Digital Age Technology and Nonviolence

This is an older blog post that I wrote on Microsoft Word because my Internet connection was acting funny at the time. It regards the talk we had with Sarah Worley about the "information age" and its implications on nonviolence.

One of the things that I found most striking about Sarah Worley's talk with the class on nonviolence in an information age was the fact that our toolbox for creating nonviolence has dramatically expanded. With this surge in the amount of information that can be transmitted and in the time that it takes to send it, there is a whole new medium for which activists can use to bring about nonviolence.

One of the strategies that we were talking about as a form of civil disobedience is hacking. Often times activists will hack onto a website and either change its content, disable it altogether, or redirect traffic to a different website. This is certainly a form of civil disobedience because it primarily uses the tactic of using extra-legal tactics to bring about social change. There is a facet of this form of activism that needs to be addressed in comparing it to other forms of civil disobedience. While to tools of hacking may be available to anyone willing to bring about change, the ability to hack is only centered in a small percentage of the population. Hacking is an art and a skill, and to be able to successfully bring about change through a tactic of hacking, an individual truly must have the skills in order to make the work meaningful. The vast majority of Internet users do not have the skills needed to participate in hacking as a form of activism. This seems in someway to violate some of Gandhi's notions that civil disobedience is accessible to anyone willing to accept to consequences. Clearly, hacking is not a tool for the masses but rather for a few small groups.

A huge problem with the Internet is the ability of those in control to stop any movement before it happens. While governments can do this too with other forms of nonviolence movements through arrests, executions, and torture, those in control on the Internet fully have the ability to just kick an agitator off of their website, forums, or network. This can be combatted using the fact that many websites on the Internet are companies, and the people have the ability to just stop using a website if it is not appeasing them. The capitalist nature of the Internet can give a special opportunity for activists to bring about social change, simply through boycotts of websites, it is shown to be able to convince the power structure on the Internet to change.