[Hamsini - Core Post 3] Infrastructure and Activism

 

Apologies for the late post—I was reading on my flight and haven’t had Internet until now.

Meme Wars does a brilliant job of tracing, in a nuanced way, the different factions that have been lumped together as the “alt-right,” showing how the movement fractured and coalesced over the course of the last decade in tandem with changes in communications infrastructure. It made me rethink the kind of form/content dualism that I think I’ve implicitly been approaching Internet studies with, showing the ways in which structure shapes culture—infrastructure shapes memes—and, I would suggest, vice versa. One of the key insights I take away from Meme Wars is the role that activism plays in mediating this technopolitics.

We’ve chatted a little bit in class about how right wing politics tends to coopt and weaponize slogans from the left; in Meme Wars, Donovan, Dreyfuss, and Friedberg trace throughlines from the Occupy movement (which, as they note, was not purely leftist) and its use of digital organizing to Stop the Steal. In Chapter 1, the authors discuss how Occupy was “open-source”: “As Occupy came together online and in the streets, it remained open-source like the international movements it was inspired by: anyone could volunteer to help organize, offer up ideas to the group, contribute” (p. 32). The use of the term “open source” here makes me wonder about connections between modalities of online activism and the ideology of Silicon Valley companies producing the tools they used.

Using hashtag activism and memes such as “We Are the 99 Percent,” Occupy grew from a fringe encampment to a decentralized national movement. However, while this was essential to the development of online/offline organizing on the left—from BLM to MeToo—the authors tease out the ways in which it also fueled right-wing politics. Ron Paul libertarians were, in some ways, initially aligned with the values of Occupy (specifically, the anti-establishment critiques). However, beyond that, right-wing figures such as Andrew Breitbart and Alex Jones came to both vilify Occupy as a leftist movement and draw lessons in organizing from it:

Breitbart shared with Jones the belief that Occupy could be a blueprint for a more lasting cultural upheaval, one that used social media, memes, and physical presence to foment social change. Occupy’s media spectacle expanded the ways in which American social movements could distribute their ideas, garner support, grab attention, and use blogs and social media to influence mainstream news. (p. 45)

This is a story of communication infrastructure shaping the tools of activism into the form of memes; as the authors note in Chapter 10, “While Andrew Breitbart used to say ‘Politics is downstream from culture,’ our research into a decade of meme wars demonstrates that culture is downstream from infrastructure” (p. 329). However, I wonder if the movement of right-wing groups across platforms, and their circulation of memes, has also ended up reshaping the communication infrastructure: forcing platforms to engage in new forms of content moderation; spawning platforms with more “libertarian” ethos when deplatformed from the mainstream, etc. The forms of online organizing might be seen as reshaping online space as well as it is shaped by it.