Dept Talk: Robin Celikates

Robin Celikates, Can Digital Disobedience Be Civil?

In recent years the Internet has not only expanded the repertoire of contestation by providing new tools for political protest, it has also emerged as an object and arena of contestation in its own right. While governments have been quick to employ the language of cybercrime and cyberterrorism, the various forms of digital activism – from so called DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) actions via website defacements to leaking – have also been described as legitimate protest and even civil disobedience. Many theorists and public commentators, however, have been reluctant to speak of digital civil disobedience as these new protest tactics do not seem to fit the standard account of civil disobedience as an essentially public, exclusively symbolic or communicative, and non-evasive form of principled law-breaking. In this talk I will argue against this skeptical view. I will show that many of the most prominent forms of digital protest can fruitfully be conceptualized as civil despite their anonymous, disruptive and evasive character. Conversely, new practices of digital civil disobedience provide an occasion to revise the standard account’s view of the definition, justification and role of civil disobedience.