Anarchism & Social Technology: Contextualising the (non?)-field? – Full conference paper

11/28/2012 by 1 Comment

I blogged a couple of months ago about hosting and facilitating a conference stream at the Anarchist Studies Network’s conference, Making Connections, about the relationship between anarchism and social technology. We had two presenters come along and discuss their research which focused on and explored some novel theoretical approaches to social media and technology from a distinctly anarchist or libertarian communist perspective.

Aaron Peters spoke about the network society, public-private spheres and Paolo Virno‘s ‘Soviets of the Multitude‘ in relation to the networked social movements we’ve seen emerge around the globe post-economic collapse. While Thomas Swann discussed the potential for cybernetic theory to be brought into play to account for the decentralised organising seen during last year’s riots and what this might mean for a conceptual model of anarchist organising. You can get download Aaron’s paper via Scribd here and Thomas’ paper here.

Aside from facilitating, I presented a short paper that aimed to contextualise what Gordon (2008) has described as the “ambivalent relationship” between anarchism and technology. This ambivalence as one of the reasons we proposed the stream originally as despite the conference organisers citing the #Occupy and Arab Spring movements as powerful, contemporary anti-authoritarian social media-enabled forces rising from the grass-roots, there were few attempts to engage with and analyse technology directly within the conference’s extensive agenda. My paper attempts to understand why this is and suggest what might might be done:

Ultimately, the paper – and the wider conference stream – aimed to kick-start a debate about the role technology plays (and the potential it possesses) in political resistance and social struggles as well as to stimulate renewed theoretical as well as practical engagements with the topic. What this might look like, I’m not entirely sure yet – although I’m fairly soundly convinced it will need to include a greater level of scholarly and activist reflection and praxis – but I’d love to hear any suggestions.

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Anarchism and social technology: conference panel

08/30/2012 by 1 Comment

I’m going to be facilitating a panel on anarchism and social technology at this year’s Anarchist Studies Network conference in Loughborough next week. You can read the abstracts below.

There are a couple of really interesting papers up for presentation that seek to account for the social changes we’re witnessing around the globe. Both papers draw on some really interesting and novel theoretical approaches to social media and technology that – in the true ethos of the internet – hack existing theories to account for contemporary radical projects or event. For example, Aaron Peters takes Paolo Virno‘s ‘Soviets of the Multitude‘ – an extremely far-sighted perspective that appropriates Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’ and uses it to account for the decentralised and autonomous techno-social productivity that we’re witnessing with the social web. Thomas Swann, meanwhile, draws on (the often maligned) cybernetic theory to account for the decentralised organising seen during last year’s riots.

Aside from facilitating, I want to use my time to give a short overview of what has been described as the “ambivalent relationship” between anarchism (and anarchists) (Gordon, 2008). This relationship appeared to be manifest when trying to generate interest in this conference panel. Despite the organisers citing the #Occupy and Arab Spring movements as powerful, contemporary anti-authoritarian forces rising from the grass-roots it has not been easy to identify researchers or practitioners to take part.

I plan to address this issue and hopefully put it into some context before attempting to briefly point a way out of the ambivalence!

Maybe see you there :)

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Assemblages of Resistance: Network Politics paper (finally)

02/17/2012 by Leave a Comment

Dan McQuillan and I presented a paper at Anglia Ruskin’s Network Politics’ conference in Cambridge last May.

I’ve been meaning to sort out getting this paper up for a while but never really found the time to edit/tweak/revise it so just figured I’d post it anyway!

Assemblages of Resistance: new media, old technology and the Egyptian Uprising

It’s very image-led so I heartily recommend consulting the slide notes or this blog post while you review.

In summary, we were interested in the notion of assemblages that draw together material objects/forces as well as communicative components in a fluid network. Our argument addressed the conference’s question of whether the emergence of distinct, proprietary platforms (e.g. Facebook; apps; etc) are undermining the web’s political potential.

We believed that assemblages provide a conceptual framework for accounting for radical ways to circumvent and route around attempts to lock down the web as a networked space. Perhaps more radically, we asserted that the web isn’t just an immaterial networked space but that it’s also imbued with physical effects – from technological infrastructure, hardware to human capacity and material resources.

Articulating this hypothesis we used some good empirical data and insights that Dan had gathered from the Egyptian #jan25 uprising and internet shutdown. We tried to highlight how multiple components – people, technology (crucially, both ‘new media’ such as twitter as well as old media such as ham radio, faxes, etc) and material objects (rocks; lamposts; space; etc) – were assembled to act as a radical, revolutionary assemblage – or more accurately, a network of assemblages.

Importantly, such assemblages contain within them – and exude – a radical potential. This radical potential is firstly that assemblages resist attempts to curtail them (e.g. the Internet shut-down didn’t stop the revolution, merely prompted different arrangements of components within the assemblage(s)) and secondly, that as the effects of fluid (re)assembling of multiple material and immaterial components are based on their capacity to become something when combined with other elements in the assemblage the outcome can never be known beforehand, thus making attempts to predict and put a stop to the revolution near impossible. Still with me?

Finally, we seek to learn from the Egyptian Uprising case study and articulate a way of using assemblages not only as a conceptual framework, but as a pedagogical one too. We do this by turning to the pedagogy of Paulo Freire who argued for a praxis-based learning rooted in experimentalism – the sought we identified being assembled in Tahrir Square. Dan brings this point to life using other examples he has been involved in, such as Social Innovation Camp and The Good Gym, and demonstrates how such approaches not only offer a radical resistance to authoritarian ways of thinking and doing, but also provide a productive route out of the totalising and seemingly inescapable spaces and practices – both in Egypt and the UK.

At least, that’s how I remember the paper coming together. It might have been nothing like that. Why not take a look at the Slideshare above and find out! You can find the original abstract here to make sure I’m fibbing :)

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