(en) Anarkismo.net: Internet & Ideology - Against the Nationalist Fragmentation of Cyberspace & Against ?Astroturf Activism?

The Arab Spring redrew the battle-lines between over the control of information between 
the statist/capitalist elites and the popular classes ? raising questions of increased 
restriction and surveillance, and of the limits of cyber-activism. In some ways this 
battle is often mischaracterised as being a narrow debate between cool intellectual 
property technocrats and wild-eyed free-use pirates, or as being a political dispute 
between authoritarian regimes and free speech activists, with no wider relevance to 
society. But it is clear that what is at stake is the global ideology (and exploitative 
practice) of corporatist enclosure versus that of the creative commons; in other words, it 
is more even than a universalist human rights concern, but is rather an asymmetrical war 
between the parasitic and productive classes over a terrain of power/wealth-generation 
known as the knowledge economy.

A gathering of journalists, media development experts, and online activists (among others) 
at the Highway Africa media and technology conference in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 
September 2012 grappled with the paranoid responses of many states to the supposedly 
social media-driven Arab Spring, but failed to grasp the nettle of the class nature of the 
statist/capitalist threat.

Nationalist fragmentation in Russia?

One of the keynote speakers was young Alexey Sidorenko of Russian website Teplitsa 
www.te-st.ru and author of ?New Media Tools for Digital Activists? who spoke about the 
sea-change that had taken place in Russian cyberspace before the Arab Spring. Before 2011, 
he said, the old state-controlled legacy media was being bypassed as an information source 
by the ?free blogosphere,? citing the fact that the audience of the www.yandex.ru website 
had outgrown that of the leading TV station, Channel 1.

This reflected a shift in trust from the legacy media to the internet, especially among 12 
to 34-year-olds, 96% of whom were connected today, making Russia the second-most connected 
European nation after Germany.

Before the Arab Spring, the Russian authorities, whether retread ?communists,? robber 
barons, or neo-liberals, had viewed the internet with suspicion, but had largely 
restricted their assaults to the harassment of bloggers (largely by the hacking of their 
sites, or by swamping the sites with requests in order to stall them ? DDoS attacks).

Worryingly, however, they had not only been covertly running ?deep-packet inspection? 
(DPI) surveillance of online content, but had also begun overt prosecutions of internet 
?extremism? which, Sidorenko said, outlawed the dissemination of some 1,500 prohibited 
works, including classic 19th Century texts on Islam, or radical thinkers of socialism 
(including anarchists of course), or nationalism ? ?but which includes literary and 
oppositional works?.

In the Arab Spring era, although electoral fraud to the Russian national parliament, the 
Duma, had continued at similar levels to the 2008/9 period, internet-based evidence of 
this fraud had rocketed, with the result that sites such as Karta Narusheniy (Map of 
Violations) and 23 other anti-corruption sites became so popular that they were frozen by 
DDoS attacks, presumably originating from the state.

Internet activists responded, however, by mirroring the websites? content and in December 
2011, a 23-year-old activist managed to mobilise demonstrations of tens of thousands of 
protestors against the cyber-attacks, protests which lasted well into May this year.

The state in turn responded with a three-pronged counter-attack: firstly, they put 
criminal libel ? only decriminalised in 2011 ? back on the statute books; secondly, they 
introduced the blacklisting of internet service-providers (ISPs) whose users posted 
content the censors found unacceptable; and lastly, they cynically foregrounded child 
protection as a major issue to be addressed online, creating the possibility that state 
agents by planting a single item of child porn on an oppositional site could threaten to 
shut down the entire ISP ? and so forcing many ISPs to protect themselves by actively 
censoring user content.

Sidorenko said there were worrying signs at the international level too, where there were 
several proposals by the likes of Iran to create and police ?national sovereignty in 
national internet sectors? ? which, he feared, could ?create isolated, hermetic net 
islands,? in other words, the replication across the world of the amputated model employed 
in Belarus or China currently.

?This will lead to an erosion of internet integrity and global interconnectedness, the 
result of a push by authoritarian regimes who will suppress free speech online as they do 
in traditional media. My question is how we as media activists can prevent this 
colonisation, this fragmentation, of the internet.?

Sanctions against authoritarian regimes who embarked on online and mobile truncation would 
not work, however, he said, citing the case of the Belarus dictatorship, an ossified 
Stalinist regime, which had purchased surveillance software through a third party despite 
sanctions: ?Sanctions can?t keep up with technological innovation.?
Sidorenko predicted that the big internet companies would readily kowtow to such 
proposals: we presumably all know about the ?Google Wall of China,? whereby the internet 
giant struck a deal with the red corporatist state to restrict the socio-political 
functionality of the internet. But what are conditions like in China currently?
Nationalist fragmentation in China

Where there is a will, there is a way, and journalists and activists in China have 
laboured in Kafkaesque conditions to work around the hermetic status of their cyber-island 
? where internet penetration stands at a population-proportionately whopping 38% (compared 
to 13% in Africa).

Professor Yuen Ying Chan, director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the 
University of Hong Kong, sketched a similar picture of digital ascendancy as in Russia, 
with some online writers having more followers than the multi-million readership of the 
largest Chinese daily newspapers.

The authorities, apart from creating their own policed versions of Western social media 
such as Weibo (the ?Chinese twitter?), had both human and mechanical censors which trawled 
Weibo and other internet content for outlawed content.

Ironically, this data-mining was now being used by journalists and activists themselves. 
For example, Yuen said though the state had outlawed political reportage on rising 
?communist? leader Bo Xilai who was axed from his post, journalists used data-mining to 
map his business relationships in Hong Kong and further afield ? because there is a 
loophole in the legislation on business reportage (and in ?communist? China, the 
convergence between party power and business interests is intense, with the media sector 
being the third-largest tax revenue earner for the regime).

Still, the lesson is obvious: not only is a ?hermetic island? very tough terrain for 
social, economic and political activists to operate in, but the exact same data-mining 
processes used by activists can and will be turned on activists themselves by the 
authorities to gather information sometimes deemed treasonable and punishable by death.

As Niels ten Oever, a fiery Dutch freedom of expression activist who has worked on 
projects in some very tough regions ? Ethiopia, ex-Somalia, and Afghanistan ? warned, 
social media has transformed us into ?communications exhibitionists, standing naked at the 
window, exposing ourselves without knowing who is looking.?
The Arab Spring & ?Astroturf Activism?

Of course, on the rare occasion that it goes down to the wire, as it has in Syria, one 
wants the whole world to be watching as the sheer deluge of publicity offers some degree 
of protection or at least of validation of one?s war against the parasitic elite (not that 
class war is the entire Syrian story).

But, sub-Saharan African activists warned, that cut-and-paste social media solutions, even 
from the Arab Spring, might not work in other contexts. Abiye Teklemariam, a Reuters 
institute fellow from Ethiopia, said an oft-repeated question of why there had been no 
echo of the Arab Spring in sub-Saharan Africa usually ignored the fact that all the North 
African regimes had been complascent before a Tunisian vegetable-seller set himself on 
fire, so similar uprisings could perhaps occur in the south; objective conditions in 
several southern dictatorships made it possible.

But, he warned, sub-Saharan political activists had often totally misunderstood the use of 
social media in North Africa as a tool to organise, quietly and for perhaps at least a 
decade before the uprisings ? rather than as a tool to merely mobilise demonstrations in 
the short-term. In Egypt, for example, facebook was only used to mobilise the first Tahrir 
Square protest; the authorities shut it down the next day; from then on, the people 
organised the protests on the ground.

?There was a perception of facebook as a magic tool to create revolutions; [sub-Saharan 
African] activists started overpromising on this basis, and this led to a decline in the 
public?s trust in activists when they failed to deliver,? Taklemariam said.

?There has also been a rise of Astroturf activism. The original social media was linked 
through networks of trust, but governments and political parties started creating 
Astroturf groups and started calling actions, but people soon realised these groups were 
fake, which had the effect that mistrust started bleeding into the real groups.?

I need to add that the failure of South African political activist groups to understand 
the necessity to prepare the groundwork by organising within poor communities for years ? 
as the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa has done ? rather than 
relying on ersatz internet mobilisations was what lead to the embarrassing displays of 
Astroturf activism in attempts to mimic (without real grassroots organising) the Northern 
?Occupy? movements at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and in Cape Town.

As in Russia, before the Arab Spring in Africa, statist repression was offline only; even 
if bloggers were targeted, they were targeted by physical assault, rather than by 
cyberwar. Earlier last year, I met young Egyptian blogger-dissident Kareem Amer and his 
girlfriend, Egyptian nude blogger-dissident Aliaa Maghda El-Mahdy. Amer said that it was 
ironic that, having been jailed for four years for blogging against the Mubarak regime, it 
was only after the regime was toppled that he and Aliaa had had been forced to flee into 
exile by the insecure conditions of the Arab Spring itself. So even within the Arab Spring 
countries, repression had merely shifted form.

Admire Mare, an activist, researcher and the director of the Zimbabwe Youth Empowerment 
and Information Dissemination Trust, who blogs at ?Scribbles from the House of Stones,? 
also asked whether social media could be used for change in southern Africa as it had in 
Moldova, the Philippines, Indonesia, Iran and Spain ? as well as North Africa and Syria: 
?Is such a revolution possible here??

He said the battle-lines had been clearly drawn between the partisans of the ?technology 
of surveillance and repression? and the ?technology of freedom? ? but he warned that 
social media can?t be automatically assumed to be a democratic space as it was ?a 
profit-driven project,? vulnerable to hostile data-mining, and owned by digital elites: 
?We need to look at how activists can creatively appropriate this technology. 
Cut-and-paste models can?t be applied; we need to adapt to local contexts.?

Michael Schmidt