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This chapter examines the ways that companies, users, and states alike navigate the overload of data in the cloud by targeting information, and argues that targeted-marketing campaigns online come out of the same ideological apparatus as military targeting. Two oppositional groups serve as case studies for this argument: first, a group of radio-frequency hackers that data mined the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, and second, the artist/geographer Trevor Paglen, who photographs U.S. reconnaissance satellites and other covert military infrastructures. As this chapter argues, these oppositional tactics may be effective, but sometimes re-animate the very structures of power that they purport to expose or overturn. The reason is due to something this chapter terms the sovereignty of data, which both co-opts user participation and also gives practices such as torture and extraordinary rendition new life within the cloud.

This chapter discusses the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group that developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. EDT, like many artivist groups, understood that the “politics of fear” set-off by 9/11 would be used by governments to establish almost everything under the signs of cyberwar, cyberterrorism, and cybercrime in order stop the development of Digital Zapatismo, electronic civil disobedience, hacktivism, and tactical media work across the arcs of Latin America and beyond. This essay establishes the conditions that were navigated by EDT and artivists working across digital platforms to establish new network gestures that would connect and amplify new visions of social formations emerging across Latin America, especially from the indigenous communities that were not deterred by the establishment of post-9/11 planetary war.

Policy hacking is a media reform strategy that focuses on citizen-based do-it-yourself policy alternatives and the development of new law and regulation. Typically it encompasses a) collecting and analysing existing policies (often from other countries) and b) re-assembling these components towards a new policy package. Often it involves digital tools to crowd-source contributions from a wider range of civil society. It thereby moves beyond classic forms of advocacy, lobbying and public pressure aimed at authorities and assigns a central role in the policy process (including both policy development and policy transfer) to civil society actors. Involving loose networks and informal coalitions, policy hacking relates to the recent rise of “connective action” and “organised networks” in the civil society realm, and it is based on a tendency toward prefigurative action that is wide-spread in media activism (e.g., the development of alternative infrastructure). Policy hacking is often embedded in traditional advocacy and/or protest strategies. It is context-specific and typically requires beneficial policy windows (such as a political or economic crisis) to be successful. Yet as part of a broader strategic and tactical mix it can play a significant role in future efforts to affect and achieve media reform.

This chapter looks into the relationship between hacktivism and the humanities. It describes a range of related protest movements during a time when a significant cohort of professors called for hacking the academy, including department chairs, heads of national centers, and leaders of professional associations who demanded fundamental changes in fair use, peer review, and tenure guidelines. To understand these phenomena that bring either politics into academia or academia into politics, current theories both of hacking and of hacktivism, or the nonviolent use of digital tools in pursuit of political ends, are examined. The chapter also considers how dissent by students and faculty, and protest by an old guard of political organizers and a new cadre of programmers in the general public, may be related. In the context of the digital humanities, hacktivism theory offers a way to broaden and deepen our understanding of the use of digital tools and of the politics of that tool use, and to question the uncritical instrumentalism that so many digital humanities projects propound.

Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of Anonymous as a political actor. It addresses the question of why Anonymous members first mobilized in 2008 and includes information about how this community became politically active. This chapter argues that Anonymous became involved in political activism because the technological spaces of 4chan.org and other Anonymous posting board systems—particularly extreme anonymity, lack of regulation, and shocking content—created a highly cohesive online community with a history of collective online activities of questionable legality and morality. The history of organized community activities granted Anonymous members a sense of capability that empowered them to take on the Church of Scientology in 2008.

Chapter 3 examines political mobilization on The Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing site. It argues that in the case of The Pirate Bay, the technological space appears to be anonymous, unregulated, and based on commercial exchange, but it allows users to behave in ways that put them in direct conflict with legal norms and various authorities, including the United States and influential corporations. Additionally, the leadership of The Pirate Bay stands as the jetty in the legal sea of copyright issues, taking the legal attacks of the recording industry on behalf of its users and articulating file-sharing as a political act, which furthers the site’s function as a political platform.

This chapter explores the way questions of access and control are negotiated in computer-mediated communication in general and the expressive politics of hacktivism and tactical media in particular. More specifically, it addresses three of the most unfortunate misunderstandings in the standoff between old and new media. First, hackers tend to be portrayed as immature crooks, and the remedy typically sought against hacking is greater disciplining power for the authorities, with the inevitable backlash. Second, once the protection of privacy and free speech is hollowed out by surreptitious data mining and invasions of data privacy, activism becomes all too easily equated with cyberterrorism. Third, the assertion that greater secrecy ultimately yields greater security is wrong, and the cult of secrecy gives rise to a global resurgence of irrational rumorology online. The chapter also considers how conspiracy theory affects public debate over code and law when it takes the place of critical Net culture.

Chapter 1 outlines the ontology of cyberspace, and how objects, events, and operations transpiring in that domain differ from those in the familiar domains of land, sea, air, and space. It summarizes the background history of malevolent activities in cyberspace, including crime, vandalism, political activism (hacktivism), espionage, and putative acts of war. This form of state conflict is compared to “irregular” warfare in conventional domains, and is also identified as a component of China’s People’s Liberation Army doctrine from the 1990s of “unrestricted” or “soft” warfare. Soft war is a form of unarmed conflict designed to coerce adversaries into yielding to the attacker’s political will, thereby achieving the same objectives as conventional armed conflict. State-sponsored hacktivism, as distinct from the conventional use of effects-based cyber weapons, is the principle form of soft war practiced by states at present.

This chapter offers a limited defense of a controversial argument put forward by Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” namely that technological society threatens humanity’s survival. It draws on direct correspondence and prison interviews with Kaczynski and applies his broader views to the robotization of humanity; and it argues that the technological system is so complex that users are forced into choosing between jailed technology controlled by those within existing oppressive power structures, dedicating their lives to building knowledge and understanding of the software and robotics that facilitate participation in the technological system, or otherwise revolting against said system. That is, contra Peter Ludlow, it is not simply a matter of putting technology back in the hands of the people through “hacktivisim” or open-source design and programming. We must either accept revolt as permissible or recover a philosophy of technology truly geared toward human ends—parts set against the dehumanizing whole.