tactical media

With half a century’s worth of profound social and technological change, the 1960s protest movement is far removed from today’s world. Networks, databases, video games, social media, and the rise of algorithmic culture and the sharing economy have irrevocably altered our landscape. What, in this world, is the 21st century equivalent of that key feature of the sixties protest movement: the protest song? This paper argues that one possible answer is the protest bot, a computer program that algorithmically generates social and political critiques on social media.

Using Habermas’s imperfect account of the public sphere as my starting point, I suggest that five characteristics define protest bots—or bots of conviction, as I also call them. Bots of conviction are topical, data-based, cumulative, oppositional, and uncanny. After explaining these five characteristics, I explore several well-known and lesser-known bots on Twitter, showing how they are or are not protest bots. Throughout this paper I adopt a critical code studies approach, diving into the procedural DNA of several bots of conviction of my own creation.

This paper situates bots of conviction within a larger bot ecology, which includes spambots, chatbots, generative poetry bots, art bots, and absurdist avant-garde bots. Unlike these other forms of computer-generated social media, protest bots are a promising form of tactical media, a kind of media activism that destabilizes dominant narratives, perspectives, and events. This micropolitical activism, I argue, should complement the creative dimensions of digital art, poetry, and literature, serving as one of “the ends” of electronic literature.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Part protest novel, part guerilla theater, @OccupyMLA played out on the crowded virtual street corners of Twitter hashtags #mla and #omla for fifteen months before being revealed a as "fiction" at the 2013 MLA e-literature reading. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century protest fiction changed attitudes about slavery and industrial excess; @OccupyMLA charged #MLA members (and hashtag lurkers) to feel angry about dehumanizing adjunct working conditions built upon the "innocent dream" that Ph.D.s in literature could get paid to teach literature.

In a climate of "DH niceness," to dwell on adjuncting as a broken promise was agit-prop. Real life participants added their own anecdotes and Tweeted sympathy to Hazel, comingling "fiction" and "nonfiction" in an eerie, Barthesian "Reality Effect." The Netprov's melodrama and anger were deliberately out of sync with the positivistic #MLA discourse community. "Here's where #omla is correct," opined George Williams in a retweeted pair of Tweets, "conditions for contingent labor in higher ed are abomidable. But making the MLA the target of your ire and your movement is not going to get you very far. + #omla #imho."

Twitter as medial setting (of speed, mobility, partial attention) created a fragmentary reading experience that was in practice unique to each reader. Rita Raley observes in her 2013 essay "TXTual Practice" that an SMS text as literary utterance rarely merits close reading; but that same text projected on a building and read in tandem with its medial and embodied environments becomes a complex signifying system because of each moment's unrepeatability. A similar claim could be made of @OccupyMLA. The MLA physical convention space was overlaid as a LARP game space augmented by #omla posts. Some feared #omla people would interrupt their panels; some scanned the crowds for badges bearing a penny, the sign for allegiance to #omla. Henry Jenkins reminds us that even lurkers are an important audience in the circulation and meaning of media objects.

"Didn't we always expect @occupymla was performance art [because the] narratives read like fiction about very real problems?" asked M.M. Gonzalez. Ironically, MLA Executive Director Rosemary Feal derided @OccupyMLA because its fictional characters were too fictional, calling it a "cruel hoax [because] the characters are so unlike 99% of real adjuncts."

The very notion of a "hoax" implies that the confusion caused by a work's truth destabilization is temporary. "It's not like performance art is the only way to raise concern about contingent fac," Roopka Risam objected. Instead it pierced the romantic fictions we tell ourselves about adjuncting and suggested that decorous means of "raising concern" will fail to interrupt the neoliberal university's expansion of the adjuncting class.

(Source: author's abstract)

The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials.

Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.

(Source: Continuum online catalog)

Our understanding of “subversion” can be traced to its Latin roots: vertere, which means “to turn, overthrow, or destroy,” and the prefix sub, which means, “under, beneath.”  Hence, subversion is literally destruction from below.  This understanding carries with it two different connotations, one which is more concrete, as a form of non-frontal assault on a government or similar institution, by staging the attack from behind enemy lines.  The second, relies upon the antagonistic connotations of the first, but refers to the act of turning a system upon itself from within. This paper deals with subversion in the context of a changing media landscape.  Fundamental to this is the question of subversion as it relates to the norms of digitality itself: the subversion of the “discrete” value as applied to the entirety of existence.  The process of digitization, which reassembles the organic as transmissible, programmable units of abstract value, increasingly permeates all levels of social existence. From digital communication to human labor, from intelligence to food, reality is increasingly being rendered in commodity form, subject to information processing, communication, and storage.  This emerging universal structure, then, is the definitive terrain upon which all future acts of digital subversion will be formed.

Rita Raley’s Tactical Media covers the “spectrum ranging from direct action (e.g., denial-of-service attacks and game space interventions) to symbolic performance (e.g., data visualization)” (150).  Raley ties together a movement which eschews grand narratives and the contrapuntal teleological declarations of manifestos, identifying a strain of media activism that is, to use deCerteau’s term, “tactical”.  What ties these practices together is a combination of “virtuosic performance and cultural critique” (Raley 150).  As Raley maintains, and as the work reflects, tactical media is characterized not by its ability to instigate a widespread revolution, rather it is in the ability of relatively powerless operators, through skill and creativity, to turn systems of power against themselves, exposing, however fleetingly, the illegitimacy and injustice of their own authority. 

The text covers three chief thematic areas which are seem to roughly characterize the dominant subjects of tactical media: Chapter 1: Border Hacks (which addresses the vast pool of tactical media that has arisen to critique the politics of globalization and human migration), Chapter 2: Virtual War (which focuses on those works which exist to raise critical consciousness about war and conflict), and Chapter 3: Speculative Capital (which deals with works that aim to shed light on the practices of global financial markets).   In addressing these three areas, Raley does not necessarily confine “tactical media” to such subject matter, rather she highlights the chief discursive threads whose point of convergence to form a critique of neoliberalism.  Here is where this activist movement is able to establish its center, if it can be said to have one at all.

But beyond offering a useful delineation of “tactical media” and a strong theoretical frame from which it can be understood, Raley’s work points to the limitations of such work.  In reviewing the corpus of works selected and the movement’s general rejection of generalities in favor of short term, ephemeral, and technologically facilitated acts of opposition, one cannot help but notice the tension that exists between an art movement that is overwhelmingly in solidarity with the dispossessed, yet seems to resist statements of solidarity in theoretical matters, which believes in the power of art and the symbolic to intervene in the construction of reality, yet doubts the possibility of human-generated interventions we call revolutions. 

---

Tactical media describes interventionist media art practices that engage and critique the dominant political and economic order. Rather than taking to the streets and staging spectacular protests, the practitioners of tactical media engage in an aesthetic politics of disruption, intervention, and education. From They Rule, an interactive map of the myriad connections between the world’s corporate and political elite created by Josh On and Futurefarmers, to Black Shoals, a financial market visualization that is intended to be both aesthetically and politically disruptive, they embrace a broad range of oppositional practices.

In Tactical Media, Rita Raley provides a critical exploration of the new media art activism that has emerged out of, and in direct response to, postindustrialism and neoliberal globalization. Through close readings of projects by the DoEAT group, the Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience, and other tactical media groups, she articulates their divergent methods and goals and locates a virtuosity that is also boldly political. Contemporary models of resistance and dissent, she finds, mimic the decentralized and virtual operations of global capital and the post-9/11 security state to exploit and undermine the system from within. 

Emphasizing the profound shift from strategy to tactics that informs new media art-activism, Raley assesses the efficacy of its symbolic performances, gamings, visualizations, and hacks. With its cogent analyses of new media art and its social impact, Tactical Media makes a timely and much needed contribution to wider debates about political activism, contemporary art, and digital technology.

(Source: University of Minnesota Press catalog copy)