Digital Content

Digital Media Theory+ Hacking Discussion

Geert Lovink

Definitions + discussions of Tactical Media
1997 manifesto on Tactical Media

Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.

Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the source their power, ("anger is an energy" : John Lydon), and also their limitation.

their typical heroes are; the activist, Nomadic media warriors, the pranxter, the hacker,the street rapper, the camcorder kamikaze, they are the happy negatives, always in search of an enemy.

But once the enemy has been named and vanquished it is the tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall into crisis. Then (despite their achievements) its easy to mock them, with catch phrases of the right, "politically correct" "Victimculture" etc.

How does Lovink regard representation?

To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is to believe that the very real life chances of groups and individuals are not still crucially affected by the available images circulating in any given society. And the fact that we no longer see the mass media as the sole and centralized source of our self definitions might make these issues more slippery but that does not make them redundant.

What does Lovink see as the progression of tactical media?

Awareness of this tactical/strategic dichotomy helped us to name a class of producers of who seem uniquely aware of the value of these temporary reversals in the flow of power. And rather than resisting these rebellions do everything in their power to amplify them. And indeed make the creation of spaces, channels and platforms for these reversals central to their practice. We dubbed their (our) work tactical media.

How does Lovink separate alternative media + tactical media?
How Does Lovink connect migrant culture to tactical media?

Like other migrant media tactitions Wodiczko has studied the techniques by which the weak become stronger than the opressors by scatering , by becoming centreless, by moving fast across the physical or media and virtual landscapes. 'The hunted mustdiscover the ways become the hunter.'

Alexander Galloway

• Structures / systems of control run by protocols

• Protocols the rules of a system - exploits can exist within protocols

• Protocols are powerful and can be resistant to change / flexibility

• Decentralized power structures v.s. central hierarchies

• Networked resistance

• Vertical vs Horizontal

• Locating the Exploit

• The point of entry or weakness in a system - hackers search this out

What examples does Galloway use to describe the difference between decentralized power structures and hierarchical powers?
How does Galloway define and describe “The Exploit” + “Protocols”?
What does Galloway think must be “mastered” in order to gain major advantages - why?

...the current global crisis is one between centralized, hierarchical powers and distributed, horizontal networks... Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks. It takes networks to fight networks…

Whoever masters the network firm first and best will gain major advantages...what happens when the powers that be actually evolve into networked power (which is already the case in many sectors.)

In recent decades the primary conflict between organizational designs has been between hierarchies and networks, an asymmetrical war.

However, in the future the world is likely to experience a general shift downward into a new bilateral organizational conflict - networks fighting networks.

From the Wired Arab Spring Social Media Article 2016

Activists were able to organize and mobilize in 2011 partly because authoritarian governments didn’t yet understand very much about how to use social media. They didn’t see the potential, says NYU professor of politics Joshua Tucker, a principle investigator at the Social Media and Political Participation Lab at New York University. “There are a lot of reasons the people in power were slow to pick up on this,” he adds. “One of the things about not have a free press is it is harder to learn what was going on in the world.”

Today, governments take an aggressive hand in shutting down digital channels people use to organize against them. In Egypt, for example, where 26 million people are on Facebook (up from 4.7 million people in 2011), security forces arrested three people who administered nearly two dozen Facebook pages, according to Egyptian media reports. It also detained activists who had been involved in prior protests. And at the end of December, the government shut down Facebook’s Free Basics service, which had offered free Internet services to Egyptians on mobile phones. More than 3 million people had signed up for the program in just two months, according to Facebook. Meanwhile Turkey has made 805 requests for tweets to be removed since 2012, according to Twitter’s most recent transparency report; more than half were made last year.

These governments have also become adept at using those same channels to spread misinformation. “You can now create a narrative saying a democracy activist was a traitor and a pedophile,” says Anne Applebaum, an author who directs a program on radical political and economic change at the Legatum Institute in London. “The possibility of creating an alternative narrative is one people didn’t consider, and it turns out people in authoritarian regimes are quite good at it.”

Link to Freedomhouse.org report on global net freedoms in 2016