Abstract

In ‘over-developed’ – or advanced capitalist – societies, digital media and networks have increasingly become a ‘battlefield’ where, following the emergence of novel power relations, new forms of resistance have come to the fore. Domination, discipline and power-over have not disappeared, but are aligned by new patterns of anticipatory control, governmentality and enslavement, which take advantage of the pervasiveness of media technologies. In parallel, political dissent and opposition begun to deploy media as ‘weapons’, moving beyond the simple use of media as communicational tools. This is, for instance, the case of media actions such as those organised by ‘Anonymous’, which increasingly exploit the performative capabilities of digital media and networks.
These forms of resistance are often activated by media practices that find their roots in hacking. However, the ‘hack’ (cornerstone of hacker cultures) – in its material application and potency of abstraction – very often sustains a state of individual creation, leading towards points of high, systemic efficiency (as the reorganisation of capital via ICT demonstrates). Moreover, the concept of resistance does not seem to have a good reputation in contemporary cultural theory: over-used and abused, it is frequently suggested as a reactionary disposition in a dualist opposition with power.
Without entering in the empirical details of my research, I suggest the idea of ‘hacktions’, proposing a theoretical reflection on the concept of resistance. Networked media actions as hacktions will be characterised through their affecting potential by considering Guattari’s ethical and aesthetical paradigms, which are useful when positing a de-individualised ‘creativity’ capable of questioning the individual, objective-oriented features of the hack, and pointing it towards ecological disruption(s). Finally, with the aim of activating (more than defining) the politics at stake in contemporary forms of digital dissent, I will read resistance (as critical) in vitalist terms, via some of the issues discussed by so-called ‘post-structuralist’ readers of Nietzsche and in particular Deleuze.