Mirroring the videos of Anonymous:cloud activism, living networks, and political mimesis

Mirrors describe the multiplication of data across a network. In this article, I examine the politics of mirroring as practiced on videos by the hacktivist network Anonymous. Mirrors are designed to retain visibility on social media platforms and motivate viewers towards activism. They emerge from a particular social structure and propagate a specific symbolic system. Furthermore, mirrors are not exact replicas nor postmodern representations. Rather, mirroring maps a contestation over visibility that entangles both cloud activists and platform firms

Technology retreats and the politics of social media

This essay examines weeklong technology retreats in Silicon Valley. These retreats embody digital healthism, which I define as the discourse that promotes the self-regulation of digital consumption for personal health. I argue that the self-regulation advanced by digital healthism insufficiently addresses the politics of media refusal. Technology retreats channel frustrations about social media use into opportunities for personal and corporate growth instead of political activism. I consider how technology retreats might participate in a dialogue about the regulation of social media platforms and companies by states. Evidence for these claims come from ethnographic research with the founders of a technology retreat in Silicon Valley

A computational study of how and why reddit.com was an effective platform in the campaign against SOPA

In this paper, we analyze the posting and voting activities of reddit’s users and show how these interact with the site’s structure to create an environment where information activists could build a resource base to oppose the 2012 US House of Representatives bill, Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). The broadcasting function of the ‘Front Page’ was important in raising awareness of SOPA among reddit’s users. Broadcasting the outcomes of collective voting back to the voters establishes an attentional feedback loop, and this imbued the collective action which followed with certain characteristics. Continuing a longitudinal investigation into changes in the ways that user attention and activity is distributed between the site’s 240,000 ‘subreddits’, we conclude by theorizing whether such collective action will be possible on the reddit of the present

Gagged and doxed:Hacktivism’s self-incrimination complex

The investigation, arrest, and conviction of a number of high-profile hacker-activists, or hacktivists, reveal the ways subjectivity is mobilized through processes of revelation and evasion. We use the term subjectivation to describe the performative practices engaged in by hacktivists and contrast them with governmental and disciplinary practices of subjection. We elaborate upon two categories of subjectivation (coming out and versioning) and two categories of subjection (doxing and gagging). These categories form the vectors of hacktivist and state coproduction that emerge in selfie-incrimination. We use the term selfie to describe both intentional and inadvertent practices of online self-disclosure. Selfie-incrimination that is public and voluntary we discuss in terms of coming out. Versioning describes the public voluntary manipulation of personal identity. Being doxed entails the online disclosure of a hacktivist’s identity. Gagging refers to this ultimate silencing of illicit political digital activity, wherein the state designates the parameters of speech as well as physical movement. We conclude by examining the entangled and asymmetrical relationship between hacktivist subjectivity and the cybersecurity of the state

Zopa's lambs:video ads, internet banks, and the financialization of affect

This article is about how affect is mobilized through video advertising to encourage people to try new practices: discuss money and use peer-to-peer banking. A 2013 television commercial for a UK-based peer-to-peer lending firm demonstrates how affect is mobilized in the context of financialization in an age of austerity and increasing social inequality. The commercial, “Zopa Lambs,” assembles imagery of an idealized rural England to obscure geographical and class differences among its customers while positioning the firm as a trustworthy upholder of conservative banking values against predatory payday lenders and irresponsible global banking firms. While the firm is entirely internet-based, in an environment of relatively low financial and technological literacy, trust is constructed heavily through the use of traditional media. While financial instruments generally are marketed through affective associations with particular status circles, here that circle is constructed neither as a wealthy urban elite nor as a populist mass, but as the “sensible:” a weighted term carrying affective resonance with times of austerity, capital investment rather than consumption, and an idealized rural past

Networked idiots:affective economies and neoliberal subjectivity in Russian viral video

Idiot is usually a term of derision. In this article, we reconsider the common meaning as designating a stupid person and return to an earlier etymology as signifying a private and independent individual. In ancient Greece, being idiotic meant engaging in the contemplative process of becoming an individual. At times, this pursuit of individuation differentiated such individuals as their acts occurred in public and were seen as absurd, out-of-the-ordinary and, frankly, idiotic, as most now know the term. With the widespread use of social media and digital video, these once private or semi-public acts of individuation often become explicitly public acts for others to see, critique and mimic. Social media has made it possible for these explorations of self to circulate where their emotional intensities resonate with or are rejected by viewers, are captured for profit by media corporations, and leveraged by their producers into media careers. Using a case study from Russian social media, this article describes the affective economy of idiotic videos and how the history of one Internet video illustrates the circulation, capture and self-capitalization attendant with neoliberalism

Drones:Visual Anthropology from the Air

This book chapter investigates the ethnographies, epistemologies, and ontologies of atmospheres and how atmospheric technologies are deployed in visual anthropology. Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are epistemological tools for the production of videographical and other sensorial knowledge by anthropologists, archaeologists, and allied fields of natural science, social science, and social justice. Drones--and other atmospheric platforms such as satellites--are anthropologically relevant because of how cultures of visual and technological production evolve around their invention, deployment, and discourses of economic and political power. Lastly, this class of airborne technology is comprised of ontological objects which elevate and extend the human senses into the air, to the edge of the internet, and into entanglements with human and non-human and technological others. Thus, as epistemological, ethnographic, and ontological things drones generate compelling visual and multisensual data, offer opportunities to witness socio-technical cultures, and exist and come into being within a matrix of atmospheres, humans, and non-human agencies