Panel Statement
Panel: Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media
‘‘We will stop at nothing until we’ve achieved our goal. Permanent destruction of the identification role.” _ Anonymous
The revolution of social media has been heralded in by utopian appeals to reinvigorate democracy. Western media attributed the success of dissident movements in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to twitter, facebook, wikileaks, and various other social media platforms. Social media not only produce radical spontaneity in the form of Flashmobs, swarms, or multitudes needed to organize and demonstrate solidarity, but also globally distribute evidence that exposes the brutality and corruption of various countries’ respective regimes (e.g., China’s ‘human flesh search engine’ group). But at the same time these same technologies can be co-opted by governments, secret service organizations and their nemesis, global terrorist organizations and rogue states to monitor, censor, track and control users, whistle-blowers, populations and the traffic of information (as in the case with China, Iran and Egypt), thereby undermining the very democratic ideals and calls for freedom upon which such appeals were predicated. As a result the discourse of ethics and accountability becomes more and more entangled with politics. The one thing that is clear is that social media have rendered individual privacy and government and corporate secrecy almost impossible to sustain. In this game of exposure, being identified has become another form of vulnerability. The evasion of government and corporate surveillance has lead to alternative models of thinking about social media and its relationship to agency, politics, and perception. This paper will look at the relationship of the group Anonymous to Wikileaks spokesperson Julian Assange. The media has reduced the discussion of Anonymous’s attacks on those commercial services that (under pressure from the US government) denied service to Assange to an ethical question — one that implies individual responsibility and criminal activity. Instead, I will concentrate on how Anonymous mimics networks (like the free software and open source movements or the Creative Commons) or crowd sourcing projects (like Foldit) in its dissident and controversial political actions. By mimicking government and corporate tactics it questions the criteria for a ethical discourse in relation to social media, and it points to the limits of identification of subversive groups that depend on multiple users rather than leaders or figure heads like Assange himself. Rather than attempt to produce some authentic group identity, Anonymous has borrowed the mask of Guy Fawkes from the graphic novel and/or film, V for Vendetta. In this respect identity functions more like a meme, that is passed peer-to-peer, and subject to infinite modulation.
- Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Associate Professor of Technocultural Studies (UC Davis, US) is film and media scholar whose work focuses on the problem of representing and theorizing the violence produced by nation building, ethnocentrism, and sexism in a manner that does not play into a vicious cycle where moralism, media images, and language produce their own forms of violence. She has published articles on film, performance, installation art, and new media in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Third Text, PAJ, Representations, Screen, Third Text and numerous collected volumes. Her interest in the “digital uncanny” and the culture of surveillance has inspired “Recoded” – the large international conference on the politics and landscapes of new media.