Abstract

In contemporary internetworked 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. Amongst these resistances, there are so-called ‘digital swarms’. This is a communicational disruption also technically known in computing as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS): a form of political dissent that, in the last years, hit back the headlines thanks to the digital media actions of Anonymous.

This paper addresses its attention on these forms of mediation, approaching the resistances of Anonymous via a media ecological and archaeological compass: a non-linear, cartographic method that genealogically stresses materiality and relationality. I argue that the forms of digital resistance at stake in such media actions cannot be read as an issue of obtaining attention through media visibility, and that the disruptions these originate cannot be accounted as mere metaphors of street political action, finding conversely their non-linear cultural history in other forms of media disruptiveness. As such, the key material and relational dimensions are acknowledged via the infrastructural character of disruptive mediations as well as via non-anthropomorphic patterns of enunciation, which enable – in a field that is micro-political – innovative, collective processes of subjectivation.