The notion of digital resistance is regularly mobilized in academic and activist writings to describe practices of use, detournement (diversion), creation of content and/or technologies within a social justice and anti-oppressive perspective. The term is associated with practices that are often tactical rather than strategic in nature and, by definition, in opposition to a certain dominant, hegemonic order. In English, the term digital resistance was conceptualized at the turn of the millennium by the Critical Art Ensemble, around the idea of “tactical media”, a concept itself referring to critical uses and theorizations aimed at putting forward various subversive practices in support of an anti-colonial indigenous liberation movement. The Critical Art Ensemble had developed a small, easy-to-use DDoS software program to paralyze the websites of the Mexican government, which at the time was repressing the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. The Zapatistas' media and communications strategy succeeded in rallying activists from all over the world to support this anti-colonial struggle. This international support for the Zapatista movement gave rise to the Indymedia movement, itself strongly associated with the so-called “alter-globalization” movement of international solidarity. One of the models put forward at the time was that of “electronic civil disobedience”, which aimed to mobilize digital technologies for protest purposes in order to disrupt the powers that be. Digital resistance is also often associated with hacker culture where tech activists build autonomous digital infrastructures. The term continues to be mobilized today, mostly in reference to tactical uses, for example in support of the Palestinian struggle. Digital resistance includes but are not limited to struggles that oppose the commercialization of the internet, the ever-increasing grabbing of our data without our consent to train artificial intelligences, state and capitalist surveillance, the development of cryptography to ensure privacy, and above all, a call for “doing otherwise” in the context of rising fascism and the climate emergency.
This workshop will first provide an overview of the concept of digital resistance, with historical and contemporary examples from several categories such as low tech, digital labor, cryptography and digital forensics. The workshop will then map out digital resistance practices with the audience. The workshop will be conducted in English, but contributions in Spanish and Portuguese are welcome.