Abstract

Digital media and networks occupy an increasing central position within contemporary societies. This position does not simply involve communicational forms. From the turn of the millennium, phenomena of on- line activism have regularly emerged, bringing novel political forms of resistance to the fore. In academic literature, such phenomena are defined as ‘hacktivism’, putting hacker culture in contact with the politically motivated use of networked media by social movements. However, these scholarly perspectives often fail to deal sufficiently with the original forms of mediation that are at stake in hacktivist ‘deployments’ of media apparatuses.
Finding inspiration especially in the work of Félix Guattari, I propose a ‘machinic’ methodology able to deal with the relations and processes with which the act of researching is inescapably involved, overcoming the distances that epistemologically separate the subject from its objects of research. Hence, I originate a ‘method assemblage’ by combining emergent theories in the field of media and culture, and advancing a critical questioning on the same researching procedures. Linking media ecologies and archaeologies, the resulting creative method allows an approach to the case study of ‘Anonymous’ through a novel critical compass. The original creation of the method aims to study without foreclosing the heterogeneous forms of active resistance actualised through media technologies. I suggest that the short-term, transient character of contemporary forms of resistance does not lack political efficacy. Rather hacktivism has to be reconsidered in vital terms beyond representation, within a field that is ‘micro-political’ and materially involves novel processes of subjectivation and disruptiveness.