The Mechanics of the Liberatory Promise: A Review of Joss Hands’s @ Is for Activism

In @ Is for Activism, Joss Hands, a senior lecturer in communications and media studies at Anglia Ruskin University and director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture, tackles the complex issue of the potentials and pitfalls of current media tools for anticapitalist activists. The book starts off reviewing what some of the more critical theorists of technologies—in particular, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse—have argued regarding contemporary technology’s close relation to capitalism. The book in turn claims that such theories foster a too essentialist rendition of technology as always aiding capitalist ends and instead proposes a way of understanding the possibility of activism by looking in more detail at the design of media networks. Hands then suggests that a certain possibility in the configuration particular to media networks’ codes and protocols may aid in the maximization of the Habermasian ideal of collective communicative action through what he calls the quasi-autonomous recognition network, or QARN, since the latter apparently formalizes “anti-power” by enabling allegiances and recognition between groups and individuals. The last third of the book finally offers a number of analyses of how past and current anticapitalist and alter-globalist activisms like Indymedia have or have not displayed the propensity for this maximizing of communicative action and how the development of ideas around the “commons” and the “multitude” can benefit from the QARN concept.

The story that accredits new media technologies with all kinds of subversive powers, especially in the face of all kinds of totalitarianisms, was one of the main narratives of the late twentieth century and remains very much alive within the twenty-first century. Popular and news media, for instance, are suspiciously keen to make sweeping statements about the role of social media in the current revolts in the “undemocratic” Middle East and have been eager to claim that new media activists will bring down the Chinese “oppressive” regime. From the use of mobile phones to collaborative websites like Wikipedia to the “social” websites Facebook and Twitter, new technologies are constantly heralded as the harbingers of true democracy and freedom, especially in those realms of the globe and of contemporary society that lack the alleged virtues of democratic participation. The discerning eye will of course immediately recognize the familiar kinds of Western moral superiority that are implicated in such statements in the popular news media—after all, these statements suggest that what we call “the West” has already embraced such new technologies to the fullest, which is supposedly why “the West” is more democratic and freer than all those other countries. But more important, there is a problematic discourse as well as a material and formal logic of these new technologies at work—a way in which these technologies come to stand in for the democratic and liberatory promise—that especially requires deeper critique, dissection, and reflection than has currently been pursued by news media and academic research alike.

Hands’s @ Is for Activism is admirable in taking this issue or problem of the formal logic of new media technologies to task in light of the anticapitalist activist vision. By way of working through a host of academic literature—Heidegger and Marcuse, but also Karl Marx and Andrew Feenberg—on the relationship between technology and oppression, Hands overall argues for a position in between social constructionism and technological determinism when understanding this relationship. He does this by proposing that Heidegger’s conclusion of increasing technological “entrapment” dismisses how technology “could actually be a source of liberation” (27); that Marx’s point about the exploitation of labor through the technologies of production is no longer relevant since technology might today possibly “empower labor”; and that Marcuse’s claim of the nonneutrality of technology nonetheless still holds within it the possibility of a rupture with technology’s current complicity with class interests. [End...