Tag: Digital Resistance

  • An interview with Stand Up magazine about social media and fragile politics

    Social media is often accused of being an echo chamber, but has it played a role in empowering marginalised people and elevating their voices? It has and it’s important that we don’t lose sight of this when we focus on the problems which social media is creating for politics. In recent years, cyber-utopianism has been […]

  • Liberation and coercion

    There should be a catchy phrase for this phenomenon. It’s important to understand in its own terms but contrasting emphasis on each pole tend to divert scholarly debates into tedious dichotomies that obscure the underlying reality. From loc 3411 of The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin: Often seemingly opposing outcomes are bound together so that […]

  • The Pseudo-Catharsis of Social Media

    From Rethinking Social Exclusion, by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, pg 73: Political protests these days are taken not as an indication that something is going wrong and that a significant number of the population are dissatisfied with the nation’s political leadership. Rather, they seem to indicate that a healthy and vibrant democracy is in […]

  • Fragile movements and their political cultures 

    From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, loc 85-94: From the alter-globalisation struggles of the late 1990s, through the antiwar and ecological coalitions of the early 2000s, and into the new student uprisings and Occupy movements since 2008, a common pattern emerges: resistance struggles rise rapidly, mobilise increasingly large numbers of people, […]

  • The Return of the Riot

    From Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot pg 2. He argues that the return of the riot reverses a long term trend observed by Charles Tilley, in which the riot had given way to the strike as the foremost tactic in socially available repertoires of contention: As the overdeveloped nations have entered into sustained, if uneven, […]

  • The Moral Reasoning of Edward Snowden

    I’m reading Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide and thought these statements from Edward Snowden were powerful: "I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light." – @Snowden — Mark Carrigan (@mark_carrigan) June 2, 2016 "Leadership is about acting first and serving as an example for others, not waiting for […]