Search Results

Chapter 7, “ ‘The Citizen’s Did It’:15MpaRato, Autonomous Hacker Ethics in Action” moves from the “analog” mobilizations of the preferentes pensioners discussed in the previous chapter to the technopolitics of 15MpaRato, which bases its political praxis on a hacker ethic that seeks to harness the power of the digital commons to bring down the bankers responsible for the fraud behind the preferentes scandal and the massive public bailout of these same banks. It shows how their technopolitical praxis is used to contest and transform hegemonic narratives about the crisis, austerity, and Spanish democracy, and above all to show people that ordinary citizens can reclaim public institutions for the common good.

Chapter 12, “15-M Political Culture, Collective Identity, and the Logic of Autonomous Networks in the Digital Age,” argues that, against all odds, autonomous networking logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal professionalized organizational structures and strong leadership, and across heterogeneous issues and identities. It explores the synergies and tensions within 15-M political culture, and shows how they act as a corrective to some of the key challenges faced by autonomous movements. Contra “connective action” theses, the chapter shows how collective action logics continue to fuel autonomous networks in the digital age.

Chapter 5 analyzes the impact and significance of Acampada Sol for the development of the 15-M movement. Acampada Sol was one of many “occupation” camps that combined a pro-democracy and anti-austerity orientation. Demands for greater democracy form a central shared theme across a wide range of protest sites and forms of protest within and beyond Europe. But not all of these resulted in strong and sustained movements afterward, and not all mass mobilizations in times of crisis result in the emergence of social movements. This chapter argues that the experience of Acampada Sol had two crucial impacts that served to fuel and sustain the 15-M movement. The first was to establish democracy as the central problematic around which the movement cohered. The second was to consolidate a political culture and a collective identity that would sustain the movement, enabling it to expand and evolve. Autonomous, feminist, and hacker ethics forged a political culture that would strengthen the movement’s political identity and efficacy.

Chapter 10, “15-M and Podemos: Explaining the Puzzle of the ‘Electoral Turn,’ ” explores the relationship between 15-M and Podemos to answer a central puzzle that arises from the case of 15-M: How did so many members of a movement that was radically committed to critiquing representative democracy embrace the Podemos electoral initiative less than three years later while still claiming allegiance to the spirit and identity of the 15-M movement? It argues that party strategists engaged in extensive discursive work to overcome their cognitive dissonance and realign their activist identities to embrace an electoral option without reneging their 15-M identity. Podemos managed to convince 15-M activists by offering the promise of integrating core elements of 15-M political culture into the party, including autonomy, feminism, and a digitally enabled hacker ethic.