Blackout

The week before last, Wikipedia went dark, along with a great many other sites to protest against SOPA, and the threats to internet freedom. During various events of the Arab Spring (I wondered who coined that term), various states turned off the internet, and / or mobile networks. In China internet censorship is routine via the Great Firewall, and undoubtedly things will get worse. The internet will soon be anything but free.

Internally there is a strong rationale for using Facebook as the building block of our activist network. It is the tool people use, where people are at, better funded than our open source equivalence, and yet we hesitate to trust them. Meetup is a more palatable choice, and a more powerful organising tool, but it’s not where people at are – so it’s problematic.

We don’t want to trust our organising structure to a private company with differing interests to ours. The Guardian by-line ‘if you're not paying for an online service, you're not the customer; you're the product’, didn’t help and relying on any tool you don’t control to effect change, makes you vulnerable to the forces that can control that tool – or turn it off.

So in the debate between online and offline activism, if offline activism more robust against such interferences. Traditional freedoms, which may again change, protect the right to assembly, to meet others, to campaign etc. Public opinion is generally against bugging such meetings, police infiltration, and the paranoia of the security state, and instinctively these activities are more protected than my right to say setup a Facebook group to denounce Volkswagens lobbying against climate change laws.

However the near impossible challenges we face, preclude the safe options of robust organising offline, and dictate the risks involved in using commercial social media structures to reach more people, to mobilise more people to bring down the institutions that are herding civilisation to destruction. Risks I’m bound to deliver on, but unhappy about.

The 50 Cent Army, Blog Raiders and Facebook Puppets

After a wee piece of direct action before breakfast, I thought I’d continue with my more speculative musing as to how to deepen ones activist credentials online.

The premise is that more time and effort one puts into an action, online or offline, then the more effect it has in the real world, which is kind of the point.

At Friends of the Earth I heard of a strange phenomenon that evolved on their community forums. A small group of contributors, started discussing how they were fed up with the right wing blogs (and similar) that kept on publishing scathing inaccurate reports of environmental issues / campaigns.

They decided to do something about it, and organised into an online raiding party. Each week they would pick a target and team members would regularly hit the target, ideally alternating members posting daily, to wind up the authors and to present a differing view.

In a similar vein marketing companies, I’m sure, offer a pay for hire online service, where you can promote your product via internet postings by a specialist team. Big Oil has used staff resources to promote climate skeptic arguments, where the same tired old arguments clearly come from the same old song sheets.

Finally the Chinese state allegedly employers an army of 50 cent’ers, (perhaps 100,000 of them) to post pro-state comments anywhere where there is a discussion of interest.

In the old days we called them trolls, in the modern era they’re viral marketeers.

One could suppose (and I would never suggest that we did this), that you could recruit a team of real life activist, with appropriate web skills. You could pull them together for a training day, equip them with campaign arguments, and an online coordination structure.

One could then invite the team to scour the internet, and especially target media sites, looking for topical issues, where they could put a campaign message across, to counter the assumption that something was a done deal / a good thing (e.g. nuclear power).

The brief wouldn’t be to get drawn into long winded discussions, simply to post and leave. To stir things up, to act in the spirit of true trolldom, and to present a counter point to every argument, to damage those arguments and ensure that nothing could be considered as accepted wisdom, even on the most right wing of webblogs.

One might argue about the morality of training up internet trolls. However rather than paid professionals, if the individuals are volunteers, who are passionate about the issues, and who are simply enjoying a certain amount of leadership, then I think we are safely removed from Exxon paid climate sceptics or the agents of the Chinese state.

And finally a piece of speculation about the ease of constructing online identities. One could argue with oneself on such sites using different email identities (and IP addresses). In an age where social media seems to be the channel of choice for communicating hot news, how hard is it to set up a dozen email addresses, and a dozen associated facebook accounts? – facebook puppets would be the term?

If you need new friends, then it is trivial to sign into a facebook games site, and to adopt lots of game playing friends. With 500+ friends for each of your identities, you could have an audience of 6000+ people for whatever you chose to post. A dozen online activists with a dozen profiles could perhaps access a community of 50,000 through a pattern of shadows, of mirrors and viral activism that perhaps no-one has yet suspected.

The impacts of such activism is perhaps limited only by the time spent developing such identities. Until of course facebook catches on, or collapses under the weight of such artifice.