The previous chapters discussed two general types of cyber attack, namely sabotage and espionage. The third remaining offensive activity is subversion. Subversion was one of the most complex and intellectually challenging political phenomena long before the arrival of modern telecommunication. But the Internet and the commoditization of telecommunication are changing the nature of subversion, making it even more complex. As a consequence, this chapter, more than the two previous chapters, is only able to scratch the surface of a much deeper subject. Remarkably, that subject has received comparatively little recent scholarly attention. But by focusing on subversion, and not on insurgency or terrorism, the following paragraphs open fresh perspectives on past examples that help to understand the likely lifespan and endurance of resistance movements in a networked present and an even more networked future.
The first dozen years of the twenty-first century have seen an explosion in protest and political violence. The most extreme and cataclysmic expression of this trend was al-Qaeda’s attack on New York’s World Trade Center. One decade later, and only across the street in Zuccotti Park, yet in many ways on the opposite end of the spectrum, rose the Occupy Wall Street movement. The panoply of subversive movements in-between includes Arab youth triggering uprisings against despised despots, the alter-globalization movement, animal rights activists, anonymous hacktivists, and assorted social media-enabled protest movements in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere. At first glance these phenomena have little in common: some are seen as a righteous force for progress and overdue change—others as an expression of perfidy, barbarism, and regression.
Yet at second glance these diverse examples have at least two common characteristics to all observers, regardless of their allegiances. The first is that they all share the goal of undermining the authority of an existing order. Activists in any of these examples may not share one vision of what the despised existing order should be replaced by, but they share the belief that the establishment should be forced to change its ways, if not its constitutional setup. Whether extreme or mainstream, whether peaceful or violent, whether legal or criminal, whether progressive or regressive, these movements were all subversive. The second common characteristic is that all these movements or groups benefited to a certain degree from new communication technologies. Taking action seems to have been enabled, at least initially, by the newfound ability to send and receive information, often interactively and often personal, on platforms that were no longer controlled by the very establishment the activists were up against, like their country’s mainstream media, state-run or not. Whether radical or conventional, whether non-violent or militant, whether legitimate or outcast, these movements all had a virtual trait.1 This chapter proceeds from the assumption that new subversive movements in a networked twenty-first-century context merit a general discussion: cyberspace is changing the nature of subversion, both to the benefit and to the chagrin of activists and militants.
Subversion is an old idea that arose in Europe’s own democratic revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its virtual dimension was added only 200 years later, with the emergence of the interactive Internet at the turn of the twenty-first century. The concept is time-tested, nimble, and remarkably fruitful: subversion is not necessarily focused on violence and counter-force, and may therefore overcome the inadequate terminology of victory and defeat. Once subversion is conceptually fleshed out, a number of illuminating questions become visible: how is it possible to distinguish between regenerative and more radical subversion? When is subversion likely to become violent? And under what conditions is subversion likely to lose momentum, peter out, and disappear again?
This chapter argues that networked computers and the commoditization of consumer electronics have affected subversion in one overarching way: the early phases of subversively undermining established authority and collective trust require less violence than they did before. Launching a subversive “start-up” has therefore become easier—but technology has a darker flipside for those attempting to undermine established powers. Turning this subversive start-up into a successful insurgent or revolutionary “enterprise” has become more difficult. Technology, in short, has lowered the entry costs but raised the threshold for success.
Pointing out three conceptual strengths of subversion plus three hypotheses will outline the argument. The first strength is that the notion of subversion is much older and better established than its more narrow-minded recent rivals. The second strength is that subversion takes the debate beyond a counter-productive focus on violence. The concept’s third strength is that it is able to grasp the phenomenon of limited goals and motivations. From these rather uncontroversial insights follow three more provocative hypotheses, each of which will be illustrated with one or more examples of recent subversive movements that were influenced by networked communication technology to some degree. The first hypothesis is that new technologies have enabled a proliferation of subversive causes and ideas, leading to a larger supply of subversive ideas, and to a more diversified landscape of subversive entrepreneurs and start-ups: subversion, in short, has become more cause-driven. The second hypothesis holds that new technologies have made it easier to join a subversive cause, and they have also made it easier to stop subversive activity again: subversion, consequently, is seeing higher levels of membership-mobility. The third hypothesis is that technology is enabling new forms of global and participant-driven organization—and that has made it more difficult for subversive movements to establish organizational discipline and trust, features that are enabled by what legal theorists call an internal coercive order: Internet-driven subversion, therefore, is characterized by lower levels of organizational control. Each of these three changes comes with advantages as well as disadvantages for subversives. The balance sheet, and whether the bottom line is red or black, may depend on the political environment of the subversive activity, whether it takes place in the context of a liberal democracy or under authoritarian rule.
A brief word of caution on methodology is necessary here: the examples used to illustrate this chapter’s argument—such as the antiglobalization movement, Anonymous, or online organizations that helped spark the 2011 Egyptian Revolution—are far more complex subjects than the discussion of single instances of malicious programs in previous chapters. They are multi-layered social and political phenomena that were, to a certain extent, enabled or influenced by technological innovations. And studying social phenomena is often harder than studying technology. What follows are therefore mere illustrations and examples to demonstrate very specific points, not full-blown case studies.
Subversion is the deliberate attempt to undermine the trustworthiness, the integrity, and the constitution of an established authority or order. The ultimate goal of subversion may be overthrowing a society’s established government. But subversive activity often has more limited causes, such as undermining and eroding an organization’s or even a person’s authority. The modus operandi of subversive activity is eroding social bonds, beliefs, and trust in state and other collective entities. The means used in subversion may not always include overt violence. One common tool of subversive activity is media work, such as writing pamphlets and literature, and producing art and film. Naturally, the rise of social media and Web 2.0 has greatly facilitated the subversive tactics of public outreach. Influencing the loyalties and the trust of individuals and uncommitted bystanders provides the vehicle for subversion to take place, not influencing technical systems. Human minds are the targets, not machines.
Subversion, as a concept, is much older than insurgency or terrorism. Yet for many observers and some contemporary historians it misleadingly conveys a mid-twentieth-century feel. Indeed, the term arose—again—in the 1950s and 1960s, when the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States resulted in global proxy conflicts where both sides employed all means at their disposal to undermine the influence of the other ideological bloc. Subversion was one of those means, applied by one state clandestinely against the established order in another state. But historically, the heyday of subversion was much earlier (Figure 1).
The concept of subversion came to be used more widely in the English language around the time of the French Revolution of 1789 and the crushed Irish Rebellion of 1798. Many words alter their meaning over the course of time. But subversion did not significantly change its meaning. “To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our country,” wrote the Irish statesman and orator Edmund Burke in his famous conservative manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). And he added that “no common reasons are called for to justify so violent a proceeding.”3 It is noteworthy to point out that, for Burke, subversion included violent action. The term, like sabotage and espionage, was imported into the English language via the French. It was already in widespread use before Paris descended into insurrection, mutiny and then civil war in the 1780s. In earlier sources, to subvert was to overthrow, to overturn, and to corrupt, said one authoritative dictionary of the English language of 1768.4 A thesaurus of 1806 gave the synonyms: overthrow, destruction, ruin, end.5 (The term “insurgency” was not in common English use at the time and does not appear in historic dictionaries.) A book about George III, who reigned in Britain in turbulent times from 1760 to 1820, has several fleeting remarks about attempts at subversion: of the government, of the state, of the constitution, and of the “established faith.”6 Military jargon had a similar understanding. One military dictionary of 1810 compiled by Charles James, a major in the Royal Artillery Drivers, described subversion as “a state of total disorder and indiscipline; generally produced by a neglect of small faults at the beginning, and a gradual introduction of every sort of military insubordination.”7
Figure 1: Semantic rise and fall of the terms “subversion,” “insurgency,” and “terrorism.” Source Google Ngram Viewer.2
Over the course of the next century, subversion boomed. Europe’s anciens régimes would be unsettled and its populations uprooted again and again by rival political ideologies, expressing themselves in agitation, violence, and revolution. By the turn of the century the geopolitical balance of power slowly began to shift to the New World, as America’s economy bloomed and expanded rapidly. The United States grew into a capitalist giant thanks in part to the hard labor of European immigrants who filled its factories and mines. Many of these workers had experienced oppression under Europe’s kings and czars, and they brought with them radical and utopian ideologies from Italy, Russia, Germany, and France. Not without justification, America’s political establishment feared the specter of subversion. “The time of the great social revolutions has arrived,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt in 1895. That year the future president served as police commissioner in New York City, “We are all peering into the future to try to forecast the action of the great dumb forces set in operation by the stupendous industrial revolution,” he wrote.8 One year earlier, activists representing one of those dumb forces—anarchism—had assassinated the president of France. Several heads of state would die at the hands of anarchists over the next six years, including Roosevelt’s predecessor as America’s president, William McKinley, who was killed in 1901. A little more than a century after McKinley’s assassination, it was the stupendous information revolution that was again setting in operation great forces that toppled heads of states and removed anciens regimes, this time across the Middle East. And we are again peering into the future to try to forecast the course of action of these subversive forces.
Subversion is not just older than insurgency. It is important to note that subversion is a broader concept than insurgency. The most prominent aspect is that subversion goes beyond violence, that the concept has not merely a military meaning, but also a political and philosophical one. To date, military writers and security scholars neglect this aspect. But for this very reason the security literature is a helpful point of departure. One useful author on subversion was Frank Kitson, a well-known British general who had seen action in the Kenyan Mau Mau Uprising, the Malayan Emergency, and in Northern Ireland. Kitson defined subversion in a narrow and rather linear way as “all illegal measures short of the use of armed force,”9 essentially as non-violent political crime. A subversive campaign of non-violence, Kitson argued, may fall into one of three classes: it may be intended as a stand-alone instrument, without ever becoming violent; it may be intended to be used in conjunction with full-scale insurgency, for instance to divert limited government assets away from another, more violent battle; or subversive action may be intended as a phase in a larger progression towards a more intensive violent insurrection.10 Kitson aptly recognized that subversion is much broader than insurgency, but like great military writers before him who highlighted political aspects of war, he had precious little to say about these broader political aspects, let alone the social and cultural aspects.11 By defining subversion as illegal yet non-violent, the British general maneuvered himself into conceptually murky territory that is difficult to reconcile with an open and democratic political order, as will become evident shortly.
Kitson’s narrow take on subversion may be contrasted, for maximum effect, with the views of one of his contemporaries, Johannes Agnoli (both were born in the mid-1920s). Agnoli was a Marxist professor at Freie Universität Berlin and one of the intellectual forebears of the 1968 student revolt. In a final lecture series before retirement in 1991, Agnoli grandly attempted to draw a positive theory and history of subversion, from “paradise” to the French Revolution.12 He depicted Eve as the mother of subversion. It was Eve, derived from Adam’s rib, which was in turn derived from God, who heard the voice of reason and subverted the two layers of hierarchy that had created her. Not God and not Man, but the subversive Eve, for the first time, made the step from the unconscious to the conscious, from mythos to logos, from object to subject.13 The strongly left-leaning intellectual professor in Berlin was unabashedly in favor of subverting the West German government and society in the 1970s. Yet dismissing Agnoli’s ideas and his impressive analysis would be just as naïve as some of his radical students probably were. One of the professor’s prime questions was the nature of subversion, of “the thing itself,” as he called it with awe. Should subversion be understood as action, as praxis? Or should it be understood as reflection, as thinking about something, about “the conditions that aren’t,” as he quoted from Bertold Brecht’s refrain in the 1928 play Dreigroschenoper?14 “The utopic is always blended into the subversive,” he wrote.15 He understood utopia as a hope toward a better life, as a dream. If there was no utopia, Agnoli argued, then the human side of society would disappear. By that he meant a humanity that wouldn’t limit itself to pity and merciful philanthropy, but a humanity that is fighting for its freedom and its happiness. “Those who declare the end of utopia while criminalizing the subversive,” Agnoli wrote, “want to prevent the possibility of progress.”16 Refusing such progress and innovation would be “pissing thought,”17 the Berlin professor deadpanned in reference to Hegel. The German idealist philosopher once compared the creation of new consciousness (Bewußtsein) and novel thought with siring new life—and staying within the boundaries of a used framework with “pissing.”18 Even after only superficially comparing Kitson’s and Agnoli’s ideas, it is easy to see how subversion as a broad and overarching political idea appeals more to those in favor of change, perhaps even radical change, than to those in favor of keeping the social order as it is or as it has been. For Agnoli, Kitson’s book must have oozed the smell of stale urine.
A third aspect is that subversion usually has more limited goals than insurgency. Insurgency and revolution are only the most extreme forms of subversive activity. And insurgents and revolutionaries, by implication, have the goal of overthrowing the government and putting in place a revolutionary regime. Subversives, by contrast, tend to have more limited causes, such as undermining and eroding an organization’s or even a person’s authority. The modus operandi of subversive activity is eroding social bonds, beliefs, and trust in a government, a company, or other collective entities. The means used in subversion may not always include overt violence. The vehicle of subversion is always influencing the worldviews and loyalties of individuals and uncommitted bystanders, the way they interpret relationships of authority and power vis-à-vis their own political, social, and economic situation. The purpose of subversion is to make resistance more likely, be it non-violent or violent. If violence is used, decision-makers are the prime targets, not technical systems. In other words: even when violence, sabotage, or arson is explicitly targeted at technical installations or property, not people, it is the mind and the cost–benefit calculations of politicians, owners, managers, or consumers that is the actual target of such attacks.
A subversive movement may fail to progress and mature into a full-fledged insurgent group not for lack of strength, but for lack of intention, even when some more extreme members and cells resort to systematic violence. Activists may simply not want to make revolution. Indeed, historical examples of regime change or revolution through non-violent subversion alone are extraordinarily rare.19 Again it is useful to consider Kitson, who aptly pointed out that the goal of subversion may either be overthrowing an established economic or governmental order—or “to force them to do things they do not want to do.”20 The first objective is revolutionary and existential; the second objective is evolutionary and pragmatic. Here one of the main defining features of subversion becomes visible. The objective of insurgency is always to overthrow an existing order, nothing less. The objective of a subversive movement is attempting to change an organization’s behavior, but not attempting to overthrow an existing order. Subversion, in short, can be limited to forcing those in power to do things they do not want to do, rather than to force them out. Yet radical activists may well resort to systematic violence. Subversion can therefore take two principal forms: it may be intended as a non-violent prelude to insurrection and revolution, or it may evolve into a campaign with a non-revolutionary dynamic, be it violent or non-violent.21
A good example of this logic of limited ambitions is the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a well-established and influential subversive movement originally based mainly in Britain and the United States, but with some activists scattered across the globe. The ELF illustrates that even an amorphous group without leadership and hierarchy can limit its goals as well as its tactics, in this case to violence against inanimate objects.
The Earth Liberation Front was launched in 1992 in Brighton, England, as an offshoot of the larger movement “Earth First!” The ELF had its most active phase in the mid-2000s. The elves, as its members affectionately referred to themselves, engaged in ecotage, a pun on sabotage. The movement initially benefited from academic participation, with book authors and scholars mobilizing for the elves’ cause.22 The movement—dubbed “eco-terrorism” by its critics—had a clear ideology and a powerful cause: defending the planet and stopping the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. The destruction of the environment, the ELF’s propaganda reasoned, was driven by the pursuit of monetary gain, by corporations and by the governments that allow these corporations to continue. In principle, this cause spoke to a very large constituency in many countries. The ELF’s amorphous organizational form reflected its potentially broad appeal. The movement relied on a leaderless resistance model with “no discernable organizational structure,” one of the most detailed academic studies of the “elves” pointed out.23 The activists’ website says it is an “international, underground movement consisting of autonomous groups of people.” The radical green activists formed a cell structure, based on a shared ideology, but not much more. Activists remained largely unknown to each other. Instead of relying on clear lines of command and internal discipline, the movement relied on members “who understand the organization’s goals and orientation to take action on their own initiative.”24 The organization operated with “no central leadership, no hierarchy, no membership databases, but a rather strict adherence to a set of very basic guidelines.”25 These rules were three in number. The first was to educate the public on the “atrocities” committed against the environment and all the species that cohabitate in it. This amounted to a built-in reminder not to forget to market the cause. The second rule concerned the use of violence and specific targets, “to inflict maximum economic damage” on all those who profit from environmental destruction.
The third guideline was especially noteworthy: to take “all necessary precautions against harming any animal—human or non-human.”26 Taking these rules seriously means limiting the form of activism to economic damage, not damage in life. The elves are known to have staged attacks in more than a dozen countries. Violent attacks have targeted developers, logging companies, those engaged in genetic engineering research, ski resorts, and even SUV dealerships. The amount of property damage caused by the radical environmentalists is remarkable.27 In the five-year period between 1996 and 2001, one of the movement’s cells, called “The Family,” inflicted damages as high as $80 million against federal land and animal management sites, meat-packing plants, lumber facilities, and car dealerships. The cell’s most high-profile “direct actions” were a $12-million arson at the Vail Ski Resort in Colorado in 1998 and the sabotage of a high-tension power line near Bend, Oregon, in the following year. Since 1997, the Earth Liberation Front claims to have inflicted damage totaling well over $150 million worldwide. Yet, “in the history of the ELF internationally no one has been injured from the group’s actions and that is not a coincidence,” as the group’s Frequently Asked Questions point out.28 The elves took care to walk a fine but clearly demarcated line: labs, research facilities, and company infrastructure were legitimate targets, while workers and managers were not: “we want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.”29
The ELF, like many subversive movements that gravitate towards violence, is a highly diverse and fractured movement. This effect is enhanced by the movement’s non-hierarchical setup as well as by an absence of consensual decision-making, in contrast to Earth First! There are, therefore, more radical streaks within the movement that embraced revolutionary rhetoric, albeit without attempting to turn the revolutionary vision into reality.30 By and large, the ELF seems to be subversive and to have embraced violence against property—but at the same time the movement is limited; it is subversive but not revolutionary, and its violence carefully avoids targeting human beings. Radical environmentalism and the ELF predate the broad use of the Internet, and in contrast to other subversive movements it was not enabled by new technologies. But new technologies drastically enhanced one feature that the elves also grappled with: diverse causes.
The more technologically sophisticated a subversive movement and its targeted constituencies, the more cause-driven it is likely to become. One of the key drivers behind this dynamic is collective emotion. The concept of “cyber war” is inept and imprecise. But other classic concepts of the study of war retain their relevance and pertinence for the study of cyber offenses. Clausewitz, and many other strategic thinkers, consistently highlighted the role of passions and emotions in conflict, be it regular or irregular conflict. “The intensity of action,” Clausewitz observed, “is a function of the motive’s strength that is driving the action.” That motive may be a rational calculation or it may be emotional indignation (Gemütserregung), he added. “If power is meant to be great, the latter can hardly be missing.”31 Subversion, like insurgency, is driven by strong motives that mobilize supporters, volunteers, and activists and, if violence comes into play, justify why fighters and insurgents would take up arms and possibly kill civilians. Another revered military thinker, David Galula, described the driving force behind an insurgent group as the cause. An insurgency’s treasure would be a “monopoly of a dynamic cause,” wrote the French expert of counterrevolutionary war in the 1960s.32 But fifty years later, the demise of grand ideologies33 and the rise of highly networked movements have altered the logic of dynamic causes. Rather than grand narratives, it is highly specific issues that are likely to mobilize a critical mass of enraged activists, if only temporarily. This dynamic has a flipside: the monopoly over a dynamic cause is replaced by a dynamic market of causes. Individuals and small groups may join a movement for their own individual reasons. These individual causes may have a strong emotional draw, but that benefit comes at the cost of coordination, coherence, and unity.
Perhaps the most insightful example of cause-driven subversion is the rise and decline of the anti-globalization movement, a left-leaning international protest movement that climaxed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Globalization became a widely used buzzword in the early 1990s. For many, globalization was equivalent to economic globalization. And economic globalization soon stood for the increasing liberalization of goods and services, unfettered capitalism, the power of multinational corporations, and regimes of global governance put in place to perpetuate a system that seemed unjust and oppressive to many. The globalization critics identified the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank as their main targets, along with a much-hated multilateral agreement on investment, the MAI. The anti-globalization movement understood itself as a counter-ideology. Globalization from above, as some activists saw it, needed to be resisted by globalization from below.
Initially, the movement was driven by the excitement of large, international protest events. One of the most visible founding events, the Carnival Against Capital, was held in Cologne, Germany, on 18 June 1999, and is therefore known as “J18”. Simultaneous events in the City of London and Oregon helped galvanize international media attention. The international day of protest had the rallying cry, “Our resistance is as transnational as capital.”34 Perhaps the most memorable event in the short history of the anti-globalization movement was a march on Seattle in November and December 1999. The magnet for the protest was a World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Approximately 50,000 people took to the streets of downtown Seattle, a mid-size city of 600,000. On the morning of a cold and rainy Tuesday, 30 November, the “Battle of Seattle” began to unfold. The large number of demonstrators caught the city’s security agencies off-guard and effectively shut down the conference by blocking the Seattle Convention Center. The police resorted to tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests. “N30,” as the November day is known among protesters, became symbolic for the anti-globalization movement and helped mobilize follow-on events.
Two things leaped to the eye. The first was the movement’s diversity. N30 did not just catch the authorities off-guard; it also caught those with a subversive agenda off-guard. The diversity of this early twenty-first-century phenomenon surprised even the organizers. At the time Carl Pope was the executive director of the Sierra Club, America’s oldest grassroots environmental organization founded in 1892. “From my perspective, and I came out of the ‘60s, Seattle was the first time when you saw multi-generation, multi-class, and multi-issue in the streets together,” Pope told Time magazine shortly after Seattle.35 The banner of “anti-globalization” seemingly united a motley crew of activists: environmentalists of various shades, animal rights activists, union members, human rights advocates, anarchists of different stripes, even participants from the White supremacist scene. More than 600 groups, out of a total 15,000 participants, converged on Washington, D.C. in April 2000 in an event known as A16. The groups ranged from Greenpeace, one of the most established groups, to the Third Position, a curious mix of anarchist left and right positions and one of the more violent outfits.36 The combination of such a sundry set of small groups into a larger movement resulted in a swirl of media attention and political responses. This visibility, in turn, created an impression of power that far exceeded what any single group could accomplish. CSIS, the Canadian intelligence service, summed up this dynamic in a report published shortly after Seattle:
The melding of the various groups into one large body implies power, and attracts attention and publicity, which, in turn, draws more and more participants. Many groups and individuals take part largely because of the ensuing attention and publicity, almost in the manner of self-generating growth.37
Some groups united under the anti-globalization umbrella frequently changed their names. Also, individual activists may have been members of more than one group or changed membership as a group stopped operating for one reason or the other. It was not the mode of organization that matters most, but the underlying psychological forces of activism, “Of more importance are the causes and motivations per se,” the Canadian intelligence analysts observed. The activists’ positive visions and ideals included fairer trade, more organic products, improved labor conditions in developing countries, corporate social responsibility, advancements of human rights, green energy, sustainable development, global justice, gay rights, feminism, and more.
But this diversity had a thorny side-effect: it diluted the movement. More causes meant less content. The result was empty slogans. “Another world is possible” was the motto of Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the first World Social Forum was held in late January 2001. For a few years, the meetings became counter-events to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which the critics saw as the embodiment of global capitalism. In Porto Alegre, various committees approved a so-called charter of principles later in 2001. The meeting, the charter said, was a place for:
groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Mankind and between it and the Earth.38
This statement was so general and broad as to be nearly meaningless. But its authors had little choice. The principles expressed in the document needed to be all-inclusive in order to offer a roof to anybody who self-identified with what had become a global network of protest. Building a planetary society and organizing for fruitful relationships among mankind and the earth seemed to do the trick. This leads to the second noteworthy feature.
The rise of the popular anti-globalization network curiously coincided with the rise of another popular global network: the Internet. Many activists, young and with experimental lifestyles, were early technology adopters. Naturally, they suspected a correlation between the new technologies and the new ideas they embraced so passionately. One example is Evan Henshaw-Plath, founder of the then-popular site http://protest.net. Shortly after Christmas 2001, Henshaw-Plath gave an interview to a graduate student. He commented on the relationship between the web and the movement, and mused that the former had enabled the latter:
The anti-globalization movement could not exist without the Internet. This is not to say that we wouldn’t be struggling over similar issues but the movement that we have now wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be making the connections and coalitions. We couldn’t organize such massive coalitions with almost non-existent overhead if we didn’t have email mailing lists and websites. I think the tactics of having very large broad protests with indymedia centers, conference spaces, counter conferences, legal protests, illegal protests, and direct action wouldn’t be possible without the net.39
Henshaw-Plath probably overstated the point. The anti-globalization movement could probably exist without the Internet. The question was how the new media affected political activism. That question, how the global Internet impacted on the anti-globalization movement, naturally became a sexy topic for sociologists and political scientists, many of whom at least sympathized with the protesters.40 One assumption was that the new media facilitated participation, “Political action is made easier, faster and more universal by the developing technologies,” one widely read article argued in 2002. New information technologies would “lower the costs and obstacles of organizing collective action significantly.”41 By following simple yet detailed guidelines, the article continued, “all supporters can easily become real participants.”42 The dotcom bubble, it seemed, had not burst in academia, where enthusiasm for the positive and possibly revolutionary impact of new information technologies refused to go away.43 The Internet, many sociologists argued, enabled a collective identity, effective mobilization of participants, and the ability to network the organizations into a larger movement that would be more reactive as a result. Until the early 1990s, big hierarchical groups had a “fundamental” advantage, another prominent article argued in 2006. But by then, a decade later, the comparative advantage had shifted. “In the Internet age, the transaction costs of communicating to large audiences, of networking, and of working transnationally have diminished,” wrote one World Bank-based researcher about the anti-globalization movement, “while the advantages of nimbleness—of being able to respond swiftly to events as they unfold—have grown.”44 As entry costs and organizational costs are lowered, new entrants, groups outside the establishment of public institutions, such as parties, labor organizations, or unions, would benefit most in relative terms. By 2006, Twitter was founded and Facebook had opened to the public. The web continued to inspire entrepreneurs, politicians, academics, and activists. Social media had lowered the cost of organizing collective action, thus drastically increasing the number of people who would actively contribute to society and politics, and not just passively consume information as “couch potatoes,” a prominent web evangelist, Clay Shirky, argued in 2010.45 But by then the anti-globalization movement had again outpaced sociological scholarship: the movement, despite its “fundamental advantage,” had quietly disappeared from the planetary stage. By the end of the 2000s, a decade after the Battle of Seattle, the fighters for global justice had scattered—this did not happen despite the rise of the Internet, but at least partly because of the rise of the Internet. To understand why, another subtle change of twenty-first-century subversion has to be considered.
These considerations about a proliferation of small causes lead to the second hypothesis: the more a subversive movement relies on multiple causes, new technologies, and networked communications, the more likely it is that this movement will be characterized by high membership mobility. At closer examination, several factors that go beyond the attractiveness of a dynamic cause increase the number and the frequency of members joining a new movement: the ease of finding out about the movement and its cause; the opportunity to participate at low costs; and the benefits of participation. One overarching factor, by contrast, is likely to determine whether participants terminate their subversive activity, independent of success or failure: the costs of ending the participation and leaving the “movement.” Of course other considerations influence an individual’s decision to continue supporting a subversive cause, for instance whether the movement is making progress, whether it has achieved any results, whether participation pays off in one way or the other, or whether there are other competing movements or better ways to make a difference. But all these motivations are contingent on the costs of leaving. In some cases, the increased ease of temporarily joining a movement and leaving that movement again represents a hard challenge to the leaders and organizers of subversive action.
An insightful example of high membership mobility is Anonymous, a loose and largely leaderless movement of activists that became visible to the larger public in 2008. The movement’s activities initially took place only online. These activities could be legal or illegal, for instance hacking into protected computer networks. But Anonymous’s activities remained entirely non-violent, in contrast to its brick-and-mortar predecessors like the ELF or the anti-globalization movement. Supporters concealed their identities and rallied around self-defined causes, often promoting free speech, agitating against censorship and government oppression. The movement’s motto was frequently posted at the end of announcements: We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. By late 2010, Anonymous had become to protest what Wikipedia was for encyclopedias and Linux for software; an improved, open, and crowd-produced alternative: nimble and effective to the point of appearing dangerous to the establishment. That, at least, is how enthusiastic sympathizers and frightened critics alike saw the phenomenon. By mid-2011, Anonymous seemed to have peaked. A closer look at this curious movement exposes three tender spots that are of general interest for the study of subversive social movements.
The first feature is the movement’s internal fissures and contradictions. Anonymous has, in simplified terms, two main streaks that reflect the movement’s lopsided rise: crude entertainment and political activism. Anonymous initially rose from the raunchy online message board 4chan, an online platform and image board with forced anonymity visited by more than 20 million unique visitors a month. The original activists were in it for the laughs, the “lulz.” Lulz is a concept related to Schadenfreude, derived from a plural of “lol,” which stands for laugh-out-loud.46 An example was Anonymous’s “YouTube porn day,” a concerted prankster raid on 20 May 2009 where hundreds of pornographic videos were defiantly uploaded to the popular video-sharing site to retaliate against Google’s removal of music videos.47 In a video titled “Jonas Brother Live On Stage,” a viewer commented: “I’m 12 years old and what is this?” The phrase, quoted in a BBC story, went on to become an Internet meme. Such trolling didn’t need to have any social or political dimension. It could just be crude and mean and entertaining. For instance “doxing” an innocent victim by hacking or tricking him or her and then posting embarrassing private pictures, ideally of body parts, on /b/, 4chan’s most popular and unmoderated forum, or on the victim’s Facebook wall, for family and friends to see.48
On the other side of that internal divide are those who are genuinely driven by a political cause. Those who disagree with the ethics of this or that prank are called “moralfags” on /b/. This slur is also applied to politically motivated activism. One of the early major campaigns became known as “Project Chanology.” The op’s name was a portmanteau of 4chan and the name of the target, the Church of Scientology. Chanology was triggered by Scientology’s attempt to get YouTube to remove a weird promotional video with Tom Cruise that had allegedly been leaked and edited. Anonymous initially reacted with DDoS attacks on Scientology’s website, but it soon expanded the campaign. The Internet collective launched the operation publicly with its own YouTube video on 21 January 2008.49 The high point of the Anonymous campaign was the wave of demonstrations that took place in front of the sect’s main centers worldwide. The protesters wore the now-famous Guy Fawkes masks, adopted from the film V for Vendetta. The global turnout on 10 February 2008 may have been as high as 8,000 protesters. The campaign was widely covered in the international press. “Oh fuck,” one famous photo of a group of anti-Scientology protesters read, “The Internet is here.” Scientology noticed that the Internet was here in unexpected ways: by receiving large numbers of unpaid pizzas, black faxes to drain printer cartridges, unwanted taxis, and prank calls. Some of the lulzy operations had a shallow political dimension, as the YouTube-porn day illustrates, and some of the political activism has retained an amusing side, as the Chanology shows. This mix was a recipe for success, and temporarily bridged the internal divide among the “Anons.”
The second feature is the movement’s low internal visibility. In late November 2010, the crowd on 4chan’s /b/ board was again jolted into action. After WikiLeaks published secret US diplomatic cables, PayPal and other financial firms announced that they would block payments to the whistleblowing start-up. Anonymous staged a few high-profile DDoS attacks in defense of Julian Assange’s outfit, most notably against PayPal, Visa, and Postfinance, a leading Swiss bank. Operation Payback, as it was known, received wide attention in the international press and Anonymous’s channels on Internet Relay Chat, better known by its acronym IRC, were brimming with new members. A number of follow-on operations, most notably the hacking of HBGary Federal, further increased the group’s visibility. Policy-makers began to be concerned about the dangerous hacker collective. Scholars and PhD students started dissecting the phenomenon. Books were published.50 But this high public visibility of Anonymous contrasted sharply with a low internal visibility for those who decided to participate in its activities. A multitude of platforms, IRC channels, changing pseudonyms, and simultaneous communication in high volumes made understanding what was going on a challenge. Anonymous activists, naturally, remain anonymous—also amongst each other. This lack of visibility means that participants may not know how many people join an operation, why they join an operation, and most importantly who they really are. This situation, combined with the knowledge that many hacks and DDoS attacks were illegal, ultimately created distrust, paranoia, and fragility.
The third feature is Anonymous’s myth-making. Many part-time participants in Anonymous’s operations share a core tenet: the belief in the power of the collective, the “hive mind” or just “the hive.” This vision of the collective is an old and appealing one. Anonymous’s participants see themselves as a veritable popular force, as the masses of the web, a powerful sum of elements that would be weaker individually. Plus anonymity seemed to be the ultimate form of egalitarianism: everybody could be anybody, without hierarchy, without titles or degrees. The epitome of the hive was a voluntary Denial of Service Attack, with thousands of individuals joining a Twitter-coordinated collective attack against unsuspecting targets. To stimulate the hive mind, the virtual “weapons” would have fancy names like Warbot, Russkill, Good Bye v3.0, or—to name an initially popular tool—the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, the LOIC.51 The problem was: hive-distributed denial of service attacks were far less effective than many assumed. The collective DDoS attack on PayPal.com on 8 December 2010 illustrates this. On that day about 4,500 participants who had downloaded the LOIC and set it on the “hive option” joined the collective to take down the payment service provider who had been critical of WikiLeaks. But when Twitter and 4chan exploded with excited posts of “*FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE*,” nothing happened. Only when one botnet operator joined the attack by commandeering more than 30,000 zombie computers to contribute did PayPal’s website go down. The legitimate owners of these many thousands of hijacked computers did of course not know that the temporary slowdown of their Internet connection meant they were participating in an attack on PayPal.52 The Anonymous hive, likewise, did not know that one single botnet operator outgunned them nearly ten-to-one. Remarkably, a tiny elite of Anonymous hackers did not want to discourage the collective by mentioning the botnets. The myth of the hive may be misleading, but it is also very powerful. It kept morale high—but it also ensured that there was fluctuation among the participants. “What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and organic political evolution,” wrote Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who has tracked the Anonymous phenomenon for many years. The movement has neither a strategy nor structures in place that could set a strategy. It is tactically driven. “Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program,” Coleman observed.53 This observation leads to the final thesis.
The third hypothesis follows from the preceding theoretical and empirical observations on subversion: the more a subversive movement relies on new technologies and networked communications, the more difficult it will be to establish an internal coercive order. An internal coercive order must not always express itself in actual acts of punishment, as the chapter on violence explored in some detail. But the knowledge of such an enforced order is what endows rules and guidelines of behavior with authority—it is this internal order that differentiates a movement from a group. Enforced orders also enable strategic decisions by preventing random membership mobility and thus facilitating a coherent purpose that may overcome a movement’s cause-driven character.
For any subversive movement, there are two principal sources of cohesion, an internal coercive order or external coercion. An extreme example of the former, internal enforcement, is a drug cartel or a mafia organization: even if a disillusioned member decides to leave his or her group by cooperating with law enforcement, they would still have to fear the group’s punishment—that punishment is an expression of the group’s ability to maintain an internal coercive order. The other source of cohesion, paradoxically, is the strength of the established system that a subversive movement is up against. But as soon as the despised coercive order collapses, the frail unity of a web-enabled movement is likely to collapse as well. Online subversion may facilitate the goal of collectively undermining trust in an established order, but it may also obstruct the broader aim of collectively establishing trust in the new order that is to be put in its place.
Powerful examples can be found in the way the Arab Spring of 2011 was triggered. Initially the Arab youth movements that shattered the established order in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere had a strong web presence on social media platforms. One example from Egypt, the second country to revolt against its old regime, is instructive. Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian Google marketing executive who was based in Dubai at the time, offered an inside view of one of the Facebook groups that helped trigger the revolution of 25 January 2011 in an autobiographical book, Revolution 2.0.54 Ghonim had been the administrator of Kullena Khaled Said, a Facebook group that formed spontaneously in order to protest against the fatal beating of a young Egyptian man at the hands of the secret police. In the early subversive stages of what would later become a revolution, Internet forums, but mostly Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter, helped coordinate small activities, such as a human chain along the corniche in Alexandria and “silent stands” of protestors, dressed in black. The social network offered a platform for planning as well as after-action-deliberation. Some posts later received thousands of “likes” and comments, and hundreds of thousands read the messages.55 But most importantly, Facebook helped middle-class Egyptians understand that they were not alone in their frustration, and that there was a real potential to stage protests that were too large for the government to suppress by force. The majority of Egyptian Facebook users joined the online protest under their real names, by becoming a “member” of a specific Facebook group, by “liking” that group’s status update, or by writing a short comment—such small expressions of solidarity were not enough to jolt the security forces into action (if they even noticed).
But such small expressions of solidarity were enough to begin undermining the trust that many if not most Egyptians had in the efficiency of the secret police, the confidence they had in the efficiency of the state’s coercive order—or, put inversely, it increased the prospective protesters’ confidence in the uprising. The Facebook coordination combined a potent mix of anonymity and real names: the moderators of various Facebook groups that helped spark the unrest remained anonymous, trying to evade the prying eyes of the state’s security forces, but the mass of those who “liked” the posts and commented were not anonymous. Real names lent a reality and urgency to the phenomenon that would have been difficult to achieve anonymously. On 25 January, protesters had planned to take to the streets and to Tahrir Square for the first time in very large numbers. Going to that preannounced demonstration meant taking considerable personal risk. The authoritarian regime would not stand idly by, and had mobilized large numbers of security forces. The hope of the Facebook-organized protest movement was to overwhelm the police and thugs hired by the regime with even larger numbers of peaceful protesters. Individuals, if they turned out in numbers that were large enough, would be protected by the sheer mass of the demonstration.
But the step from online to offline protest had momentous consequences. Once the initial spark started a larger political movement, street protests gained a revolutionary dynamic that could not be stopped, neither by Hosni Mubarak’s clumsy shutdown of the Internet in Egypt nor by the brutality of the state’s security forces. This remarkably fast initial mass-mobilization seemed possible only through online social networks by savvy individuals like Ghonim. But until the very last moment on 25 January, even Ghonim and the other organizers did not know if their work would create the turnout they had hoped for: “We could not believe our eyes,” he wrote afterwards, recalling his surprised arrival at the main protest site. “I began tweeting like a madman on my personal account, urging everyone to come out and join the protest.”56 But by then it was probably already too late for tweets: once the uprising had manifested itself in the street, the significance of social media instantly diminished. Facebook proved highly efficient in undermining the trust in the state’s monopoly of force and the regime’s ability to crush the protests; but the web had little to offer after that was accomplished. Building trust in new political institutions is an entirely different matter.
This chapter has argued that subversion is a useful concept to understand the potential and limits of activism in cyberspace—it is an old idea that manages to overcome the debate’s focus on violent methods and opens the comparison to resistance movements with limited, non-revolutionary goals. These shifts in perspective help to understand how new technologies are changing subversive activism.57 Three hypotheses were introduced to capture that change: that subversion has become more cause-driven; that subversion is characterized by higher levels of membership-mobility; and that subversive movements find it more difficult to exert organizational control by erecting an internal enforced order. If these conclusions are accurate, cynics may conclude, then “cyber subversion” does not represent a formidable and perhaps even existential challenge to modern, liberal democracies. Such a conclusion would be naïve and short-sighted. But the real challenge will come as a surprise to many: the challenge is not effectively stamping out subversion; the challenge is finding the right balance that maintains the fragile and hard-to-achieve degree of healthy subversion that characterizes the most successful liberal democracies and the most successful economies.
Subversion, in contrast to what some security scholars seem to think, is not principally illegal and it is not even principally illegitimate—only the most extreme forms of subversion are. The above examples were such moderate forms, and they were deliberately chosen for that reason. Understanding subversion’s extreme form requires understanding its moderate relatives first. Ideas and activities acquire subversive character not through inciting violence while remaining non-violent, but when these activities undermine and erode established authority. This thought immediately leads to a conclusion that is as surprising as it may be discomforting for most students of political violence: subversion may not just remain entirely non-violent; it may remain entirely within the boundaries of the law, especially in free and open democracies. In sharp contrast to Kitson’s ideas, neither non-violence nor illegality can successfully delineate subversive activity in its earliest stages. More in line with Agnoli’s ideas, subversive thought is not necessarily radical or militant, but it is almost always political and often embraces progress. Put differently, democracies are political systems designed to accommodate a certain amount of subversive activity—if warranted even by changing its legal and possibly its constitutional foundation. Subversion therefore spans the philosophical and the practical; the legal and the illegal; the non-violent and the violent; and the non-revolutionary and the revolutionary. Most importantly, it can be regenerative or it can be degenerative.
Figure 2: schematic graph of four types of subversion.
In any democratic political system, some degree of subversive activity is a necessary precondition of a free, open, and critical polity. The side effect must not be undesirable let alone destructive; subversion may be a constructive social force that is highly desirable from a systemic point of view. Productively challenging established authority helps bring about a dynamic, adaptive, and innovative culture—in business, scholarship, and politics. Some of the demands of students and protesters in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the end of racial discrimination, or later the promotion of gay rights, were subversive at the time in the United States and Western Europe, but were broadly accepted across the political spectrum a few decades later. It is a mainstay of capitalism that even established market leaders should be constantly challenged to stay innovative and drive competition. As soon as a firmly established authority, be it political or economic, is shielded from all criticism and challenges, it is likely to become stale, inert, and complacent.
This raises a more elementary issue: the question of when subversion flips. When and how subversion flips from the regenerative and legitimate expression and the articulation of dissent to regression, illegality, and violence—or indeed the other way round. In any democratic state, the boundary between what is considered legal and what is considered illegal is always the outcome of ongoing political debates that shape a state’s legislative measures and its laws. The line between regenerative and degenerative subversion is forever blurred and the subject of fierce disputes on both ends of any society’s political and cultural spectrum. Here time is of the essence. Subversive movements, for instance the anti-globalization movement or the “Occupy” phenomenon, may appear limited, isolated, extreme, or inconsequential, especially to conservative observers in the context of their time. But perspectives and interpretations may change slowly and imperceptibly over time. The conclusion is that it is difficult to assess subversion as it happens; some historical shifts are hard to spot in real time.58 Yet one historical trend is clear: in liberal democracies, subversion has been successfully legalized and institutionalized.59 Three examples serve to make this point.
Subversion has been institutionalized in academia. Scientific progress itself relies on periodically overthrowing established knowledge in scientific revolutions, so-called “paradigm shifts,” as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn famously outlined.60 In some disciplines scholarly practice did not remain implicitly subversive, but turned explicit. As postmodernism rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, it became possible for scholars who crafted subversive theories to make a career in the establishment of philosophy, sociology, and adjacent disciplines, and, rather ironically, to become part of an increasingly dominant order in their own right. By the early 2000s, for instance, the language of subversion had become so common in cultural studies that scholars began avoiding verbs like “undermine,” “erode,” and “deconstruct” because in the wider field of cultural studies these phrases had been overused and had become stale.61 Writing too subversively could narrow a funding proposal’s chances for success—not because the proposed ideas were running the risk of being too radical, but of being too bland.
Subversion has also been institutionalized in literature and art. In a much-noted 1981 study, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson highlighted the critical and subversive potential of fantastic literature. The fantastic, as Jackson saw it, may trace the unsaid and the unseen of a society’s cultural and political established order, that which has been silenced, concealed, and covered. Telling a story within the bounds of the rational and the accepted would imply using the language of the dominant order, thus accepting its norms and contributing to keeping the “dark areas” covered by the dominant discourse. Literature and art, not just of the fantastic kind, often playfully explore the limits of the established. Irene Rima Makaryk’s Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory has a two-page entry for Subversion. The encyclopedia understands subversion as an articulation, as the “‘becoming visible’ of any repressed, forbidden, or oppositional interpretation of the social order.”62 Cultural critics and literary scholars are fond of quoting the controversial German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings inspired a great deal of critical philosophical and political thought in the twentieth century. “So what is truth?” asked Nietzsche, and then responds forcefully,
A moving army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms, in short a summa of human relationships that were poetically and rhetorically exaggerated, transposed, and beautified until, after long and repeated use, a community considers them as solid, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions whose illusionary nature has been forgotten; metaphors that have been used up and have lost their imprint; coins that have lost their image and that are now appear as mere metal, no longer as coins.63
For Paul De Man, a founding figure in literary theory, Nietzsche’s passage stands for “the necessary subversion of truth.”64
Perhaps most importantly, subversion is institutionalized in liberal constitutional orders. An impressive example is the well-known right to resistance enshrined in some liberal constitutions. In 1968, Germany added article 20, paragraph 4, to its basic law, or Grundgesetz. The clause states that the Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social state, that all power is ultimately in the hands of the people, and that the constitutional legal coercive order, the executive branch, and law enforcement are bound by the law. The basic law then adds, “All Germans have the right to resist anybody who attempts to remove this order, if no other courses of action are available.”65 This right to resistance was designed as a safeguard against an abuse of power at the hands of the government and its law-enforcement agencies. The law is informed by the idea that, during a state of exception (Notstand), the State itself may undermine the constitutional order. The king can do wrong. In times of perceived constitutional peril, governments with an authoritarian bent react with crackdowns, censorship, or emergency laws to mounting dissent. Authoritarian regimes see the rise of Internet-fueled subversion as such a dangerous trend that it needs to be met with aggressive countermeasures. For liberal democracies, the problem is far more delicate: they need to find out how to rebalance the right to resistance and civil liberties with national security. By overshooting the target in a new and confusing digital environment, liberal states may inadvertently push previously legitimate civic action into the realm of illegal subversion. “The restoration of the old order constitutes a permanent risk,” Johannes Agnoli told his students in Berlin on 31 October 1989, just days before the Berlin Wall fell. The old Marxist closed his lecture that Tuesday by warning of unknown innovations that would again and again tempt those in power: therefore “the theoretical and practical work of subversion will never be finished.”66
