Repertoires of Action: Mobilizing Inside, Outside, and Beyond

Abstract

The action snapshots introducing this chapter provide four vivid examples of tactical preferences of emancipatory communication activists. The first is a classical example of policy advocacy: activists put pressure from the inside by cooperating with decision-makers. They participate in official meetings and accept the rules of the game, thus recognizing the legitimacy of institutions. The second and third snapshot show how activists who have no access to policy arenas (in this case the European Parliament and the US Congress) can push forward their demands for reform from the outside, pressuring policy-makers through strategies of norm and discourse change. In rallying and campaigning, both online and offline, in order to change the public discourse around surveillance and copyright, advocates and users seek to force a change in the legislation. The fourth example is a combination of two tactics — disruptive cultural resistance and direct action — used by those activists who are not invited to, or refuse to participate in, a policy arena (in this case the World Summit on the Information Society). Through the former, activists take action outside policy arenas, using cultural means (a self-produced satirical movie) as a substitute for mass protest. In the latter, activists engage in direct action beyond political arenas: the PolyMediaLab and the yomango dinner are examples of how activists create their own events, challenging institutions and social norms.

Kiev, Ukraine, March 2005, 7th Council of Europe Ministerial Conference on Mass Media Policy. For the first time at this conference, organized every five years by the CoE Media Division, civil society is invited to participate on an equal footing. In order to make the most of this policy window, community media advocates form the umbrella organization Community Media Forum Europe. For most of the CMFE members, it is their debut in a policy arena. A NGO Forum, parallel to the official summit, is attended by over 50 civil society organizations. They negotiate the amendments to be presented on behalf of civil society, and appoint their spokespersons. They strategically decide not to emphasize community media demands, but to privilege consensual broader issues such as the freedom of expression and the protection of journalists. Some of their demands make their way into the final documents of the conference, which set guidelines for the CoE future activity on communication policy. The amendments on editorial independence, minimum standards on human rights, and transparency, put forward by civil society representatives, are accepted; not, however, the community broadcasters’ demands, like the relabeling of airwaves as a global common good. According to participant Jim McDonnell from the NGO Signis, civil society participation was “positive” and “well accepted by governments”. Civil society representatives, McDonnell said, had “some influence”, and outcomes were more favorable to civil society input than expected.

(Milan, 2009b)

“This is what the web could look like under the Stop Online Piracy Act”. On January 18th, 2012, some 115,000 websites worldwide blackened their homepage to signal their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act under discussion in the United States’ Congress (Franzen, 2012). Major web companies like Google and YouTube, as well as noncommercial websites like Wikipedia, joined in an unprecedented coordinated online protest that coupled the physical protests in five major US cities. Together with millions of internet users, protesters said no the legislations designed to curb online piracy, on the ground of “the damage it would cause to our internet infrastructure” (http://sopablackout.org). “None of this could be considered ‘politics as usual’. […] A well-organized, well-funded, well-connected, well-experienced lobbying effort on Capitol Hill was outflanked by an ad-hoc group of rank amateurs, most of whom were operating independent of one another and on their spare time. Regardless where you stand on the issue — and effective copyright protection is an important issue — this is very good news for the future of civic engagement”, wrote the influencial blog TechCrunch (Binetti, 2012). “Supporters of the Internet deserve credit for pressing advocates of SOPA and PIPA to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation”, US Senator Darrell Issa said in a statement.

(Howard, 2012)

Yesterday, the first worldwide protests against surveillance measures such as the collection of all telecommunications data, the surveillance of air travellers and the biometric registration of citizens were held under the motto Freedom not Fear — Stop the surveillance maniai In at least 15 countries, citizens demanded a cutback on surveillance, a moratorium on new surveillance powers, and an independent evaluation of existing surveillance powers. “A free and open society cannot exist without unconditionally private spaces and communications”, explains an international memorandum. In Berlin the greatest protest march against surveillance in Germany’s history took place: participants in the 2 km long, peaceful protest march carried signs reading “You are Germany, you are a suspect”, “No Stasi 2.0 — Constitution applicable here”, “Fear of Freedom?” […] During the protests, which were supported by more than 100 civil liberties groups, professional associations, unions, political parties and other organizations, artists played parodies on surveillance society. […] In other countries the following events took place: a protest event with music and several art performances in Den Haag, lectures in Rome, surveillance camera mapping in Madrid, art performances in front of Parliament in Vienna, protest rallies in Paris, Prague, Sofia and Stockholm, the distribution of privacy software in Copenhagen, informative events in Guatemala City and Buenos Aires as well as a light projection onto Toronto’s City Hall.

(German Working Group on Data Retention, 2008)

Geneva, mid-December 2003. A compound at the outskirts of the city hosts the first ever United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society, open also to civil society groups. However, not everybody has accepted the invitation. Some activists created the PolyMediaLab, a self-organized space part of the WSIS? We Seize! initiative: four days of meetings and strategic planning to show that “an information society can rise from the grassroots, thanks to free knowledge and technologies which can be infinitely shared”. In the city center, hundreds of radical techies and hackers share technical skills and promote independent media production; activists engage in protest rallies. One evening, they screen a satirical movie against copyright directly on the walls of the World International Property Organization headquarters, following a forged invitation distributed to summit officials. On December 12th, while government delegates are striving to find an agreement, activists organize a yomango dinner (from the Spanish slang mangar, to steal something, in the sense of appropriating). They have previously raided local stores for groceries in order to “liberat[e] hundreds of products from some of the multinational corporations that infest the Swiss capital. Then these products were cooked and transformed into a voracious gastro-riot”. “Do you want some free food? Do you want a little bit of happiness … for free? Take it!”

(Author’s field notes)