Editorial

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
Introduction: ‘We New Media Technologies
2014, Vol. 20(4) 377–386
are the uninvited’ ª The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856514542074
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Carolyn Guertin
York University, Canada

Angi Buettner
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

New media technologies, especially mobile technologies, have come to the fore in the public
eye on the recent wave of global protests. However, it is not the technologies themselves that
have enabled the uprisings from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street Movement to
#YoSoy132; it is the new algorithms, organizational structures, and unique gatherings that have
given rise to technological innovation and the repurposing of existing tools. John Postill, in this
special issue of Convergence, calls this phenomenon ‘protest formulas’: ‘the unique compound
of societal forces [ . . . ] that characterizes each protest movement’. Entirely organic structures,
these new protest formulas morph, realign, and reconstitute in each context through their
specific constellation of actors. The scope of the protests and their technological contexts
addressed in this issue’s articles reveals the utter fluidity and adaptability of protest in the
networked world of the 21st century.
The ‘global crowd’, as Susan Buck-Morss (2014) calls it, and countercultural insurgency sup-
ported by independent and social media have played a pivotal role in political change at least since
the arrival of accessible networked communication. When the Canadian anticapitalist magazine
Adbusters posted a call to arms on its blog on July 13, 2011, with the creation of the hashtag #occu-
pywallstreet, Adbusters’ founder Kalle Lasn called on the magazine’s network to implement what
he called a ‘Shift in Revolutionary Tactics’. Inspired by the radical revolt in Spain with the Indig-
nados and in Egypt with the Arab Spring, he invoked protestors to occupy that soon-to-be-famous
square at the center of the financial world. Within 2 weeks, the call had gone viral and the revo-
lution began in Zuccotti Park on September 17. The origin of the revolution and the spirit at its
heart, however, originated not from the Middle East or from Spain but from Mexico from contem-
porary protest’s spiritual progenitors, the Zapatistas. The media-savvy tactics the Mayan Zapatistas
initiated on January 1, 1994, in protest of North American Free Trade Agreement were at that time
a revolutionary form of protest that sought not to pull down regimes but to restore a voice and dig-
nity to a people. These new methods have been powerfully influential. In her debates piece in this

Corresponding author:
Carolyn Guertin, York University, Augmented Reality Lab, c=o 900 Queen Street West, #202, Toronto, ON M6J 1G6,
Canada.
Email: carolyn.guertin@gmail.com
378 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20(4)

issue, ‘Networks, Insurgencies, and Prefigurative Politics in a Cycle of Global Indignation’, Rovira
Sancho observes that Benjamı́n Arditi ‘calls these movements ‘‘insurgencies,’’ that is, political
processes that abandon the ‘‘grammar of emancipation’’ as a predetermined script: ‘‘Insurgencies
are more about opening up possibilities by challenging our political imaginaries and cognitive
maps than about designing the new order’’ (Arditi, 2012: 2)’.
The insurgents enlist powerful tools in their service. The philosophy and practice of these toe-
in-the-door insurgencies is a new 21st-century transnational Zapatismo that has spilled with such
energy into squares around the world:
[that] has embraced indigenous rights and cultural diversity as well as antiglobalization and anticapi-
talist protests. . . . Rather than emphasizing class struggle they stress the need for broad coalitions and
grassroots movements ([what’s known as] globalization ‘from below’) to oppose the neoliberal world
order. Likewise, rather than furthering their objectives through armed conflict they have concentrated
their strategy and discourse on the international media (being dubbed the first ‘virtual guerrilla’ move-
ment in the world). (González, 2003)

The Zapatistas’ tactics have been admired and imitated by protest organizers: ‘transnational
Zapatismo has generated new political imaginations and political subjectivities, and a narrative
framework for ‘radical expressions of political possibility’ (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 697).
These narrative frameworks are a technology that create an imaginational space, a space which
operates through viral elements such as hashtags, the use and subversion of memes, and the circu-
lation of socially broadcast links, photographs and videos as vehicles to carry ideas and seed the
imagination of global indignation.
Memes encapsulate complex ideas and ideologies in a form that is easy to swallow, imitate, and
spread; some of the most influential include ‘fair trade’, ‘Too Big To Fail’, ‘the 99% percent’,
‘Strike Debt’, ‘Idle No More’, and ‘#bringbackourgirls’. They are story-based strategies that work
to inform and change the political conversation. Changing the conversation has been the great vic-
tory of the 21st-century protest, especially in Mexico, Spain, the Arab world, and in the camps of
the Occupy Movement. In Re: Imagining Change, David Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (2010:
525) argue that ‘memes are an analytical tool for understanding corporate power, globalization,
propaganda and misinformation’. Memes also spawn new narratives. The sincerest form of flattery
in memetics is imitation, and that is what the Zapatista ‘movement of movements’ has generated. It
has birthed the self-replication of story narratives, ‘collectives of collectives’ (Stringer, 2013), and
protests all over the world. The #occupy movement invites people to intervene through direct
action as a means of telling their own stories. The #occupy movement spreads like a virus across
a wide variety of groups and demographics and encourages people to imitate and enhance these
strategies. It encourages them to intervene at a local level through direct action as a means of tell-
ing their own stories about the fallout of globalization ‘from below’ (as Raul Zibechi calls it) in
their own Liberty Plaza or Independence Square. ‘Unlike traditional labor and socialist move-
ments, these new political actors do not merely counteract dominant global networks; they are
building a new politics of autonomy and self-management rooted in local territories and identities’
(Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 481–486). These insurgents simultaneously ‘reach . . . out horizon-
tally across diversity, difference’, technologies ‘and geographic space to develop new forms of
regional and transnational coordination’ (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 481–486). One of the most
tangible measures of the movement’s success may be the surprise bestseller of 2014, French econ-
omist’s Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It confirms the movement’s narra-
tive hook that capitalism is sinking under the weight of rising inequality on the basis of a broad

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range of evidence. This book is selling on its own merits to be sure, but the sheer volume of people
who are reading it and talking about it can be attributed to the fact that Occupy made these issues
news in the first place. As Rovira Sancho says, ‘These events are necessarily episodic, just as pol-
itics understood as the interruption of normality is, but they never vanish ‘‘without a trace’’ (Arditi,
2012: 159)’.
These locally situated yet global networks are collaborative and leaderless and often put forward
indigenous or feminist strategies to achieve their ends. The ‘Idle No More’ movement and ‘Blue Dot’
meme that have emerged out of indigenous culture in Canada, and Occupy protest camps have a
genealogy in second-wave feminist activism like the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.
These networks are successful because they are complex and operate in three dimensions (Juris,
2008; Rovira Sancho, this issue): the network is a relaxed form of organization across groups.
Communication in the form of ‘semiotic flows on the net does not make a revolution, but it helps
any revolution to become horizontal and communicate with its participants and the outside world’
(Rovira Sancho, this issue). The network is an ideal structure for both horizontal and democratic rela-
tionships. Guiomar Rovira Sancho discusses this in this issue, as do Megan Boler, Averie Macdo-
nald, Christina Nitsou, and Anne Harris in ‘Connective Labor and Social Media: Women’s Key
Roles in the ‘‘Leaderless’’ Movement of Occupy Wall Street’. Horizontalism has its origins in
the women’s movement, but we can see the same tactics employed in indigenous movements.
This is what critics have called the Occupy Movements’ failure, as Brian Creech points out in
his article ‘Digital Representation and Occupy Wall Street’s Challenge to Political Subjectivity’.
It is in ‘the absence of a centralized leadership group’, Boler et al. say, that ‘[t]he plurality of
Occupy messages’ prohibit ‘traditional media commentators from pursuing singular and simplis-
tic sound bytes’ thereby defying ‘mainstream conceptions of what counts as politics’. The med-
ia’s refrain ‘What does Occupy want?’, discussed by Boler et al., sets that movement in a
specifically gendered historical context, echoing Sigmund Freud’s famous remark, and making
explicit the possibility for new configurations of actors. Boler and her coauthors propose a hid-
den world of women’s ‘connective labor’ represented in the constellations of roles they define as
documentarians, connectors, and administrators. John Postill also proposes a trinity in his article,
‘Freedom technologists and the new protest movements: a theory of protest formulas’. The actors
he identifies and analyses are hackers and geeks, tech lawyers, and social media journalists. It is
in these new social groupings and subject positions that we see the power that comes through
changing the narrative. As Janet M. Conway (2013) argues in her book Edges of Global Justice,
social movements are knowledge producers. The world that persists after the global financial cri-
sis and increasingly corporatized mass media is all too often in the business of disinformation
rather than education. These new narratives and occupations (both personal and political) offer
us the potential to rewrite our own stories.
As Carolyn Guertin has explored in her book on activist art practices, Digital Prohibition,
women have long been agitators and the organizers of information networks. For example, long
before the arrival of a so-called Twitter Revolution in Iran in 2009, there was Z-Netz and
Chernobyl in 1985. Z-Netz was a feminist Bulletin Board out of Germany. It was born because
of the nuclear meltdown, and because male bulletin board administrators branded the very act
of publicizing the disaster as ‘terrorism’. Pioneering computer artist and activist Rena Tangens
found her own voice and started her own online form to inform the world of this as yet
unreported tragedy (see Waltz, 2005).
A few years later, native women increasingly became active in the United Nations and in the
global justice movement. The IV World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 was:

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a watershed for Indigenous women as they began to develop gender and ethnic perspectives on Indi-
genous and women’s struggles. The resulting Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women became the
basis for subsequent demands at the global level. (Escárcega, 2013: 2636–2639)

Grassroots electronic media also plugged in many other women’s organizations in the 1990s,
including Barbara Ann O’Leary’s Virtual Sisterhood, which set out to add grassroots activism
to the UN Agenda.
The Acteal Massacre of Zapatista children, women, and men in Mexico in 1997 fostered
another activist form: hacktivism. The term was coined in 1998 to describe an emerging hybrid
practice that united the best attributes of peaceful social protest: activism and tech-savvy online
civil disobedience (often called hackerism). One of hacktivism’s trademark features is its uncon-
tainability. It spills out into the world in the form of political protest, such as at World Trade Orga-
nization and G8 events, in books, pamphlets, net.art, and, not least, performance art. It combines
bodies and media-based dissent with real-time material concerns. Hacktivism is a narratological
disturbance in the fabric of an event or place that starts a conversation and builds a community.
Without protesting human bodies, there is no event. Feminists realized this a long time ago.
Hacktivism was first practiced by Critical Art Ensemble member and software engineer Carmin
Karasic. She was so horrified by the Acteal Massacre – 45 Zapatistas died at the hands of the
Mexican government – that she set out to create a Web interface that would perform political
protest as an aesthetic act. Along with Ricardo Domı́nguez and two others, she formed the
Electronic Disturbance Theatre. A progenitor of the Blocked Web and Interactive Mass Grave
Map in the present-day Turkey discussed in Sarah Harris’s article ‘Networked Erasure: Visualizing
Information Censorship in Turkey’ (which will be published in the forthcoming May 2015 issue of
Convergence), the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s civil disobedience engine provided not infor-
mation, but the ability to act on one’s conviction with a group of like-minded people. This engine,
FloodNet, filled browser pages with the names of the dead and required a community to begin
flooding to temporarily shut down government servers and return pointed error messages. In
2009 (from June 13 to June 21), Karasic reinvented this engine and used it in Iran for 8 days as
a tactical media disturbance to target Iranian government sites (Global Electronic Sit-In, 2009).
Protesting in the streets is not stopping, no matter how many squares are ‘systematically and forcibly
dismantled by the state’ (Escárcega, 2013: 1792). As the memes of the revolution spread, we have seen
‘a proliferation of hybridized actions that involve a multiplicity of tactics, combining actions on the
street and actions in cyberspace’ with a new species of social networks and modes of public dis-
obedience (Raley, 2009: 44). While social media dates back to the arrival of the Web 2.0 revolution in
user-generated culture, it does have both low-tech and high-tech antecedents. There are a number of
influential social media antecedents, which Rovira Sancho discusses in her article, and Indymedia is
among the most influential. Indymedia was a photo- and video-sharing, open-source publishing,
peer-2-peer (p2p) network. Advocating with slogans such as ‘be the media’ and ‘everyone is a reporter’,
Indymedia ‘began as a way for social movements to tell their own stories, but it inadvertently served as a
training ground for a new generation of [passionate, hands-on] journalists’ (Stringer, 2013: 5922–
5925). Indymedia was ‘conjured by Zapatista dreams’ according to Tess Stringer, ‘and [was] the brain-
child of several alternative media groups . . . in a Seattle storefront’; it enabled ‘grassroots firsthand
coverage of those now historic events’ known as the Battle of Seattle (Stringer, 2013: 5936–5940).
Indymedia traces its roots to the Zapatista encuentros (gatherings) in Chiapas, Mexico. There are three
main reasons for this. First, the Zapatistas, by pioneering the rapid diffusion of news and ideology
through Internet-based e-mail listservs, bulletin boards, and activist websites, were able to build a

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transnational solidarity network and could sound the alarm, and mobilize international assistance
rapidly when they encountered state repression. (2013: 5976–5979)

Secondly, as Stringer (2013: 5976) points out, the Zapatistas’ struggle was ‘a central pillar’ of
the global justice movement that sought ‘resistance to neo-liberal capitalism’. And, most
importantly:
the Zapatistas envisioned an international activist communications network as an alternative to a
corporate-dominated media landscape. They communicated this directly to the very activists who
would go on to form the first IMC in Seattle through a videotaped message from the Zapatista
spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos at the Freeing the Media Teach-in in 1997 (Stringer, 2013:
5976–5983).

Marcos said at that event, ‘there is a third option that is neither conformity, nor skepticism,
nor distrust: that is to construct a different happening – to have a critical world view and to
become interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit every corner of this
world’ (Stringer, 2013: 5983).
With this genealogy, Indymedia sprang to life with its first post. It reads:
The resistance is global . . . [,] a trans-pacific collaboration has brought this website into existence. The
web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding
and some cheap equipment, we can set up a live automated website that rivals the corporates. Prepare to
be swamped by the tide of activist media makers on the ground in Seattle and around the world, telling
the real story behind the World Trade Agreement. (Stringer, 2013: 5966–5971)

Providing an upload point, Indymedia enabled a new kind of journalism and information sharing
that is so different from the spyware that commercial social media technologies like Facebook were
later designed to be, as Christian Fuchs (2009) has explored at length.1 As next generation journal-
ists, the Indymedia makers in Seattle wore masks, committed to open software and sharing practices,
and sought to protect their own and others’ privacy, just as Anonymous and other protestors who
came after them would. ‘Indymedia is much more than the content it produces or a political critique
or an intervention; it is a transnational social experiment in building alternatives’ (Stringer, 2013:
6053–6054). Eva Giraud explores the legacy, ongoing practices, and implications of this alternative
experiment in her article in this issue, ‘Has Radical-Participatory Online Media Really ‘‘Failed’’?:
Indymedia and its legacies’. It is the pervasiveness of what we are calling transnational Zapatismo
that is explored by the authors in this special issue of Convergence, and that is why this issue is book-
ended by Rovira Sancho’s discussion of a global cycle (that began with the Zapatistas) and Gómez
Garcı́a and Treré’s exploration of its continuation in the #YoSoy132 movement. The meeting of
connectedness and personal expression is key to the new global cycle. Rovira Sancho says,
This form of ‘self-politics’ of the connected multitudes is linked to what Manuel Castells (2009) calls
‘mass self-communication’: the possibility that people be producers/receivers of their own messages
and can recombine them, remixing codes and formats, and diversifying and multiplying the points
of entry in the communication process. Being a node in the network is to exist inseparably from others
and makes evident the impossibility of closing the system. (Rovira, this issue)

The system is pried open by injecting physical bodies and personal narratives into the mix. Bod-
ies and stories unite two of the most compelling threads running through the new global Zapatismo
zeitgeist. These are the use of masks and the use of social networking technologies by activists.

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Masks are ‘a symbol of resistance’ ranging from ‘the Zapatista pasamontañas (ski masks)’ to the
balaclavas of Pussy Riot to the Guy Fawkes masks of Anonymous. See but don’t be seen is the
philosophy; the mask also ‘foregrounds a collective rather than an individual identity’ (Stringer,
2013: 6116–6118). Therefore, as Rodrigo Gómez Garcı́a and Emiliano Treré show in their article,
‘#Yosoy132 Movement and the struggle for media democratization in Mexico’, it is significant
that students in the Mexican protest around the 2012 election refuse masks, insisting instead on
both collective and authentic individual identities. Similarly, as Camilla M Reestorff discusses
in ‘Mediatised affective activism: The activist imaginary and the topless body in the Femen move-
ment’, the Femen movement blinds us to the individual by turning nakedness into a rhetorical tool
and mediatized weapon, viralized through cameras and staged media events. These masking/
unmasking dialectics are powerful. Witness how the Pussy Riot arrests are always accompanied
by forcible removal of their balaclavas. As the Zapatistas have explained, ‘We were invisible and
forgotten in Chiapas, but when the Zapatistas put on masks, all of a sudden everyone could see us’
(Stringer, 2013: 6119–6120).
Masks are not the only tools of visibility. Modes of personal expression include documentation,
reportage, collective information sharing, monitoring, and storytelling, and they are all part of the
fabric of the movement. As Brian Creech observes in this issue of Convergence:
The aggregate collection of documents from the movement allowed sympathizers to argue that the
physical phenomena of the movement existed as evidence of democratic ideals in action, as if these
values can in fact become empirically observed once they emerge, as captured by the following state-
ment: ‘This is a healthy sign for our nation because it dramatizes that the people aren’t powerless in the
face of extreme inequality’ [emphasis added]. (Collins, April 2, 2012)

In the style of the Take Back the Night Marches that second-wave feminists organized, taking
back the square is an act of ownership that is newsworthy but refuses easy spectatorship by the
media. In fact, this seems to be a large part of the mainstream media’s frustration with contempo-
rary protest. There are many stories, but no simple, reducible, overarching narrative.
Insurgencies are in opposition to grand narratives in principle. These crystallizing ‘Indigenous
movements challenge and delegitimize the modern dichotomy of ‘‘civilization’’ versus ‘‘barbar-
ism’’’; they shock us out of known paradigms, and, by troubling ‘this relationship’ between the
so-called civilized and the barbaric, the inclusion of indigenous voices ‘becomes an important con-
dition for a project of decolonization’ (Escárcega, 2013: 2568–2569). While arguably consequen-
tial documents like the ‘Declaration of the Occupation of New York City’ and the ‘Global
Democracy Manifesto’ serve their purposes by attracting large numbers of followers in a cause (the
latter had academic ‘celebrity’ names attached to it as well), they do not tend to critique their own
position. The notion of ‘global democracy’ and the even thornier notion of ‘global citizenship’ are
intensely problematic. Situated in a particular time and place such manifestos also do not ask ques-
tions about different kinds of globalization. What is important is that they start a debate. In time,
#occupywallstreet too turned its eyes back on itself. It grew until it began to critique colonialist
practices and the ‘occupation’ of Wall Street (as originally native land, too) with the movement’s
own fraught terminology. As a movement of movements, Occupy in turn births new movements,
including Idle No More and the Blue Dot meme.
In a barrage of e-mails in December 2012, three indigenous and one white woman started Idle
No More in Canada. Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson, and Sheelah McLean decided
to be ‘Idle No More’, after the Canadian Government introduced a bill attacking autonomy in
native land management on reservations, changing land rights for indigenes, removing protection

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for water, and weakening environmental laws. Their Facebook page was designed ‘to brainstorm
ideas and a plan for action. Gordon named the page ‘‘Idle No More’’ as a reminder ‘‘to get off the
couch and start working’’’ (Caven, 2013). The movement has grassroots, teach-ins, a twitter hash-
tag, and rallies and protests across the Canadian prairies:
Speaking to a reporter at one such rally, Wilson . . . said, ‘We are trying to help people get their voices
back so that we can make more change and we are able to have more of a First Nations voice . . . not
just a First Nations, but an Indigenous voice, and not just an Indigenous voice but a grassroots voice,
because it affects us all.’ And it does affect us all, as it does the environment. (Caven, 2013)

Idle No More uses social technologies to issue ‘a call for renewal of the Indigenous identities
and lifeways. The leaders and spokespersons of the movement have no hesitation linking the polit-
ical to the personal, as the personal is very much a part of the movement’ (Caven, 2013). When
Chief Teresa Spence spent 44 days on hunger strike in protest to gain an audience with the Cana-
dian prime minister (PM, who never came), it demonstrates nevertheless that Idle No More is
clearly part of the new story of global outrage. Idle No More went viral and drew in indigenous
people from all over the world. It led to a global day of action on February 28, 2013, and to peace-
ful roundhouse demonstrations on the front lawns of all of the parliaments in Canada.
Ongoing threats to indigenous autonomy in Canada by the federal government resulted in a
meeting in February 2014 where the attendees were divided into two groups: the invited guests
received yellow dots and the rest were issued blue dots and segregated in a separate room away
from the PM. Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began to arrest the blue dotted members of
the crowd. What does the blue dot mean? According to Christi Belcourt:
The blue dot signifies all of us who care, and speak out and risk arrest. It signifies the ‘uninvited’
among us who are treated as ‘less than’ by child care systems, justice systems, or health care systems.
It signifies all of us who don’t get a voice at the table with Atleo or the PM or anyone else who has the
power to mark their ‘X’ and sign away our rights. Those blue dots they made people wear were not
necessary. They could have kept the yellow ones for ‘invited guests’ and all others without, so why
did they insist people wore blue dots? Why? Twila Singer was told to wear a blue dot, then she was
kicked out for ‘tweeting’ when she didn’t even have a phone with her. She had previously protested.
(INM Collective, 2014)

This isn’t the first time that a right-wing regime has color-coded people’s lapels. This is why
Christi Belcourt started her blue dot meme under the slogan ‘We are the Uninvited’. This resonates
across racial, gender, and class lines, and in this time of #occupation ‘from below’ it is key that the
group with the most powerful narrative will be the most successful withstanding the encroach-
ments of governments and capitalist organizations around the world. Powerful metaphors like the
blue dot and slogans like ‘We Are the Uninvited’ resonate globally in a way that the news of a few
arrests at a political event never would.
The response of nonnatives to these movements has been overwhelming with even Martin Lukacs
in The Guardian saying, ‘First Nation’s Peoples – and the decision of Canadians to stand alongside
them – will determine the fate of the planet’ (Lukacs, 2013). Many politically marginalized groups
have not been so lucky, but new technologies and the technology of storytelling allow a greater, more
flexible perspective. As Sarah K Harris discusses in her article in the forthcoming May 2015 issue of
Convergence, new technologies enable new perspectives, and new perspectives enable us to see
differently. In her study of massacres in Turkey, she discovers that a satellite perspective has a
‘unique capacity’; it ‘sustain[s] a sense of the complexity of a ground conflict, rather than fixing

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knowledge about it’. She demonstrates that using the satellites for close-ups is in fact far less
effective than using it for mapping the big picture for, as Lisa Parks has discussed, ‘combining it with
alternative viewpoints that forgo close-ups on the victim’s body or face – can introduce a new
appreciation for the complexities of the issue (251–252)’ (Harris, forthcoming May 2015 issue).
In a similar way, at the Battle of Seattle, Indymedia enabled a new perspective. New technologies
helped protestors organize and evade police. In the years since, social media has become a
necessary part of avoiding the surveillance nets of high-tech militarized police units. Documen-
tation is an important part of the protest – hence its increasing criminalization as laws are rewrit-
ten in the United States and elsewhere to suppress protest. During the Arabian Spring, protestors
worked with journalist hackers to construct ‘dissemination strategies’ for metadata-rich informa-
tion that is uploaded through Bambuser and other livestream portals (Ulbricht, 2012). When
Internet access is shut down, as it invariably eventually is, low-tech couriers known as the Snea-
ker.net mobilize into action by running the information to the nearer available access point
(Ulbricht, 2012). As the Arab Spring started its cascade effect and more and more cities saw
uprisings, police started to infiltrate social media to spy on organizers and to gain an inside track
on events. Protestors had to change tactics. They began to step out of their designated role as
consumers and spectators and to become makers. Brian Creech observes that the uniqueness
of these 21st-century protest movements is that ‘there was not a singular occupier, but a strategy
of occupation abetted by digital technologies’.
The Occupy Movement has been very active in creating new apps and protective software to
enable ‘The Uninvited’ to remain connected, protected, and masked. Open Street Map gives a
user privacy as well as control over one’s own data and who shares it – as long as no one talks
to the user’s phone company. Safer p2p networks that have emerged include Occupy.here,
Serval Rhizome Retriever, and the geolocative chat room generator Geolocha. Monitoring
technologies that control overzealous police include Cop Recorder (which has its own server)
and Vibe, a time- and space-based microblogging software that enables protestors to post infor-
mation on the fly while masking the poster’s location. TheGlobalSquare is a more radical
undertaking and collective along the lines of Anonymous. It seeks to ‘perpetuate the creative
and cooperative spirit of the occupations and transform them into lasting forms of social orga-
nization’. Designed as a ‘meshnet,’ it styles itself as an alternative, decentralized Internet that is
supposed to be uncensorable (Roos, 2011). Such attempts to redefine public and private space
are essential in a time when even copyright can become mobilized as a weapon to censor and
punish personal expression and information sharing in a digital age (cf. Guertin, 2012). Of
course, as the Zapatistas discovered, anonymity and adaptability are crucial to self-defense, pro-
test and reform, and so if in doubt protestors do go no-tech – like the Sneaker.net – to ensure
their safety when necessary. As a result, if mobile media and surveillance are part of the pic-
ture, so are the notably low-tech and do it yourself aspects of global protest. Ephemera ranging
from handmade posters and signs, human microphones, drumming circles to communal libraries
have all been very much in evidence.
Indignados, Arab Spring, #Occupy, The 99%, Idle No More, #Upsettler, GlobalNoise, Strike
Debt, and The Uninvited are just some of the new terms to emerge from the global mass protests of
the last few years. They are part of a sea change in global indignation that is using digital media as
tools of organization, activism, and communication. These terms mark only one small part of a much
larger shift in media production and distribution that is the result of the marriage of global com-
munities, radical social organizations, and digital media ‘produced interculturally in multiple places
and as part of ongoing struggles at multiple levels – local, national, regional, and international’

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(Escárcega, 2013: 2611–2615). What we are seeing in a time when Western democracies are
becoming oligarchies is the public pushing back through the rise of maker culture as an integral
strategy of protest. The cornerstone of that making is in changing the stories we have told ourselves
for so long and via those stories reinventing ourselves. As new narratives and organizational
structures of protest are born, so too are new kinds of storytellers. It is those storytellers who just may
possess the power to answer Mackenzie Wark’s question ‘what if people came together and found a
way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world?’ (Creech,
this issue).

Note
1. See Netchitailova (2012) for a nuanced discussion of the complexities of the issues of surveillance and
why people are willing to trade some aspects of their freedom for the affordances of networking. Privacy
and the public sphere have changed in a networked age: ‘Capitalism is based on the idea that the private
sphere should be separate from the public sphere, where the individual should in principle be able to
enjoy autonomy and anonymity. The notion of privacy under capitalism is linked to the freedom of pri-
vate ownership. It is expected that individuals should enjoy some privacy in their private lives. However,
in order to function, capitalism exercises surveillance over individuals, with the aim to have as much
information as possible over workers and consumers to control them and encourage them for further con-
sumption. Therefore, in the current age of capitalism, the idea of privacy is undermined by surveillance
(Fuchs, 2011)’ (Netchitailova, 2012: 684).

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Author biographies
Carolyn Guertin is an established digital media scholar–practitioner. She is a Senior Researcher in the
Augmented Reality Lab at York University in Toronto and a faculty member at Transart Institute in Berlin.
She is the author of Digital Prohibition: Piracy and authorship in new media art (2012). She specializes in
digital creative practice, global digital cultural studies, emerging technologies, and media production. In
2013, she was awarded the inaugural Outstanding Early Career Award from the Canadian Society for Digi-
tal Humanities. She is currently working on a mobile fiction prototype called Wandering Meimei/Meimei
Liu Lang Ji about globalization and Chinese factory girls.
Angi Buettner is a Senior Lecturer in media studies at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Her research interests are in the areas of new media, cultural and media theory, and environmental commu-
nication. Her research centers on media and the public sphere. Her work focuses on the interaction between
media and environmental institutions, the media and communication processes that sustain environmental
debate, and the influence of ecological debates on the development of the media and media theory. She is the
author of Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe: The Cultural Politics of Seeing (2011) and coauthor
of Understanding Media Studies (2010).

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