the role of ICTs indevelopment. Coordinated by the ITU, the WSIS took place in two phases:Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005.

By the mid-1990s the internet had entered the everyday lives of ordi-nary people, accelerating communication across the globe and fosteringconnections among dispersed activists. With direct actions and demonstra-tions becoming easier to organize, and networking across borders cheaperto sustain, activists began to organize at the transnational level and to tar-get supranational institutions (Smith et al., 2002; della Porta and Tarrow,2005). Although mainstream media labeled the protesters with the pejora-tive neologism of “no global”, they preferred to be called the “alternativeglobalization” movement or “the movement of movements”, in recognitionof the multiplicity of groups, ideologies, and issue areas represented by themovement (della Porta, 2007; Juris, 2008). In 1999, protesters managed toobstruct the WTO summit in Seattle: the blockade, which caught by surpriseinstitutions and media alike, gave global visibility to this nascent alternativeglobalization movement. From Seattle onwards, a continuum of ever-bigger

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demonstrations and countersummits unfolded (Pianta, 2001; Marchetti andPianta, 2006). The many websites of the movement ensured visibility of theprotests and of the activists’ demands (della Porta and Mosca, 2007). In July2001, thousands of people marched against the meeting of the G8 in Genoa,Italy (Andretta et al, 2002). The demonstrations were brutally repressed, withone protester killed by the police and several hundred wounded. AmnestyInternational condemned the arbitrary and abusive use of force by the policeforce, and it accused protest policing during the event of representing “anintolerable stain on Italy’s human rights record” (Amnesty International,2001, 2011).

Alongside protesting the summits of multilateral organizations, civil soci-ety created its own autonomous spaces: social forums debuted in Brazil in2001 as “spaces of convergence” for civil society (Juris, 2008). The idea ofsocial forums rapidly expanded throughout the globe, becoming crucial tothe development of an independent civil society agenda and the utopia of“another possible world” (De Sousa Santos, 2003). Transnational coalitionsmultiplied, thanks to internet-based exchanges, and a “global civil society”emerged (Kaldor, 2003; van Rooy, 2004). On February 15, 2003, this globalcivil society made itself visible on the occasion of the global day of actionagainst the then-imminent Iraq War: millions of people across the worldtook the streets, as a result of several months of mobilization, which startedin 2002 and continued after the beginning of the war.

Emancipatory communication practices mushroomed, also thanks to theavailability of camcorders, laptops, and cheap internet connections whichallowed non-experts, readers, and listeners to become writers and produc-ers (Atton, 2002, 2004; Langlois and Dubois, 2005). Activists inherited thevalues and tactics of the many pirate and free radio stations, flyers, and pam-phlets produced over the years by all kinds of social movements (Downing,2001). A myriad of alternative media websites, independent video produc-tions, online radio stations, and pirate microtelevision stations (the so-called“telestreet”, broadcasting to a neighborhood; Berardi et al., 2003) emergedon the fringes of the commercial mediascape. The “media activist”, embody-ing a particular skillset and the cultures of critical usage of technology,became a distinct identity within the social movement ecology: a specificfigure at the service of movements, and instrumental to other struggles(Pasquinelli, 2002). Further editions of the Next 5 Minutes Festival took placein Amsterdam in 1996 and in 1999. It started addressing tactical mediaon the internet, promoting transnational networks of activists that wereengaged in tactical media interventions (Lovink, 2003).

In 1996 the Zapatistas had called for “mak[ing] a network of commu-nication among all our struggles and resistances” (Hamm, 2005). Partiallyinspired by the Zapatista cyberstruggle, activists protesting against theWTO summit in Seattle created the first Independent Media Centre (IMC),or Indymedia, in order to report from the demonstrations. For the first time

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in the brief history of the internet, thanks to a piece of software called Active(developed by the activist community in Sydney, Australia, and released asopen-source software), users could publish news, text, and pictures onlinewithout an editorial filter or prior registration. At a time when one needed tobe a webmaster to modify a webpage, the IMC’s innovative “open publish-ing” platform positioned itself as “the mother of all blogs” (Milan, 2010b,p. 89). Rapidly, Indymedia became a global independent information net-work: in 2002, three years after its foundation, the network could alreadycount 89 IMC nodes in six continents (Kidd, 2003). However, independentinformation projects (and Indymedia was no exception) were occasionallythreatened by repression. In response to threats, grassroots activists launchedinternational solidarity campaigns, established quick intervention networks,and tightened data-encryption systems. When the US Federal Bureau ofInvestigation seized some Indymedia servers in 2004 following terrorismallegations (Milan, 2004b), a transnational campaign was launched with theparticipation of grassroots activists, NGOs, and lawyers’ associations.

The internet also changed the protesters’ action repertoires, and new formsof technology-based action emerged (McCaughey and Ayers, 2003; van deDonk et al., 2003). The idea of appropriating online and offline commu-nication spaces regardless of institutional boundaries became increasinglypopular, following an approach to social action that did not consider insti-tutions as legitimate sources of power (cf. Jordan, 2002). Hacktivism tactics,such as net strikes and DDoS attacks, became more frequent, but theyremained confined to circles of technosavvy activists. The hacker collectiveknown as Cult of the Dead Cow (currently Hacktivismo) is credited withhaving invented the term, a portmanteau of “hacking” and “activism”, in1998 (Delio, 2004). A form of “activism gone electronic” (Jordan and Taylor,2004, p. 1), hacktivism indicates the politically motivated use of technicalexpertise such as coding: activists seek to fix society through software andonline action.10 This form of digital resistance inverted the logic of massaction: instead of trying to create an oppositional mass, digital tactics cel-ebrated the role of decentralized units and networked individual action indisrupting the system. In addition, they bypassed mainstream mass media,targeting policy-makers and companies directly (Meikle, 2002).

National, world-regional, and transnational mobilizations on media, tech-nology and communication issues gained new momentum. In 2003 thedebate about media and technology issues made the agenda of the WorldSocial Forum, becoming one of the five thematic areas of discussion (Milan,2003). The forum provided an arena for media activists to meet, exchangeskills, and launch joint projects. Media centers at major antiglobal demon-strations and countersummits became occasions for further collaborationand networking. In 2004 the European Forum on Communication Rightstook place in London.

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Mainstream media were not ignored. In 2002 the media reform organiza-tion Free Press was created in the US with the aim of promoting independentmedia ownership and strong public media. In 1995 the NGO MediaWatchCanada organized the first edition of the Global Media Monitoring Project(GMMP) from an idea that emerged at the Beijing UN Conference onWomen that same year. Citizens in 70 countries monitored news mediain order to gather data on gender representation and to plan advocacyinterventions, making of the GMMP the first ever grassroots monitoringexperiment of media content. The 2000 and 2005 GMMP editions, coor-dinated by the World Association of Christian Communication, resultedin awareness-raising campaigns targeting the role of media in reproduc-ing gender stereotypes (Gallagher, 2001). In 2005 the European campaignNo Software Patents crystallized around the issue of software licenses thatwas under discussion at the European Parliament (Breindl, 2011). Criticalvoices were not concentrated in the industrialized north alone: in the early2000s, Brazil became a vocal supporter of Creative Commons licenses11 as avehicle for digital inclusion; community radio advocates successfully lobbiedthe Indian government for licenses; activists launched a Campaign for Popu-lar Media Reform in Thailand; and Bangladeshi NGOs launched a campaignagainst media concentration, to name but a few.

But the biggest event for media reform advocates was the WSIS. Civilsociety groups attempted to seize the opportunity by participating in bignumbers “inside” the summit, but also organizing counterevents “outside”the summit venue. The CRIS campaign, created in 2001 and gathering NGOsand individuals from many countries, served as an umbrella group to rep-resent civil society values and interests at the summit. It was the mostvocal supporter of the right to communicate at the WSIS (Thomas, 2006;Mueller et al., 2007). Although on several occasions the voices of repres-sive governments and media corporations proved much louder, civil societymanaged to make its voice heard, including in the debate surrounding itsown participation. Groups that had come together with diverse agendasconverged into the alternative Geneva Declaration: “Shaping Communi-cation Societies for Human Needs”. The documents read: “At the heart ofour vision of information and communications societies is the human being[ . . . ] We are committed to building information and communication soci-eties that are people-centered, inclusive and equitable” (WSIS Civil SocietyPlenary, 2003, p. 3). It addressed aspects of the information society that hadbeen ignored or at best downplayed by the official summit documents, sucha people-centered and sustainable definition of development, the central-ity of human rights, and the ethical dimensions of the so-called enablingenvironment. During the Geneva phase, groups with an alternative mediabackground gathered in a temporary network named the Geneva03 Collec-tive and organized a series of initiatives called WSIS? We Seize!, including

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a conference, protest events, and media laboratories (Hadl and Hintz, 2009;Hintz, 2009).

The WSIS allowed civil society to strengthen transnational connectionsand identify priorities for action (Padovani and Pavan, 2009). The summitserved as a meeting space for groups of different generations and back-grounds, and it fostered connections between media activists, and women’sand indigenous people’s movements. It pressured civil society activists froma number of countries to elaborate a common understanding of commu-nication issues (Hintz and Milan, 2007); for many groups it representedan unprecedented opportunity to organize globally around communicationissues (Burch, 2004). Notwithstanding the tension between participationand exclusion (several informal civil society groups were not given accred-itation; cf. Cammaerts, 2009), the WSIS strengthened a global mobiliza-tion around communication issues and communication rights (Ó Siochrú,2004; Raboy and Landry, 2005). Some scholars saw a direct connectionbetween the WSIS-mobilized civil society and the NWICO (Raboy, 2004;Padovani and Pavan, 2009; Frau-Meigs et al., 2012). Although I do agreethat NWICO was an important reference for recent mobilization as well, itslegacy for contemporary activism was limited to the older generations ofactivists.

The second phase of the WSIS, in Tunis, symbolically closed a decade ofinternational policy advocacy activism. With grassroots activists practicallyabsent and the agenda being reduced to a few specialized issues and monop-olized by the debate about the lack of freedom of expression in the hostingcountry, WSIS2 included only a handful of thematic, well-resourced NGOsspecializing in internet governance, doing away with the diversity of partic-ipants that had made WSIS1 such an innovative event. Critics went as faras accusing the participating civil society organizations of neocorporatism“oriented at satisfying neoliberal economic imperatives” (McLaughlin andPickard, 2005, p. 359).

Other multistakeholder policy arenas opened up towards the end of thedecade, at the European and global levels, including the multilateral nego-tiations towards a UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity, eventuallyadopted in 2005. Such policy windows fostered the creation of ad hocadvocacy coalitions, such as the lobbying group Community Media ForumEurope (CMFE), created in 2004 in response to an open policy window atthe Council of Europe (Milan, 2009c). International NGOs with expertiseon ICTs and development, such as the APC, were often asked to adviseUN institutions and governments. In the UK the Community Media Asso-ciation (CMA) became an advisor on community media policy to the UKregulator, Ofcom. In a nutshell, media policy activism was strengthened bythe many political opportunities of the decade and its agenda broadenedto include “issues of structure, content, culture, practice and rights” (Stein,2009, p. 13).

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Media activism today: Hacktivism, liberation technology,and cloud protesting

If the WSIS closed a decade characterized by the unprecedented diffusionof emancipatory communication practices and brand-new openings in gov-ernance processes, the WSIS itself could not be considered as concluded inTunis. The debate on the future of internet governance moved to the newlyestablished Internet Governance Forum, a multistakeholder arena whichinherited the WSIS rules (DeNardis, 2009; Mueller, 2010; Pavan, 2012).Communication policy activism became even more specialized: more policyarenas opened to civil society, but the hyperprofessionalization of the issuesat stake accelerated a process of disengagement of civil society organizations,and widened the gulf between established thematic NGOs and grassrootsgroups (Hintz and Milan, 2009a/b). Recent threats to internet freedoms, suchas the 2006 EU Directive on Data Retention, the corporate challenges to netneutrality (Kidd, 2009), and the many ways in which the internet is beingfiltered and censored (Deibert et al., 2008 and 2010) attracted the attentionof only a handful of specialized groups of citizens (with the exception of theSOPA/PIPA case; cf. Chapter 5).

Meanwhile, other “crises” have emerged that add to the legitimacy crisesof neoliberalism and multilateral institutions: first, the global financial cri-sis, which started with a credit crunch in the US banking system in 2008,and evolved in 2011 into a debit crisis in the Eurozone; second, the socio-cultural “crisis” that is the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the “war on terror”,which jeopardizes the dialogue between the West and the Arab world; andthird, the global environmental and food crisis affecting mostly the poorestcountries in Africa and Asia. After a period of relative quiescence, citizensare taking to the streets again. From December 2010 onwards, an upsurgein protest demonstrations hit North Africa and the Middle East, resulting inthe fall of authoritarian governments in, for example, Tunisia and Egypt. Theso-called Arab Spring inspired a new wave of worldwide social mobilization.In May 2011 a series of demonstrations and protest camps in the biggestSpanish cities demanded change in national politics and “real democracynow” (Hughes, 2011; Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013). In September 2011,people started camping in a public park in New York City’s Wall Streetfinancial district, soon followed by similar protest camps all over the world(Feigenbaum et al., 2013). People protested against financial inequality andexpressed distress at institutions too often giving in to corporate agendas.But the Occupy protests, as they became known, represented primarily aquest for participation by disempowered citizens, and a call for recognitionof the citizens’ democratic agency (Tarrow, 2011).

On the communication technology front, the diffusion of commercial web2.0 tools, such as microblogging and social networking services, are chang-ing our understanding of the link between media, participation, and social



mobilization. Most importantly, they have an impact on protest dynamicsthat goes beyond their instrumental role: according to Juris, social media use“has led to new patterns of protest that shape movement dynamics beyondthe realm of technological practice” (2012, p. 297). Various scholars haveinvestigated the impact of social media on the organizational structures ofcollective action. Bennett and Segerberg observed a “logic of connectiveaction” at play, whereby personalized content shared across media net-works changes the core dynamics of the action (2012, p. 739). Along similarlines, Juris argued that, precisely because social media leverages interper-sonal networks, they tend to generate “crowds of individuals” rather thanorganizational networks (Juris, 2012, p. 297). In other words, they foster a“logic of aggregation” in a way similar to how the internet has nurtured a“logic of networking” within the global justice movement. But what for Jurisis the “logic of aggregation” is for Gerbaudo the “choreography of assem-bly”, a rather weak and temporary group dynamic typical of highly dispersedand individualized constituencies where influential Facebook administratorsbecome “ ‘soft leaders’ or choreographers, involved in setting the scene, andconstructing an emotional space within which collective action can unfold”(Gerbaudo, 2012: Kindle location 151–161).

Fenton and Barassi (2011) and Milan (2013) explored the emerging indi-vidualism in collective action and its relation to social media use. Milancoined the notion of “cloud protesting” in order to capture the way inwhich social networking services are changing organized collective action.The metaphor is borrowed from computing, where the cloud indicatesthe customized delivery of services over a network. In contentious poli-tics the cloud takes on two meanings: on the one hand it is a metaphorfor highly individualized collective action, and, on the other, it is an onlineimagined repository for the soft resources crucial to collective action. As ametaphor the cloud indicates a specific way of connecting individuals inan instance of collective action, where individuals and informal amorphouscollectives have taken central stage, dislodging organized groups, such as tra-ditional social movement organizations. As an online imagined space, thecloud stores the know-how, narratives, and meanings associated with col-lective action, including the building blocks of collective identity. It makesthem available to individual activists, who can “shop” for existing mean-ings but also contribute to creating and sharing new ones. The cloud isenabled by and accessible via digital technologies, and social media servicesand mobile devices in particular. It has the ability to reduce the costs ofmobilization by offering resources that can be accessed and enjoyed inde-pendently by individual activists in a cherry-picking fashion. In this way,individual participants can tailor their participation by creating a customiz-able narrative and a “personalized” collective identity by means of posts,tweets, links, and videos, but also with “retweets” and “likes”. The result-ing hashtag-style narrative is flexible, real time, and crowd controlled. It

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connects individual stories into a broader context that gives them meaning(Milan, 2012AQ3 , 2013).

The instrumental role played by social media and mobile phones in theArab Spring (Eltantawy and Wiest, 2011), particularly in the incremen-tal creation of a joint narrative for the protests, is a case in point. Someobservers have come forward with the (contested) notion of “liberation tech-nology”, to indicate those technologies enabling citizens “to report news,expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections,scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons offreedom” (Diamond, 2010, p. 70). However, there is no consensus on thepotential of social media for the promotion of democracy (Morozov, 2011),and the role of commercial proprietary platforms as agents of social changehas rightly been questioned (Mejias, 2011). What is sure is that the internet,and the direct participation of the average citizen enabled by web 2.0, haschanged many realms of contemporary life, including journalism practice,cultures, and norms (Fenton, 2009). For example, traditional news mediaincreasingly incorporate forms of “citizen journalism” in order to encouragea conversation with audiences that are hungry for participation (Bowmanand Willis, 2003). The whistle-blower site WikiLeaks contributed to ques-tion the role of news media in contemporary societies as it took over theinvestigative mission that traditionally belonged to journalists (Lynch, 2010;Brevini et al., 2013).

But as both activists and scholars grow more excited at the possibilitiesoffered by social media and mobile devices, cyberspace is becoming increas-ingly controlled. According to Deibert et al. (2011) and Deibert (2013) wehave entered a phase where the contest over access to cyberspace has burstinto the open, as governments and corporations alike increasingly intervenein this domain. For example, social media have been used during the ArabSpring to control protesters (van Niekerk et al., 2011; Wilson and Dunn,2011). A few days after the beginning of the uprising, the Egyptian gov-ernment attempted to curtail internet access in order to inhibit people’sability to organize through social media. Similarly, in 2011 the US consid-ered the introduction of a “kill-switch” bill to give the president the power toshut down the internet in case of cyber threats. On the corporate front, theUS music and movie industry inspired the infamous SOPA, which is expectedto restrain copyright infringement in cyberspace.

These recent events and developments show how the internet is no longerjust a tool for activist networking and mobilizing but has become the mainplatform for action, recruitment, and identification. Collective action isbecoming increasingly disembodied, distributed, and individualized. This isparticularly visible in the recent revitalization and growing popularity ofhacktivist tactics: what were back in the 1990s sporadic cell-based cyberperformances are now tactics practiced on a regular basis by decentralizednetworks of individuals seeking to intervene in real-world struggles where

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their cyber support might be needed (Milan, 2012a, 2012b). Groups like LulzSecurity (LulzSec) and Anonymous regularly make the news, and hacktivism,DDoS attacks, and website defacements have become part of the lexicon ofmainstream media and security forces alike. According to Jordan, hacktivismhas become a new ethics for living, characterized by the transgression ofexisting states of affairs, and “a sense of solidarity in pursuit of transgression”(Jordan, 2002, p. 12).

In 2010–2011, Anonymous mobilized in support of WikiLeaks by defacingthe websites of companies that had taken action against the whistle-blowerwebsite. The extraordinary visibility that hacktivism acquired with theWikiLeaks case encouraged more young people who do not care about theconsequences to join the struggle, and fostered the creation of an “army” ofhacktivists that can be readily mobilized in case of future threats to onlineor offline freedoms. To name but one such case, we have seen hacktivists inaction to support the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt as well as theOccupy Wall Street protests. Hacktivism is becoming increasingly popularalso because, when compared with other activism tactics, such as campaign-ing or street demonstrations, cyber disruption and electronic disturbancehave an intense and real-time impact despite the limited deployment ofresources.

From the perspective of emancipatory communication activists, socialmedia and technology have come to perform some of the functions (e.g.,media production, online unedited publishing) that only media activismprojects provided up until a few years ago. What was new and innova-tive back then (e.g., the Indymedia open publishing software) is now alsoavailable on commercial platforms, which enjoy greater visibility comparedwith activist projects. Today people prefer to post videos from street demon-strations on YouTube rather than Indymedia (Askanius and Uldam, 2012).At first, activists responded to this challenge by updating their services.Alternative ISPs introduced blogging platforms, while in 2008 IMC Londonlaunched a new website with “tumble” mobile publishing, allowing peopleto publish text and pictures from their phones. However, some projects sur-rendered to the predominance of commercial social media. In October 2012the Indymedia London collective announced the suspension of its opera-tions on the grounds that the project was “no longer the one which we thinkis tactically useful to put our energy into” (IMC London, 2012). In responseto these latest developments, the alternative versus commercial, activist aswell as academic debate is moving away from online media and broadcast-ing and into the realm of social media. Unlike Us, a network of academics,activists, and artists seeking to understand social media monopolies andtheir alternatives, emerged in 2011 around the Amsterdam-based Institute ofNetwork Cultures. Meanwhile, progressive techies are working to create non-commercial citizen-based social networking platforms in order to counteractthreats to privacy by corporate social networking. At the time of writing the

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projects under way include *Diaspora, Crabgrass, Lorea, SocialSwarm, Briar,and Freedombox.

I will now turn my attention to the history of community radio and theradical internet, illustrating their main characteristics.

Low power to the people! A brief historyof community broadcasting

Community radio goes under many names, and stations operate differ-ently in different countries. It is part of the broader category of communitymedia. Community media provide public communication (“made availableto everyone”) within a specific context, the community, understood primar-ily as a social setting (Hollander et al., 2002, p. 22). The community “serves asa frame of reference for a shared interpretation”: it is not a matter of size butof the “special relationship between senders, receivers and messages” offeredby the common social context (ibid., p. 23). The notion of community mediais strongly connected to broadcasting and radio in particular. Starting fromthe 1970s, measures on community radio have been progressively includedin national media regulations (cf. Hintz, 2011). In many other countries,however, community radio remains illegal.

Community radio stations are distinct from commercial broadcastersin their aspirations, working methods, and structures (Jankowski, 2002;Jankowski and Prehn, 2002; Howley, 2005; Rennie, 2006). They are “themeans of expression of the community, rather than for the community”,and “media to which members of the community have access [ . . . ] whenthey want access” (Berrigan, 1979, p. 18). Audiences are often disempow-ered or minority communities to which community media offer a means forparticipation and empowerment (Hadl and Hintz, 2009). The radio station isconceived as “the voice of the voiceless”, and “the mouthpiece of oppressedpeople (be it on radial, gender, or class grounds) and generally as a tool fordevelopment” and social change (AMARC and Panos, 1998).12 The empha-sis is on dialogue and communication as a two-way process (Carpentieret al., 2002). Notwithstanding geographic and cultural differences, threeelements typically define community stations: non-profit making, commu-nity ownership and control, and community participation (AMARC andPanos, 1998; Jallow, 2012). They are often run by a volunteer base of pro-grammers. Usually they do not broadcast commercials. Examples includeRadio La Tribu in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Radio Peace in Accra, Ghana;Radio Corax in Halle, Germany; Radio Samarghata in Kathmandu, Nepal;the Punjabi community station Desi Radio in East London, UK; and theuniversity stations KCBS Radio in Santa Barbara, California, US and CKUTRadio in Montreal, Canada. Their programming includes local news, pro-grams in migrant languages, educational programs, and niche music andself-produced entertainment.

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Since its invention at the beginning of the 20th century and its large-scale adoption throughout the second half of the century, the story of radiohas been a story of control and battles over spectrum scarcity. Governmentshave made multiple attempts to control access on the grounds of the scarceavailability of airwaves and cultural protection provisions. This “scarcity”has sometimes been a convenient rationalization for commercial or statecontrol.

The struggle for citizen-led media emerged on a large-scale in Europe inthe 1970s (cf. Jankowski et al., 1992). The earliest experiments of grassrootsbroadcasting, however, date back to the second half of the 1950s, whenthe first unlicensed stations began to broadcast from ships in internationalwaters off the Scandinavian coast (hence the term “pirate” to indicate illegalbroadcasters; cf. Chapman, 1992). Radio Mercur, the first pirate commer-cial station, broadcast from Denmark. Others followed in the Netherlands,Belgium and the UK. They were soon outlawed but kept emerging elsewhere,with the technical equipment and even the ships passing from pirate topirate. At that time the broadcasting environments of most European coun-tries were characterized by public service monopolies operated by the stateor by semipublic institutions. Pirates were seen as dangerous for a numberof reasons, including their possible interference with emergency signals, andthe deviation of listeners towards “dangerous ideologies”.

A second wave of piracy emerged in the 1970s, initially in Italy and France,where trade unions and left-wing and antagonist groups started to challengethe state monopoly on broadcasting. These non-commercial stations becameknown as radio libere (radio libre in France: “free radio”), a label that referredto their antiauthoritarian and anticonformist character. In Italy the battlewas also fought in court, with the monopoly of the Italian public broadcasterRAI being declared unconstitutional at the local level in 1974. By mid-1978there were 2,275 stations broadcasting in the country, both commercial andlinked to political projects. In France the Socialist Party began a process oflegalization when it came to power towards the end of the 1970s. Thanks tothe gradual introduction of advertising, the road to legal broadcasting wasalso paved for commercial broadcasters. By 1985, 16,000 stations had alreadybeen licensed as “local radio” in France (Rennie, 2006).

The French and Italian free radio stations inspired many other simi-lar experiments across Europe and the Americas. In the UK, for example,where community radio stations were only legalized in 2004, piracy was awidespread phenomenon for many years.13 In the US the obstacle to commu-nity expression was not public service broadcasting (virtually insignificant inthe country) but powerful commercial broadcasters. The struggle developedaround issues of free speech and access, with a strong role played by bothcommercial and political pirates.

From the 1960s onwards, community radio stations spread rapidly acrossthe developing world, in particular in Latin America and Africa. They helped

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to fight dictatorships and contributed to the democratization process, pro-viding a space for the articulation of democratic values. For example, theminers’ radio stations that appeared in rural Bolivia at the end of the 1940sand operated for about 50 years played a fundamental role in Bolivian soci-ety (Huesca, 1995; Gumucio Dagron, 2001; O’Connor, 2004). These stationswere not as horizontal in their structure as many other radio stations thatemerged later, but they are regarded as a pioneering example of a truly “com-munitarian radio”. Ownership was within the community: miners’ unionleaders funded them for political purposes. In times of peace they wouldserve miners to campaign for better wages and other claims, while in timesof social turmoil they would work as a means of resistance.

Community radio is a local phenomenon. Since the 1980s, however, therehave been several attempts by radio stations to network at the national,regional, and global levels. In several countries, radio activists, many ofwhom were or are pirate broadcasters, began to get together to lobbynational governments for the release of the state monopoly on the airwaves,and the allocation of frequencies to social groups. In some (e.g., in theUK, France and Austria, and also in Uruguay and Ghana), advocates haveorganized over the years in stable sector organizations able to represent thestations within national regulatory agencies (cf. Scifo, 2013). Communityradio advocates have also organized in transnational networks. The WorldAssociation of Community Broadcasters and the United Kingdom Commu-nity Media Association have often partnered with national regulators andinternational organizations such as the UN. Other organizations, such as theCMFE, have emerged to respond to opportunities for participation in policyarenas. These networks are set up to exchange programs, training, and bestpractices for policy advocacy. They also function as an international soli-darity system that is able to raise awareness and provide support when theauthorities threaten a community station.

Running servers for revolution: A brief historyof radical tech activism

Radical techies provide self-organized internet-based communication chan-nels to the citizenry and the activist community. Typically they offernon-commercial web-based services, such as website hosting and bloggingplatforms, e-mail accounts, mailing list services and chat rooms. Althoughtheir services are similar to what might be available from an array of corpo-rate servers, these groups operate under distinct values. They are non-profitand commit to protect user anonymity and individual privacy. They usuallysupply privacy-protection tools, such as anonymous remailers and encryp-tion systems, and commit not to release user data to third parties, includingsecurity forces. Often they manage the machines (servers) in which these ser-vices run. They may also provide platforms for information self-production



and knowledge sharing, such as collaborative platforms and wikis.14 Exam-ples include Riseup Networks in the US, ASCII (the now silent AmsterdamSubversive Center for Information Interchange) in the Netherlands, Nodo50and SinDominio in Spain, Aktivix and Plentyfact in the UK, SO36 and Nadirin Germany, and Autistici/Inventati in Italy.

As a result of their poor visibility and secretive nature, radical techies arean underinvestigated area of social activism. Groups call themselves differ-ent names, as this call for action shows: “radical techies, anar(cho)geeks,hacklab members, keyboard squatters, tech-aware activists, autonomousadministrators . . . we’ve often directly participated in that [internet] evolu-tion, advocating subversive uses of new technologies, hacking free softwareand sharing knowledge with passion, running servers for revolution”.15

The groups are affected by national political cultures and ideological back-grounds. The label “radical techies” used in this study strives to be asinclusive as possible, and to incorporate procedural and identity aspects rel-evant to the research questions. For analytical purposes, here hackers areconsidered to be a subcategory of radical techies, although some of themmight not agree.

Radical techies usually organize in grassroots tech collectives. A typicalradical tech collective would consist of half a dozen volunteer activistswho are often, but not necessarily, based in the same town. These groupsgenerally operate on a voluntary basis and through collective organizingprinciples. Some have weekly meetings, some even operate a computer lab,but most of their work and communication takes place online. Daily tasksinclude managing webservers and services like list-servs. Larger projects mayalso aim to develop software tools, such as content management systems(e.g., Drupal), operating systems (e.g., Debian and Obuntu), and encryptiontools and online anonymity networks (e.g., Tor). One of the biggest alterna-tive ISPs hosts about 4,000 e-mail accounts, and more than 30,000 peoplesubscribe to the mailing lists hosted on the server. Annual revenues fromdonations do not exceed !5,000–6,000, which is insufficient to cover theoperational costs.

The radical tech groups analyzed in this research emerged in themid-1990s when activists started to develop the idea of networkinginfrastructures as new political subjects in their own right. They pioneeredinternet usage by the citizenry, reversing the idea that the internet was themonopoly of states, the military and corporate players. Similar projects,however, emerged as early as the 1980s, long before the World Wide Webeven existed. The idea of an e-commons had spread across the world, thanksto what later became known as the free software movement (Wayner, 2001).This advocated freedom to manage and use technologies, and to redistributeand modify software according to one’s needs.

In the 1990s, with the rise of the internet, civil society organizationssaw the potential of this new tool in bringing about social change.

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Community-based organizations in North America and Europe started toprovide communities with cheap access and connections, focusing on infor-mation distribution. One of the first widely used applications was the BBS,a sort of ancestor of the modern internet. With the signing of the VelletriAgreement (1984; discussed above), a number of NGOs across the worldcommitted to develop and implement Fidonet (Kidd, 2001). The EuropeanCounter Network, which was among them, can be considered the precur-sor of the radical projects analyzed in this study (deprisa, 2003). However,for a while, large NGOs were the only civil society groups able to afford theroom-sized machines that were necessary to be online.

When computers entered common households and youngsters startedgaining some experience of these machines, a new type of grassroots techactivism emerged. The 1994 Zapatista uprising inspired these would-betechies: the far-seeing use of the internet by the insurgents transformed alocal struggle in the remote Mexican state of Chiapas into the first “informa-tion guerrilla movement” (Martinez-Torres, 2001; Bob, 2002). The internetallowed the nascent social movement to speak for itself and control infor-mation that was vital to its survival, bypassing international corporate mediawhich would at best have ignored the group’s mobilization. It served as thebackbone for the creation of supportive transnational networks that ampli-fied its messages and provided solidarity (Russell, 2001). People started to seethe internet as a tool for struggle, and new forms of political protest emerged.In 1995 the first netstrike, “a networked version of a peaceful sit-in” accord-ing to its promoters, targeted the French government in opposition to itsnuclear experiments on the Mururoa atoll.16

But soon it became clear that the mere distribution of messages wouldnot be enough, and activists started to develop the idea of networkinginfrastructures as new political subjects in their own right. Projects devel-oped around two main axes: the provision of public access to the internet,and the empowering use of free software. Back then, internet connectionsin private homes were still a mirage, thus most groups started out as inter-net cafés: vanguard areas often in occupied buildings where people couldfreely access the internet. They differentiated themselves from the NGOsoperating in the sector through their radicalism, grassroots ways of organiz-ing, and lack of resources. They were explicitly linked to social movements.In Europe, in particular, they emerged in the milieu of the squatted socialcenters and street activism, with strong links to the more radical and theautonomous/antagonist scene.17

The nature of these projects changed as the internet spread. Nowadays,only a minority of radical tech groups still maintain physical spaces, oftenin squats, but they mostly serve as meeting points. Activists hang out there,organize training workshops for users, and party. But most of the groupsexist now only on cyberspace. Activists still meet face to face to coordi-nate their activities, but they provide a virtual space instead of a physical



space. Users reach them via e-mail. Types of services and priorities haveevolved over time, too, following technological innovation and the needsof emerging social movements. A German collective, for example, startedin 1993 offering mailboxes, and evolved later in a web infoladen (a sort of“info shop”). Nowadays the group provides secure e-mail addresses, orga-nizes training workshops, and seeks to raise awareness of issues such as dataretention.

Radical tech collectives become more visible when they step out ofcyberspace. In the past, tech groups have established media centers atmajor protest events, such as G8 meetings. Over the last decade, Indymediaactivists have set up tents with computer equipment in the middle of actionsto allow other activists to upload their reports directly from the streets.A collective once transformed a countryside barn in a remote North Germanvillage into a high-tech media hub that provided thousands of environmen-tal activists with a sophisticated communication infrastructure to report ona protest against nuclear waste shipments.

Radical tech groups are mostly located in the Western world, due to theavailability of resources such as cheap technology, fast internet connections,skills and expertise. There are two or three such groups in each Westerncountry, and a few others in Latin America and South-East Asia. Over thelast decade their activities have been increasingly targeted by state repres-sion and online surveillance because of their role as the backbone of activistnetworking and organizing. Server seizures have affected, among others, theIndymedia network (2004 and 2008), Autistici/Inventati (2004), Riseup andMay First/People’s Link (2012). Other threats include data retention and usertraceability legislation that forces server administrators to retain the connec-tion metadata of users and release them upon police request. Radical techieshave organized to face such threats; transnational meetings have been calledto discuss common strategies and technical solutions, as well as to exchangeskills.


PROOF

QUERIES TO BE ANSWERED BY AUTHOR (SEE MARGINAL MARKS)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mark your corrections and answer to thesequeries directly onto the proof at the relevant place. Do NOT mark yourcorrections on this query sheet.

Chapter 2

Query No. Page No. Query

AQ1 30 Please provide text citation for Table 2.1.

AQ2 33 Describe the acronym “DDoS”.

AQ3 41 Please specify Milan (2012a) or (2012b).

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