Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into New Media

Technologies
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Networks, insurgencies, and prefigurative politics: A cycle of global indignation

Guiomar Rovira Sancho
Convergence published online 15 July 2014
DOI: 10.1177/1354856514541743

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Debate

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
Networks, insurgencies, New Media Technologies
1–15
and prefigurative politics: ª The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856514541743
con.sagepub.com
indignation

Guiomar Rovira Sancho

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico

Abstract
E-mail and Web pages made it possible to generate a space for global mobilization against the
repression of the Zapatista indigenous rebels in the 1990s. The global justice movement that
started in Seattle in 1999 extended global networks to organize action. In recent years, with the
development of what has been called ‘Web 2.0’, spontaneous mass mobilizations emerged in
large cities. These struggles are specific to each country and context; however, in all cases, they
create shared spaces both in the physical world and in the networks, connecting the streets to
the global flow of indignation. The intricate urban and digital spatiality of these insurgencies
brings a demand for democracy that goes beyond national identities, through forms of protest
that are more prefigurative than programmatic.

Keywords
Hacktivism, insurgencies, Internet, networks, prefigurative politics, urban commons

In 2011, what could be considered a new cycle of protests1 appeared worldwide, with common
generational and communication elements: The citizens’ revolutions against dictatorial regimes
in the Arab world would be followed by mobilizations in Greece, in Portugal, the Indignados in
Spain, the Occupy movements in the United States, and Mexico’s #YoSoy132 in 2012 and by the
rebellion in Turkey against the destruction of Gezi Park in 2013; the marches in Brazil on the issue
of public transportation, and the demonstrations in South Korea against electoral irregularities.
These hybrid spaces of mobilization in the streets and on the digital networks bring to light a
distributed politics within the reach of all, invoking an idea of democracy as a translocal demand,

Corresponding author:
Guiomar Rovira Sancho, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Carlos Lazo 218, int 2, Col. M.Hidalgo, cp. 14250, Mexico
City, Mexico.
Email: ondina_peraire@yahoo.com

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2 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

questioning national institutions but on a global stage. As Susan Buck-Morss states, it is the rise of
a ‘global crowd’ (2014).
It is the very extension of neoliberal capitalism on a world scale that has fostered this
globalization of the flows of power in which national governments demonstrate their inability to
negotiate between increasingly elites and more and more precarious citizens. In turn, trans-
nationalization in the sphere of the cultural industries, communications, and technology has fos-
tered the possibility of finding common languages where critical publics are engendered beyond
national borders and can communicate with each other. Just as Fernández et al. (2012: 8) state:
Each form of resistance is a stimulus. They disseminate and readapt in seemingly dissociated contexts.
And they do it in order to displace the center of the movement from one stage to another on a nearly
daily basis: today, it is Egypt, tomorrow any city in the US, the day after, Athens.

The streets and/or the semiotic struggle

Over the last two decades, social movements have gained experience in linking up networks as
well as in telling similar stories about the very impact of their collective action. One of the
inaugural cases of the use of the Internet for a social cause was the spontaneous formation of an
international network of solidarity with the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which burst
onto the scene in Chiapas, Mexico, on January 1, 1994. At that time, cyberspace was still a virgin
territory – for example, the Mexican government did not set up a Web site for the president’s
office until September 1996 – and activists around the world put together a network that gave
constant visibility to the defense of the rebel indigenous communities and exhibited significant
capability for decentralized action (for a detailed analysis, see Rovira, 2009).
By 1999, when the antiglobalization or global justice movement emerged in Seattle opposing
the World Trade Organization, the networks had already matured. Independent press and video
communicators created an information center, the Independent Media Center, or Indymedia,
with an online virtual platform that would later be replicated in hundreds of places around the
world. The ‘Indymedia Big Bang’ was the first event in an ‘epochal change in the form of public
action and its documentation’ (Halleck, 2002). Active, software created in Australia by Matthew
Arnison and expanded by other technologists, made it possible for anyone to electronically
transmit not only texts but photos, video footage, and audio files. As a grassroots tool for social
action, this early networked form of media activism shifted the relationship between social
movements and the communications media so dramatically that ‘Don’t hate the media; be the
media’ became one of its new slogans.
The potential of the Internet not only as a means of communication but as a space for
subversion-inspired artists and hackers right at the moment of the biggest upsurge of Zapatismo
and in close relation to the defense of the indigenous rebellion. As Ricardo Domı́nguez of Elec-
tronic Disturbance Theater explains:
In ’97 the Zapatista struggle took off again. We wanted to do something electronic, and the Anonymous
group in Italy got in touch and showed us the Netstrike they were already doing. We created FloodNet,
a script that sends petitions to any page you want. The first action brought together 18,000 people in
four hours. (Molist, 2002)

The idea that the Internet was not just a means of communication but a space for sociopolitical
disruption was part of the call to ‘electronic civil disobedience’ (Wray, 1998).

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Sancho 3

Activism on the net grew, then, and became a movement with three main strands: the movement
for free software and the quest for freedom of computer code (which developed Copy Left and
Creative Commons licenses); the struggle for the privacy of cypherpunks, from which projects like
Wikileaks sprang (who seek to make power visible and leak its secrets while they denounce cyber
surveillance against privacy); and the broad field of hacktivism (although groups like the Cult of
the Dead Cow, Chaos Computer Club, or the more recent Anonymous have been critiqued as less
politically correct for their interruption of Web sites which some see as attacking freedom on the
net). In the last 20 years, activism around technology has become a global movement, beginning
either with the first programmers who made the Internet and personal computing possible, or with
Richard Stallman’s (2010) launch and advocacy of free software. Cyber-activism proliferates all
over the world, advocating for open culture, accessibility, and Internet freedom. Free culture,
which has taken many forms, has like hacker ethics (Himanen, 2001) established a series of com-
mon practices and philosophies among inter-nauts, which paved the way for what could be termed
a global critical cyberculture.
Social movements at the start of the new century were energized by their network-savvy
approaches and powered – with the arrival of Web 2.0 – by a new infrastructure. The conclusions
of the December 2000 European Conference on Digital Countercultures, held in Paris, highlight
the number of groups dedicated to this new social networking:

Whether it is a matter of experiences linked to struggles or social movements (illegal immigrants,

unemployed and precarious workers, occupied social centers, etc.), of embryonic alternative networks
(Nodo 50, Sindimonio, ECN, Sherwood, Samizdat), of theoretical and cultural aggregations around
virtual spaces of development and reflection (Nettime, Syndicate), of on-line publishing initiatives
(Sherwood-Tribune, Agenzia di comminicazione territorial, Agencia in Permanent Construction,
Hacktivist News Service), or the effervescence around free software, a real richness has emerged from
practices, contents and analysis which we want to consider as a common and collective inheritance.
(ZeligConf, 2000)

The hacktivists at the conference saw the urgency of taking the potential of new media tech-
nologies forward:

We want to build a temporary autonomous zone of productive cooperation where we can converge
and combine cultures of activism and hacking, practices of counter-information and the productive
engineering of the free software, creativity of the actors of the social movements and that of the com-
munities of the networks. (ZeligConf, 2000)

However, there have been voices critical of such ‘communications euphoria’. One of the most
articulate activist groups on the net, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), have reflected on the dangers
of techno-utopian hype (including their own) and the need for a critical language in their essay
‘Utopian Promises – Net Realities’. As early as 1995, CAE pointed out that every time a new
medium appears it gives rise to an ‘electronic Utopia’: radio, for instance, and the potential
Bertolt Brecht saw in it as a medium for distributing information for cultural and humanitarian
purposes; or the video revolution and its promise to democratize access to television production.
But as they asserted:

Now that giddy euphoria is back again, arising in the wake of the personal computer revolution of the
early 80s, and with the completion of a ‘world-wide’ multi-directional distribution network. As to be
expected, utopian promises from the corporate spectacle machine drown the everyday lives of

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4 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

bureaucrats and technocrats around the first world, and once again there seems to be a general belief –
at least within technically adept populations – that this time the situation will be different. And to a
degree, this situation is different. There is an electronic free zone, but from CAE’s perspective, it is
only a modest development at best. By far the most significant use of the electronic apparatus is to keep
order, to replicate dominant pan-capitalist ideology, and to develop new markets. (CAE, 1995)

Social media’s promise of unfettered activist communication was very quickly replaced by the
reality of siloed communications and corporately owned data-gathering surveillance methodolo-
gies. José Luis Brea denounces techno-optimist euphoria as having been ‘nourished by vested
interests from all the industries of the social imaginary, from the mass media to advertising or
cinema’. This disguises the ‘awesome disproportion of the fight’. In effect, it would seem that
these media adversaries meet on equal footing, but Brea (1999) affirms that activism on the net
‘has no effect except to contribute to the benefit of the interests of the apparatuses of control, giv-
ing it a human, almost epic, profile, to this horrifying post-human cyberwar’. As corporations har-
vest our postings for marketable data, seemingly passive online activism on the net has been
denounced by others as mere ‘clicktivism’ that lacks real-world effects or engagement.
The centrality of communication in social struggles since May 1968 has led to many debates. At
the conference about counter-information organized by Next 5 Minutes2 in 1999 in Amsterdam, acti-
vists from the social movements of the former Communist countries and others from the post-1968
struggles in Western Europe came together. Among the salient issues that came out was the fact that
while in Eastern Europe movements changed the system, in the Western world media tactics were
more campaigns than effective social movements.

Once upon a time in the West, there were movements without one specific campaign. They were into
questioning every single aspect of life, with ‘the most radical gesture’. But now there are a plethora of
campaigns detached from any broadly based emancipatory movement. In contrast, Central and Eastern
European media tacticians, or the ‘samizdat media’, had been very much part of a broad social move-
ment. A movement that resulted in the dismantling the Soviet Empire. (Garcı́a and Lovink, 1999)

‘What had happened in Western Europe?’ they asked themselves. According to Garcı́a and
Lovink, the danger was embarking on semiotic campaigns, with no roots or continuity, with the
‘faint hope that if a campaign generates enough velocity and resonates with enough people, it
might just take on some of the qualities of a movement’. At the same time, some activists – like
Guy Debord before them – were totally skeptical about artistic and media practices: ‘For real
actionists the equation is simple, discourse ¼ spectacle.’ For Debord and the Situationists, spec-
tacle was what imposed numbness on our senses and was designed to keep us from political
agitation in the first place. Those who think the opposite did no more than create more empty signs,
migrate from the real space of the streets and factories to a space of mediated ideological repre-
sentation. ‘‘Net activism’’ was accused of wanting to cause social changes by ‘‘just sending out
hostile commands via the Internet or whether on your own, you can construct a movement via
technical means or through mediation only’’ (Garcı́a and Lovink, 1999).
The debate among activists from capitalist Europe and those who had brought down the Iron
Curtain posed a dilemma: Does ‘‘communication guerrilla‘‘, with its semiotic games, make any sense?
Perhaps the global justice movement, which took off at the end of the last century against the
huge world economic institutions, attempted a break and novel synthesis of these two tendencies,
articulating semiotic and corporeal action, weaving connections among groups and organizations
in the entire world capable of acting in common against a single concrete target, like a swarm.

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Sancho 5

On February 15, 2003, more than 10 million people marched in the world’s main cities against
war in the Middle East, answering the largest ever single simultaneous global call for mobilization.
But nothing stopped the plans of the United States. With the military offensives against Iraq and
Afghanistan, the overall frameworks that the social struggles drew on, such as human rights or
democracy, stopped being effective; it was precisely the world’s greatest allegedly democratic
power that trampled them in the name of the ‘war against terrorism’. Suffice it to mention the
prisons in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib – the ‘security’ discourse devoured any appeals by a
mobilized public. Post-Berlin-Wall capitalism abandoned the promise of democratic rights and did as
it pleased. I think that that moment was the end of the global justice movement as we had known it.

A new cycle of collective action: The connected multitude

Web 2.0 started to enter public consciousness around 2004 in the guise of social networks and
microblogging. Social media enabled the ‘autonomous construction of social networks controlled
and guided by their users’ (Castells, 2012: 221). Experiential collective social phenomena such as
‘fast mobs’ or ‘smart mobs’ also became prevalent (Lasen and Martı́nez, 2008), and intelligent
multitudes (Rheingold, 2004) or ‘the global crowd’ (Buck-Morss, 2014) arrive as terminology to
explain the new phenomenon. In Spain, between March 11 and March 14, 2004, an emblematic
event took place, that is, through short message service mobile phone messages, the citizenry coun-
tered the media and government discourse which attributed the attack on Madrid’s Atocha train
station to ETA (The Basque nationalist armed organization). The ‘mobilization’ was so wide-
spread that it changed the outcome of the elections 3 days later. Many other examples of this shift
to intelligent crowds can be found worldwide, that is, from Iran’s Green Revolution – despite its
controversial forms – to Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign and its use of social networks to win
that election.
In late 2010, the cyber-activist group Wikileaks disseminated the Pentagon cables; in 2013,
Edward Snowden reveled the US government global espionage through the National Security
Agency. Both incidents demonstrated that, in the new technological age, the secrets of those in
power are no longer safe – neither are the freedoms of citizens. The Anonymous network blos-
somed in defense of Wikileaks and spread worldwide with local variants, applying distributed
electronic attacks against corporate and government web sites.
That is when a new global cycle emerges, radically different from the global justice movement,
much more local and national but at the same time connected. The year 2011 saw the start of the
Arab rebellions followed by revolts in Southern Europe. These are urban insurgencies that chal-
lenge the power of the state. In many cases, huge crowds occupied public squares or spaces: the
15M and Plaza del Sol in Spain, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Qasba in Tunisia, the Pearl Roundabout in
Manama, Barheim, Greece’s Sintagma Square, and Telaviv’s Rothschild Boulevard (against hikes
in housing costs). The occupation of Wall Street in New York spread to 1000 cities in the United
States and Canada during 2011. In the following year in Mexico, thousands of young people
poured onto the streets under the slogan #YoSoy132. In June 2013, the defense of Istanbul’s Gezi
Park gave rise to a massive movement, as did the Passe Livre for access to public transport in
Brazil.
All these unique mobilizations, with their own specific contexts, have something in common;
they seem to be self-convened on the Internet based on spontaneous indignation that goes viral and
from there spills into urban space (Castells, 2012). In addition, although their objectives are diverse
and they do not have a common ideology, ‘in all cases, the central issue is democracy. They are

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6 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

movements for democracy’ (Castells, 2013). They are not fights for democracy circumscribed by
the frameworks of particular nation-states, but rather these practices and discourses give voice to a
stronger idea of democracy that transcends national identities and aspires to a global scenario for
universal access to democratic freedoms.
They are insurgencies that challenge the state with very concrete demands, but at the same time
have no programmatic platforms. Although the antiglobalization movement also took to the streets,
it did so at events that its foes had organized; at that time, the world economic institutions were
clearly the enemy on whom they set their sights to attack or block wherever they met. These new
insurgencies emerge unexpectedly and their arrival on the scene reveals a will to be prefigurative,
building spaces for common experimentation with the uniqueness of much more individualized
participation. While the global justice movement managed to bring together on the same stage
many different political groups, activists, collectives, unions, and nongovernmental organizations
from different parts of the world, in the case of these recent self-organizing insurgencies the ones
taking to the streets are not organized or previously politicized people but ‘regular Janes and Joes’
who participate as individuals – often without previous activist experience.
No explicit call is prepared and shared by all of them. The people who communicate the call to
protest do not develop their own alternative means of communication (such as a dedicated Web
page, blog, or central node), but act based on their day-to-day social networks, and in many cases
change their habitual everyday use of electronic devices in dramatic ways as they suddenly become
tactical weapons for collective action.
Politics stops being a restricted sphere of society, inhabited only by political parties,
institutions, and opinion leaders or a space monitored and reported by the mass media, with
its journalists acting as gatekeepers of what is said and what is not. Politics also stops being
a question of counterpublics3 or of organized groups of activists with highly elaborate ideas
about emancipation. The demand for leaderless initiatives and personal engagement through
speaking in the first person appears with unprecedented radicalism under Web 2.0. Anybody
can say what she or he thinks. Thus, this kind of politics breaks with the logic of ‘friend
and foe’, as defined by Carl Schmitt (1996), in that it does not take on board the distinction
between left and right.
The issue of identity – be that social, political, ethnic, and so on – loses importance and the
capacity for inclusion. Instead both identity and participation become based more on dignity and
the fact of sharing human life. As networks, those insurgencies cannot be defined as a finite
number of parts but are multiplicities organized around the principle of perpetual inclusion. ‘While
networks can be individuated and identified quite easily, networks are also more than one’
(Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 60). It is both the open unity and the heterogeneous flow of a
networked structure that allows individual participation in building the commons without med-
iation or representation.
In most of these mobilizations, people do not go out onto the street because they belong to
specific social groups. Even in Turkey in June 2013, more than 70% of demonstrators were people
without party affiliation or banners (while the remainder was from organizations). The connected
multitudes celebrate their diversity, not from the point of view of aggregation but from the unifying
axis of the democratic idea, transcending ethnic groups, religion, or social class.
For this reason, Lance Bennett argues we are in the age of personalized activism (2012). Not
by mere coincidence was Time magazine’s person of the year in 2006 ‘‘You’’ (the word shown on
a computer screen), followed in 2011 by ‘The protester’. The latter was a drawn image of a
demonstrator, with face half-covered – that is, it could be anybody, but it was an individual. For

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Sancho 7

Bennett (2012), the more diverse a mobilization, the more personalized it becomes. Social net-
works make this new phenomenon possible, which can be characterized by (1) an ethos based on
diversity and tolerance of different viewpoints; (2) the increased scope for personal action, even
on a massive scale, such as in the Occupy movement’s ‘We are the 99%’ (something which is
much easier to identify with and personalize than some earlier calls to mobilize, like ‘Eat the
rich’); and (3) the participation in dense networks where the individual is able to share his/her
own histories and problems so that he/she can be the catalyst for mobilization processes and initi-
ate his/her own networks.
This is demonstrated with exceptional clarity in the case of Mexico’s #YoSoy132 (I am 132),
which not only uses the first person singular as a statement but has adopted a style of video
‘portrait’ which is characterized by ‘showing your face’ – that is, speaking to camera in close-up,
stating your identity and showing a document to confirm that identity.4 It’s all about doing
politics in your own name, which at the same time can be the politics of anybody; the prefig-
urative nature of this is demonstrated by the participants acting ‘as if’ citizenship existed, as
if Mexico were a country where giving your own name did not mean you were risking repression
but was a guarantee of fair treatment at the hands of the state. In essence, acting in your own
name, making your own placard, and holding it over your head makes it possible to foster a
meme out of a collection of autonomous statements following the same formula for each of its
members. That is what we have seen in these huge demonstrations; every person raises a placard
with her/his own words. Only a few people march in groups divided by ideology or as members
of big organizations.
This form of ‘self-politics’ across connected multitudes is linked to what Manuel Castells
(2009) calls ‘mass self-communication’: the possibility that people can be producers/receivers
of their own messages and can recombine them, remixing codes and formats, 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. The difference between witnessing a phenomenon and being
part of it (being ‘connected’) comes to mind. Networks do not exist in a fixed totality. They remain
incomplete and open, an area can be destroyed and another one grows, like in a rhizome. As a
consequence, there are no stabilized leaders, only relevant nodes that change over time. As Javier
Toret of the Databanalysis de Barcelona group explains, ‘No node has the complete information
regarding the system but it remains connected. Through nodes and internodes to which they are
connected, nodes can navigate without having the information of the system as a whole’ (Toret,
2013: 89). Activist networks manage to find specialists according to their needs. In doing so, they
favor collaboration without the need of a leader and thus engage in distributed politics that can be
viralized, reproduced, and spread. Marga Padilla claims that while occupying Puerta del Sol in
Madrid they witnessed something marvelous, ‘We were being copied. That’s right my friends. This
is copyleft. Remix and recycle. In hundreds of cities across the globe people were building
campsites. Repeat. Retweet: Please copy’.5
To define Spain’s 15M movement, Toret employs the ‘network system’ notion: ‘15M is a
transversal agent. Social movements make alliances among constituted subjects; 15M is always an
expressive update, without representative models’ (2013: 82). He goes on to also point out that,
‘The 15M model configures; it does not affiliate’ (Toret, 2013: 82–83).
So, we have ‘expressive updates’ instead of representations; configurative models, not the
affiliations of previous organizations. For Toret, we are witnessing the ‘capability of connected
multitudes, of the brains and bodies connected in a network to create and self-modulate

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8 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

collective action’. This is what he calls ‘technopolitics’: ‘The re-appropriation of digital tools
and spaces to build moods and the common notions needed to empower yourself, make collec-
tive behavior possible in urban spaces leading to taking the reins of everyday matters’ (Toret,
2013: 41).
Amador Fernández Savater found it difficult to designate the Spanish 15M as a social move-
ment, he labeled it ‘social climate’: ‘We knew more or less how to organize a social movement but
how about a climate?’ An array of circumstances might cause a ‘mood’ or a ‘political climate’
which takes place at an appropriate moment. Fernández Savater refers to the despair of past
political activists, arguing they are no longer the protagonists. They have been replaced by the
people who take to the streets for the first time. He goes on to assert that these ‘climates’ do not
last, they disappear once they are institutionalized – that is, when a mobilization stops growing and
turns into ‘a group of friends’. At this stage, he argues that ‘self-referential codes and rituals may
offer comfort and well-being, however, they get rid of those who are different. We are left with an
amusing tribe which is by no means a political space’ (Fernández Savater, 2012).

The urban commons

Another common element in all these mobilizations is that they happen in urban settings. In
Rebel Cities, David Harvey maintains that, ‘The revolution will be urban – or not at all’ (Burke,
2013) and recuperates the old 1960s cry for the ‘right to the city’ (Harvey, 2012). Adolfo
Estalella (2013) expresses a similar view, ‘If 10 years ago globalization was the object of
activism, today it is the city. So, the pro-common is for current activism what globalization was
[for activism] ten years ago’. Estalella defines ‘pro-common’ as the politicization of the urban,
the possibility of experiencing sharing, living together, sleeping, collaborating, and doing with
others, in the spirit of the purest Do-It-Yourselfism. Acting politics and joining together based on
your own initiative. Two activist traditions come together in the idea of the commons6 so present
in these movements; on the one hand, the free culture native to the network and hacktivism and
on the other hand, the defense of the reproduction of life and natural commons that emanate from
environmentalist and ecofeminist struggles.
‘The commons’ appears on the street as a third space between the public and the private and
opposes neither, but rather shows itself as a prefigurative politics. Despite the fact that the World
Bank appropriates the discourse about ‘the global commons’ as something to be protected, for
social movements the idea of the commons refers not only to natural materials (water, earth, the
oceans, etc.) but also to social relations and noncompetitive forms of collaboration. Just as Silvia
Federici argues (2013), there are no commons without community; the commons is not something
to be distributed, but something to be produced, like areas of cooperation that do not exist before
they are experienced.
Benjamı́n Arditi, in an article where he debates with Slavoj Žižek the struggles of 2011, 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). Insurgencies, he explains, link the world of today to another possible world, not
with a series of steps or horizons but by putting it into action; they are performative political acts in
that, through them, people start to experience what they are fighting for, regardless of their success
in challenging the status quo.

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Sancho 9

These events are necessarily episodic, just as politics understood as the interruption of nor-
mality is, but they never vanish ‘without a trace’ (Arditi, 2012: 159). Their performative quality
is local but has an impact beyond that:

The circulation of images of the experience of occupying Tahrir and resisting attacks of government
forces precipitated an enhanced connectivity that reverberated much further than the space of Tahrir.
The physicality of occupation was supplemented by a virtual being-together of those who wanted to
change their world. People in the square and elsewhere in Egypt felt that they could touch the sky with
their hands in the fleeting moment of their being-together. (Arditi, 2012: 11)

This being together prefigures a different society and other values, in addition to creating its
own, unpredicted power. The insurgents generate their appearance in public, multiplied and
amplified on the networks. What all these rebellions display is a prefiguration of another kind
of politics and another possible world. This is something that cannot be achieved without the
appropriation/creation of a social form. As Judith Butler asserts, Occupy Wall Street’s revolu-
tionary potential is precisely situated in reproducing life by producing the protest:

It is not that bodies are simply mute life-forces that counter existing modalities of power. Rather, they
are themselves modalities of power, embodied interpretations, engaging in allied action. On the one
hand, these bodies are productive and performative. On the other hand, they can only persist and act
when they are supported by environments, by nutrition, by work, by modes of sociality and belonging.
And when these supports fall away, they are mobilized in another way, seizing upon the supports that
exist in order to make a claim that there can be no embodied life without social and institutional sup-
port, without ongoing employment, without networks of interdependence and care. They struggle not
only for the idea of social support and political enfranchisement, but their struggle takes on a social
form of its own. (Butler, 2011)

The prefigurative quality of these insurgencies implements the use value of the immediate and
collectivizes spaces previously denied; it turns a public square into a camping ground, solves the
problem of shared food, invents and experiences the pleasure and the difficulty of being together.
Rules for living together develop, based on respect and solidarity – the enormous work done by the
Commission of Respect in Madrid’s Acampada Sol should be emphasized here – and the ecolo-
gical rhythms of being together are resolved. It is a struggle against the spatial organization of
power that only permits flows: the movement of cars, circulation as a metaphor against the valuing
of every person’s body as a closed container, hostile to others. Suddenly, the touch of other bodies
is pleasurable because it generates something bigger, an experience of potential, as described by
Bostjan Videmsek (2013) in Taksim Square in Istanbul:

Raving nationalists were fraternising with the Kurds. The vibe of unity had taken over the square – a
vibe, it needs to be said, that always has a very limited shelf life. Activists were handing out food, drink
and clothes to thousands of protesters. Several workshops were taking place at once. Both political and
merely amusing speeches were being delivered. Some women were practicing yoga as teenagers
fiddled with their cell phones and listened to Nirvana. I saw one man reading War and Peace by
candlelight . . .

The mise-en-sce`ne makes a community of equals emerge, equals who have their own chorus of
voices, many names, a community that does not exist, that is negated by the state and, in most
instances, repressed. Violence has no place as a method of struggle because it is outside democracy

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10 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

and is reserved for the state the protesters are confronting; violence is where the repressive forces
of the state live, not where protest happens.
The vulnerability of protesting bodies is allied with visibility. That’s why people know that their
endeavor to remain in the square must be rebroadcast because they are speaking to a global
community that understands the longing for democracy and denounces the brutality of those in
power. In doing so, they clearly establish that violence and the power that uses it is unfair,
undemocratic. Videmsek (2013) reproduces the statement made by Ekim, an activist from Istanbul.
We were simply fed up. . . . This park is merely a symbol of what Turkey has been doing to its citizens.
For the first three days, it was truly awful here. We knew what our police was capable of, but no one
expected anything of this magnitude. Protesters were being beaten like the most disgraceful among the
criminals. But – and I think they’ve become aware of that – this was a big mistake! Their violence and
their arrogance only added fuel to the fire. Pandora’s box has been opened: the riots have spread all
over the country. We are no longer afraid. We are united. One week ago, Istanbul was an urban jungle,
where it was each man for himself. Now we have turned into a community. That’s a big thing, you
know – no matter what comes next!

Watching the watcher: Maximum visibility for democracy

From other parts of the country or the world, people keep a close watch, people look, people
catch the bug. Through the screens on their devices, the audience gets excited and indignant,
takes into their own hands the safeguarding of the public square just by looking and extending
that visibility; they denounce the arbitrariness of the state by re-Tweeting what’s going on, by
being vigilant, and therefore by demonstrating as an involved participant. In the square, people
are the medium and the message. The exhibition of a political act of citizenship (as Isin, 2009:
371 states, ‘they constitute themselves as those with the right to claim rights’) goes beyond the
local territory; it’s witnessed by millions through technological devices. Judith Butler (2010)
reflects on this:
If they are transported in one way, they are surely left in place in another, holding the camera or the cell
phone, face to face with those they oppose, unprotected, injurable, injured, persistent, if not insurgent.
It matters that those bodies carry cell phones, relaying messages and images, and so when they are
attacked, it is more often than not in some relation to the camera or the video recorder. It can be an
effort to destroy the camera and its user, or it can be a spectacle of destruction for the camera, a media
event produced as a warning or a threat. Or it can be a way to stop any more organizing. Is the action of
the body separable from its technology, and how does the technology determine new forms of political
action? And when censorship or violence are directed against those bodies, are they not also directed
against its access to media, and in order to establish hegemonic control over which images travel, and
which do not?

The physical act of leaving the square where repression comes down is more complicated than
stopping streaming. No doubt about it. However, the spectator’s commitment to the protestor is
woven into that hybridization of the spaces, in the assemblies, in the marches, in the squares but
also in communication mediated by computer, in the global celebration of technologically boosted
publicity. That’s when people shout identification with that space: we are all Tahrir, we are all Sol,
we are all Syntagma, we are all hashtag YoSoy132. An identification that eludes proper or
restrictive names but allows the inclusion of anybody.

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The square generates a constellation of the local and the global, a spatiality that is simultane-
ously mediated and immediate, virtual and physical, local and global. Doreen Massey proposes the
idea of ‘a global sense of place’ (1994). The space filled with living bodies is more widely cir-
culated in both personal and public media. Communication is the lung with which the protest
breathes. The concentration of people is also spatialized through the luminous map of Tweets that
emerge from it. In the Square like on the net, presentation and representation happen at the same
time.
Awareness of the importance of telling others about what is happening, of broadcasting (or
narrowcasting), is widespread. The young people at these protests know that they have to
broadcast, to stream, to send Tweets and photos. In June 2013, Derya Çalik, a student and
activist, talked about the demonstrators’ experiences in Taksim Square:

3G connectivity in Turkey is very poor. Congestion occurs when it is used excessively. We are aware
that the police is [sic] using signal inhibitors. Therefore, we started using a VPN connection (Virtual
Private Network). At the same time, shops, restaurants, hotels and residents have given us Wi-Fi by
unlocking their network passwords. (Çalik, 2013)

The global rebel square is the new public/private space, a place for the commons. It fore-
grounds the sweat and emotions of the encounter. It enables collectivity and collectivism and that
capability of resolving problems among everyone, including sourcing food or distributing water
or dispensing medical services. The square houses the voices, the songs, the tents, and the
hygiene of the movement. It is the space of the uprising’s self-care and work, the space of an
alternate and rebelling body that resolves its existence without the mediation of the state, with
a collaborative, open, free ethics: the hacker ethic or what Matt Ratto and Megan Boler
(2014) call Do-It-Yourself Citizenship, the space where critical making meets participatory cul-
ture. One of the most surprising scenes I have witnessed from Mexico in real time was the
appearance of a grand piano in Taksim Square on June 12, taken there by the German David Mar-
tello who played Bella Ciao7 accompanied by a huge chorus, the night falling, recovering the
square after hours of repression and tear gas.
However, these kinds of phenomena cannot be considered the result of technology alone.
Derek Gregory (2013), for example, reports a survey of Egyptian demonstrators that found that
50% heard about Tahrir for the first time via face-to-face communication, 28% via Facebook,
and 13% via their cellular phones. Indeed, when the rebellion was well underway, leaflets called
for people not to talk about demonstration plans on Facebook because it was being monitored by
the police. Gregory also points to the Internet blackout instigated by President Hosni Mubarak to
stop the protests against him, asserting that it was in fact counterproductive because it made
many more people go to Tahrir precisely because there was no longer any other way of knowing
what was happening.
Communication as 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. It
helps create that global street that also belongs to those who, from afar, get excited about the power
that is born of being together anywhere in the world, in any language. Analysts of Spain’s 15M
suggest such protests have several dimensions like a ‘multilayered system’:

The contents and the emotional charge of the messages, whether in the form of Tweets or Facebook
posts, presuppose an organizational key to a mental cloud flying over the squares. The very physical
layer of the camp has a system of signs for debate in assemblies and commissions, influenced on

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12 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

different levels by the cloud of social interaction that exists in the multi-layered, multi-level structure
of the network. (Pablo Aragon, in Toret, 2013: 89–90)

The revolt changes the meaning of life and also of the technological extensions. According to
the protagonists, suddenly they stop using the Internet to upload photos of parties and start giving
their use of it a techno-political bent. In a study of 15M, Toret discusses the transformation in
terms of changing ‘digital diets’, that is, what people do with the Web: beginning on May 15,
2011, Twitter, Facebook, and Windows Life Profile were increasingly used, compared to enter-
tainment and game sites. In a similar vein, he notes that the growth in the use of different support
systems, platforms, and communications technologies between April and May spiked, and traffic
was 17% higher in May than in April (Toret, 2013: 43). The alternative social network N-1.cc
also shot up from 3000 users on May 15 to more than 30,000 1 month later, while Twitter went
from 3043 nodes to 110,198 nodes (p. 44) during the 2-day period on May 13–14.
Even those not on social networks are pushed to start using them when they join events in the
streets. According to a study by the Arab Social Media Report (2011), the number of Facebook
users in Egypt grew by 30% in the first quarter of 2011, with almost 2 million new users joining
between January and April 2011.8
The Internet is a connector and allows for collaborative, collective enunciation. It is in the heat
of practice that its uses and potentials broaden out. Etherpads turned into instruments that made it
possible to write documents collaboratively. The possibility of directly transmitting information to
a wider public has been consolidated based on the 2011 protests and the livestreamer has become a
fundamental figure. What does it mean to be able to watch an assembly via livefeed, on a screen in
the comfort of your home? To see without being seen? Is it the logic of Foucault’s Panopticon
carried to its maximum expression? Or the inversion of the Panopticon, where we discover that
when we leave the cells where we are continually under surveillance, we can use visibility in our
favor, to see the watchman and denounce him? Does others watching streamed feeds protect those
who are in the public square from repression? The technology that makes totalitarian control
increasingly possible is a double-edged sword. The vulnerability of the bodies to totalitarian sur-
veillance can become the strength of the collective and the visibility a precondition for democracy.
Today, open communication, online access, and digital freedom are the conditions for the survival
of the global crowd – that animal that is barely emerging (Buck-Morss, 2014) as an anticipatory
dream of a global democracy and that can also die, extinguished in an Orwellian dystopia of
already existing cyber-police departments and cyber-wars.
Patricia Horrillo, who suffered police brutality in Madrid, asks herself, ‘What kind of a threat
can I be? I’m 50 300 .5 The threat she poses was carrying a recording smart phone. Many people
witnessed her beating, hence while the watcher is watching, the watcher is also being watched from
the global street. Transparency and accessibility are key resources of every democratic revolution,
and it is the right to tape and broadcast that are so often what militarized forces move most quickly
to prohibit. The powerful use technologies for secrets, espionage, and criminalization. But com-
munication in the hands of the multitudes opens the possibility of unmasking, of exposing the
authoritarianism of the 1%, and reclaiming power for the 99%, for the networks of indignation.

Conclusion
In this article, I have reviewed various instances of transnational activism articulated in digital
networks over the last 20 years. From the emergence of a human network enabled by digital tools

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Sancho 13

to express solidarity with the Zapatista indigenous rebels in Chiapas, to the appearance of the
cycle of global justice protests starting in Seattle in 1999, we can see the broadening out of the
potential of transnational actors for weaving common frameworks and acting in a concerted
fashion on the net. With the emergence of Web 2.0, and a cycle of global indignation starting
with the Arab Spring, a series of multitudinous self-convened protests have appeared on the
scene, engaging in semiotic struggles on the virtual networks alongside physical social mobili-
zations on our cities’ streets. They are local insurgencies that build from their own contexts and
concrete indignation a shared ideal of democracy, which in turn can be communicated to a global
public. These insurgencies undertake action for an idea of democracy and therefore are pre-
figurative of a new local collectivism but also linked to the emergence of a global commons
which extends beyond national, ethnic, religious, political, or class identities. They are a net-
worked fight for democracy that uses global visibility and freedom on the net as a condition for
its existence.

Notes
1. Sidney Tarrow defines the ‘cycle of collective action’ as ‘a phase of heightened conflict across the social
system which includes a rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors;
a quickened pace of innovation in the forms of contention; new or transformed collective action frames; a
combination of organized and unorganized participation and sequences of intensified interaction between
challengers and authorities’ (2004, 202–203).
2. Tactical Media global conferences organized by Next 5 Minutes were first held in 1993 and took place in a
building in Amsterdam called De Waag.
3. Nancy Fraser states:
in stratified societies, subaltern counterpublics have a double character. On the one hand, they function as spaces
for retreating and regrouping. On the other, they also work as training camps and bases for agitation activities
directed at wider audiences. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions where their emancipatory
potential resides. (1997: 116–117)

4. The video that went viral and started all the movement is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v¼P7XbocXsFkI
5. Interviewed in 15 M.cc, a documentary by Stéphane M Grueso, Madrid, 2012.
6. ‘The pro-commons is a zone of exchange where common resources converge with free culture: the
communal hills or the collectively administered fishing ground and free software or free-culture Wikipedia
are both examples from different traditions and contexts. The commons are summoned by urban projects.
Having the ability of spatial translation, they coexist with Internet-free culture. ‘ . . . However, I wish to
underline the painful effort of attempting to take the logics of collaboration beyond the web’ (Estalella,
2013).
7. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼QZfu_qagC7c&feature¼player_embedded
8. Seventy per cent of electronic network users in the Arab region are young people between the ages of 15
and 29, and only 32% are women. On Twitter in the Arab world, the most popular hashtags from January to
April 2011 were #egypt, #jan25, #libya, #bahrain, and #protest (Arab Social Media Report, 2011).

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Author biography
Guiomar Rovira Sancho is a Research Professor in the Education and Communications Department at the
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City. Her books include Zapatistas sin Fronteras: Las
Redes de Solidaridad con Chiapas y el Altermundismo (2009), Mujeres de Maı´z (1997; translated as Woman
of Maize, 1998), Zapata Vive (1994), and the coedited collection La autonomı´a posible (2009). She has also
published articles on social movements, networks, and communication.

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