Re: Action? - Software for political protest (en)

Pierre Depaz This session will be a talk about the possibilities
for developing and using software in order to enable
pro-active political actions. Most of the technologies developed
recently for political and citizen action seems to actually be
developed for citizen re-action. Cryptography and privacy software
reacts to invasive government surveillance and corporate tracking.
Social media movements react to the biased information of the
mass media. Data visualizations react to the obfuscation of
actions, from drone strikes to the carbon footprints of server
farms. Bots spit out facts on the internet without directing them
specifically at anyone. In parallel, it seems that our current
tools of political protest (worker strikes, demonstrations, public
petitions, etc.) are not as effective as they once were. Recurrent
protest movements in western democracies such as the U.S (e.g.
the Black Lives Matter movement), in France (the Nuit Debout
movement), in Spain (Indignados) or in Greece have not had the
expected outcome of their organizers, failing to curb police
violence, states of emergency, austerity measures and
extra-territorial financial intervention. Once the protests die
down and the media attention goes away, it is business as usual. It
seems that those means for political action -violent, street-level
protest- have become less relevant in face of the shifting
structures of power they are meant to counter. It has become clear
now that those structures of power have become more and more
decentralized, less bound by specific physical nodes and more tied
to information relations, mostly through the development of digital
communication technology. Networked communications and social media
have had the same effect for political organizations, starting up
movements and uprisings such as the Arab Spring or the
Umbrella Revolution, and yet it does not seem to be enough to
change the long-term status quo of the balance of power. The
question I will be asking, then, is how can we also use these tools
to support active political protest so that we can, once again,
make them relevant to fight against the negative actions and
behaviours of the current political, economical and
technological authorities? This talk will first focus on
a historical account of how political actions have
evolved during the past century (from early european revolutions to
the Civil Rights Movement, the NetFlood Zapatista campaigns, Ocuppy
Wall Street and #BlackLivesMatter), and how some of them achieved
success for their agendas, and then focus on what is being done
today/what can be done in the future. As such, I will present
projects that are currently in development or are being developed
around the world to actively put pressure on them and return
agency to protesters as a group with legitimate political
demands instead of simply “protesters”. I will look at the
technical, legal and ethical implications of developing such tools
and the potential impact that they could have if political
activists could use software for action, on top of exclusively
re-action and organization.