Center for a Stateless Society The Coming Swarm

http://c4ss.org/content/34108

Center for a Stateless Society

Search

About

A Left Market Anarchist Think Tank & Media Center

Resources

Support

BOOKS AND REVIEWS

The Coming Swarm

Kevin Carson | December 18th, 2014

Molly Sauter. The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the
Internet (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014).
The aim of this work, Sauter writes, is to place DDoS [distributed denial of service] actions in a
historical and theoretical context, covering the use of the tactic, its development over time, and its
potential for ethical political practice. And this is an excellent source on the history of the tactic; the
historical context she provides goes back to the early use of DDoS attacks, like EDTs campaign of
digital storms in support of the Zapatistas in the 1990s, and also devotes considerable attention to
Anonymous Operation Payback in 2010.
Sauters main line of argument is that DDoS actions to shut down government and corporate
websites are not only permissible but perhaps necessary, given the growing hegemony of such
institutions and their official perspectives over the Internet. A protester might set up a dedicated blog
which may or may not ever be read but it is much harder for her to stand collectively with others
against a corporate giant in the online space. Sauter didnt make an explicit comparison to so-called
free speech zones as a physical analog, but thats the first thing I thought of. Because of the
densely intertwined nature of property and speech in the online space, unwelcome acts of collective
protest become also acts of trespass.
Direct action is an ideological mode of activism that encourages activists to disrupt harmful
processes and systems at the same time as they attempt to provoke a dramatic, illustrative
reaction from their target. It doesnt force activists to channel their dissent through ombudsmen
or PR departments, or to curtail their political behavior to that recognized by their targets as
valid. Protesters arent required to tacitly supply their consent before being permitted to express
their dissent.

S u p p o r t e r U p d at e s
Enter your email address:

Subscribe

Anonymous, capitalism, class

war, corporate, corporate state,
counter-economics, counterpower, David Graeber, DDoS,
democracy, direct action,
economic development,
Emergent Orders, internet,
internet freedom, politics, state,
stigmergic, Stigmergic
Revolution,

The disruption of government and corporate websites, against a background of such hegemony, in
itself carries a positive meaning. The disruption itself creates a counterartifact in opposition to the
flow of communication controlled by corporation and state.
The blank browser screen, the long-delayed load time. [W]e can see how the imposition of
silence and delay into a signal rich environment can be a powerful discursive contribution.
By replacing continuity with disruption, activists attempt to create a rhetorical cavity in the
digitized structure of capitalism wherein activism can take place. This break in business as
usual makes room for the counteractions of activism. It is the creation of excavated, disrupted
space that is valuable in these contexts, sometimes even more valuable than direct discursive
engagement between activists and their target.
If we look at the moment of content-less interruption as a moment of impact to be absorbed
rather than a conveyance of content to be understood, we can then look at it as a form of
exchange between differently empowered groups or between different power structures.
[The disruption] opens bandwidth for speech from new actors and participants in a public
discourse that otherwise only ever receives signals from those (always) already broadcasting.
As we look at the role of DDoS within online activism, the reader should bear in mind the power
of disruption to draw attention to issues that no one wants to talk about, and to call different
types of stakeholders to account. Though DDoS as a tactic is still relatively novel, it fits within a
centuries-long tradition of breaking laws and disrupting business as usual to make a political
point. These actions arent simply disruption for disruptions sake. Rather they serve to help the

1 of 5

12/27/14, 11:53 AM

Center for a Stateless Society The Coming Swarm

http://c4ss.org/content/34108

activist or dissenter to direct the attention of the public through the interpolation of difference into
routine.
Disruption protest like DDoS actions serves to alert the wider public that the normal channels of
participation have failed for a certain population. The lack of signal that is the external manifestation
of an activist DDoS action should be interpreted as making space for unheard dissent.
This creation of an awkward silence in the constant whirl of communicative capitalism challenges
the position of the continuous one-way communicative barrage of dominant institutions as an
unquestioned and pervasive ground, and instead creates a contrast against which the dominant
narrative is forced to stand out in relief as one contending figure. The official narrative, rather than
passing unexamined as a ubiquitous fact of nature, is forced to state itself and defend itself as a
proposition, and become a topic of debate in which it is contingent rather than inevitable.
Regarding the ethical issues raised by suppressing speech by rendering websites of government and
corporate entities like the WTO, MPAA, RIAA, etc. inaccessible, speaking only for myself Im
totally down with disrupting their ability to function at all. In my opinion its just a way of jamming the
C3 of an invading enemy.
Sauter also demolishes Malcolm Gladwells and Evgeny Morozovs critique of slacktivism
internet-based, weak ties activism as being somehow too easy compared to traditional activist
movements. According to such critics, its not simply that online activism appeals to the lazy, and
offers an easy feel-good form of participation for those who lack the motivation for a real sacrifice.
Its that they lionize a model of civil disobedience beloved of liberal memory that centers on the
drama of willful violation of the law; deliberate arrest; and having ones day in court.
These critiques make a series of assumptions about the purpose and practice of activism and
often ground themselves historically in the civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War
protests. In this model, worthwhile activism is performed on the streets, where the activist puts
himself in physical and legal peril to support his ideals. Activism is hard, not anyone can do it.
Activism has a strong, discernible effect on its target. If the activist is not placing herself in
physical danger to express her views, then it is not valid criticism.
But [the slacktivist critique] fails to consider that activism can have many divergent goals
beyond direct influence on power structures. It explicitly denies that impact on individuals and
personal performative identification with communities of interest can be valid activist
outcomes. It casts as a failure the fact that the simpler modes of digitally based activism allow
more people to engage. As the cost of entry-level engagement goes down, more people will
engage. Some of those people will continue to stay involved with activist causes and scale the
ladder of engagement to more advanced and involved forms of activism. Others wont. But there
must be a bottom rung to step on.
The whole point of stigmergic technologies, in this regard, is their granularity: They enable the
leveraging of even very small contributions that previously would have been made uneconomical by
the high transaction costs of coordination. Wikipedia, unlike Britannica, can leverage millions of
contributions as small as an added paragraph or clause, or change in punctuation in an existing
article, without first having to amass the capital to create an entire encyclopedia.
Sauter challenges a nostalgia for civil disobedience on the part of critics that seem[s] to originate
from an ahistorical view of the development and implementation of civil disobedience in the United
States. Such popular understandings stem from a narrativized view of iconic moments in political
activism, such as the Civil Rights Movement, which do not take into account the realities faced by
political movements as they develop or the particular challenges faced by activists attempting to
operate in a novel environment such as the internet. The Civil Rights Movement, in the fifty years
since its greatest achievements, has taken a venerated place in activist history. Its history has been
narrativized and packaged to the point where it has become virtually ahistorical, and no modern,
developing movement could possibly stand up in comparison.
Sauter continues: One aspect of civil disobedience that this nostalgia glosses over is its potential for
disruption. The marches, sit-ins, and boycotts of the civil rights era were intensively disruptive and
were intended to be so. This tendency to obscure the revolutionary and disruptive nature of the real
Civil Rights Movement has made it easier to sanitize (as evidenced by the safe, packaged liberal and
neoconservative version of Martin Luther King Jr., who apparently did nothing but give the I Have a

2 of 5

12/27/14, 11:53 AM

Center for a Stateless Society The Coming Swarm

http://c4ss.org/content/34108

Dream Speech and march hand-in-hand with current Republican leaders in their extreme youth).
DDoS attacks arent the only tactic excluded from upper-middle-class white NPR liberals received
version of struggle.
this ahistorical myopia that encourages the exile of tactics such as occupations, blockades,
monkey wrenching, defacements, culture jamming, strikes, sabotage, and many more from the
popularly recognized repertoire of civil disobedience discourages activism and dissent It
should not be surprising that these disruptive, and in some cases destructive, tactics, often
interpreted to fall outside the realm of acceptable political acts, are used primarily by groups
that are historically underprivileged in the area of public politics. Students, blue-collar workers,
inner-city youth, the homeless, those living below the poverty line, and other minorities are
routinely pushed out of public political life because they are not engaging in what is popularly
accepted as proper political conduct. These biases toward what counts as politically valid
conduct and speech contributes to disfranchisement and narrows the public political discourse.
By ignoring the potential legitimacy of these out-of-the-mainstream disruptive tactics, critics are
contributing to this systemic disenfranchisement by artificially and harmfully restricting what
political speech and conduct is acceptable and, by extension, whose.
It bears mentioning that its increasingly only highly visible public figures politicians and
entertainers who can safely engage in the idealized model of civil disobedience any more. In many
cases its almost a ritual for some rich celebrity to chain herself to the White House fence or splash
mock crude oil on some public monument, and then be perfunctorily arrested for the cameras by
cooperative police, booked and released. For ordinary people, on the other hand, the traditional
brutality of Bull Connor and Mayor Daly has been supplemented by a post-9/11 legal regime that
brings peaceful civil disobedience under the shadow of felony prosecution for terroristic activity.
Undercover filming of animal cruelty in the food industry has been criminalized, and in what
amounts to a revival of the old criminal syndicalism statutes anyone engaged in 1930s-style
industrial activism takes a serious risk of being charged with economic terrorism.
Criticisms based on an idealized liberal version of history ultimately chill innovation in political
movements. Theres a close parallel, libertarians may note, with the way regulatory entry barriers
lock in high-overhead, capital-intensive technologies used by privileged incumbent corporations, and
lock out competition from smaller upstart firms using new democratic technologies that otherwise
would permit them to enter the market without large capital outlays or a large revenue stream to
service overhead. Similarly, the approved forms of activism promoted by legacy activist institutions,
their professionalized leadership and celebrity allies tend to privilege the forms of protest that are
most feasible for the middle class, thus creating entry barriers against the weapons of the weak and
more asymmetric modes of opposition by ordinary people. [I]t encourages the expression of
dissent only by those individuals willing to risk everything for the sake of a political point or by
those who can afford to do so.
Sauter also points to another important function of the DDoS attack which doesnt get much attention:
its constitutive function. To the extent that the networked resistance movements of the past twenty
years are prefigurative, their mode of organization is as important for the ways it creates a sense of
subjective identity and habitual ways of doing things that prefigure the successor society the ways
it constitutes the successor society as a self-conscious force as for the influence it has on the
institutions of the existing society. Sauter, borrowing a James Scott quote on hidden transcripts from
Domination and the Art of Resistance, writes that DDoS attacks create a common medium in which
participants recognize the full extent to which their claims, their dreams, their anger is shared by
other subordinates with whom they have not been in direct touch. Partcipating in DDoS actions may
result in biographical impact and conversion, radicalizing the participant and making it more likely
she will continue to be politically involved.
Distributed denials of service and other forms of online activism dont occur in isolation, I would add.
Historically they have existed as one subset of a much larger global revolutionary wave that began
with the EZLN uprising in Chiapas, and has since taken such forms as the Seattle anti-globalization
movement, the Arab Spring, M15, Occupy, and the current nationwide uprising against police racism
in the U.S. And according to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, the exposure and swarming carried
out by the global online support network for the Zapatistas is probably the reason they werent quietly
crushed like similar previous movements. Similarly, Sauter points out, the electrohippies combined
DDOS/email swarming campaign against the WTO from November 30 to December 4 of 1999

3 of 5

12/27/14, 11:53 AM

Center for a Stateless Society The Coming Swarm

http://c4ss.org/content/34108

followed by two days of emailing large file attachments to WTO-affiliiated addresses provided
support to the sea turtles marching in the streets of Seattle.
So the traditional NPR liberal pearl-clutching over DDoS attacks dovetails with hostility on a much
larger scale on the part of the old-line, verticalist Left establishment, against all forms of revolution on
a prefigurative or horizontalist model. Witness mainstream Left critiques of Occupy for its lack of
public spokespersons and bullet-pointed demands. Never mind that it came very close to being such
a movement which would probably have lasted a few days and then fizzled out had not a group
of horizontalists including David Graeber prevented it being hijacked by the conventional Left, and
instead caused it to crystallize on a model like the Spanish M15 movement.
The emphasis on mass, hierarchy and central coordination to which the traditional establishment Left
is so attached is very much an industrial age paradigm. And the model of activism it lionizes
centered on large-scale concentrations of bodies in space, with slogans and posters amounts to a
cargo cult.
Going back to Engels in Anti-Duhring or even to Marx in The Communist Manifesto, there was a
tendency in much of the Left to equate size, capital accumulation and overhead with productivity, to
view the gigantism fostered by capitalism as progressive, and to equate Revolution to putting
capitalisms hierarchical institutions under new management. Even Gramsci, for all his talk of a war
of position, only put off the final conquest of the commanding heights institutions until the cultural
sappers had done their job.
This mission of revolutionary conquest, or reformist capture, of the institutions of the old society
presupposed countervailing institutions of equal mass. The Old Left model of revolution, and its
survivals in the verticalist/establishment Left to the present day, are direct analogues of the mass
production industrial model of Schumpeter, Galbraith and Chandler.
If there was ever any validity to this model which I consider highly doubtful it ended with the
mass production age. We no longer need to storm the ramparts of those old state and industrial
hierarchies because they no longer perform any socially necessary function. Ephemeral production
technologies and distributed, stigmergic coordination mechanisms have made it possible to build a
society entirely outside the old institutional framework, and leave the old institutions to crumble. As
my friend Katherine Gallagher put it (writing as @zhinxy on Twitter):
We wont be encircled by them, but woven through their antiquated structures, impossible to
quarantine off and finish. Im not a pacifist. Im not at all against defensive violence. Thats a
separate question to me of overthrow. But to oversimplify, when it comes to violence, I want it to
be the last stand of a disintegrating order against an emerging order that has already done much
of the hard work of building its ideals/structures. Not violent revolutionaries sure that their society
will be viable, ready to build it, but a society defending itself against masters that no longer rule
it. Build the society and defend it, dont go forth with the guns and attempt to bring anarchy about
in the rubble. I think technology is increasingly putting the possibility of meaningful resistance
and worker independence within the realm of a meaningful future. So much of the means of our
oppression is now more susceptible to being duplicated on a human scale.
And I think we should be working on how we plan to create a parallel industry that is not held
only by those few. More and more the means to keep that industry held only by the few are held
in the realm of patent law. It is no longer true that the few own the lathe so to speak, nearly as
much as they own the patent to it. So we truly could achieve more by creating real alternative
manufacture than seizing that built. Yes, there will be protective violence, but its not as true as it
was in the past that there is real necessary means of production in the hands of the few. What
they control more now is access to the methods of production and try to prevent those methods
being used outside of their watch. Again, Im not saying that the last days of the state wont be
marked by violence. But I am saying we now have real tactical options beyond confronting them
directly until they come to us. (July 2012 paragraph divisions mine.)
To the extent that it is useful to directly challenge the state in the arena of public opinion, the same
technologies that have rendered mass, capital and overhead obsolete in production have also
rendered it obsolete in activism. Getting back to Sauters comment on the fetish for an idealized
1960s model of civil disobedience impeding innovation in activism, the establishment Lefts
attachment to mass, hierarchy and overhead amounts to an entry barrier against innovative forms of
resistance that challenge the incumbent business model.

4 of 5

12/27/14, 11:53 AM

Center for a Stateless Society The Coming Swarm

http://c4ss.org/content/34108

Even models of mass demonstration like Occupy, to the extent that they lionize the occupation of
space by masses of bodies, and equate them to activism as such, can amount as I said above
to a cargo cult. That is, they mistake the incidents of an older model of activism marching, signs,
slogans to the thing itself, and hope to conjure results through the ritual use of those incidents.
This is not to deny that the Occupations of 2011 and other mass demonstrations since then have
been valuable. Only to say that they are part of a larger movement whose primary focus is the
creation of prefigurative counter-institutions, not protest as such. The most important stuff
democratic neighborhood assemblies, local currency systems, micromanufacture, Permaculture,
squats, commons-based peer production isnt so visible.
Theres a tension in Sauters analysis between her evident desire to defend DDoS actions in terms of
older traditions of civil disobedience, on the one hand, and the ambivalence of those engaged in the
model themselves toward the goals of traditional civil disobedience. The classical model of civil
disobedience as explained by Thoreau and King treated the protester as a citizen of the political
community; the very requirement of accepting the states punishment, in order to spur the conscience
of the political community and restore the laws to a just foundation, reflected a recognition of the
states moral legitimacy and the need to be subject to its authority even in disobeying it. To the extent
that the world revolutionary wave of the past twenty years is prefigurative, autonomist or secessionist
that is, that it seeks to build a new system outside the institutional framework of the old one it is
not interested primarily in capturing or influencing the policies of commanding-heights institutions
within the existing society. And many subcurrents of that movement particularly those with an
avowedly anarchist or revolutionary ideology explicitly reject the legitimacy of the state and its
laws.
Early actors engaged in DDoS actions, like EDT and the electrohippies, saw such actions as a direct
analog of traditional sit-ins, which incorporate a give-and-take with the state and law enforcement
into their operational logic. They viewed public identification of themselves, and acceptance of the
consequences, as part of the ethic of civil disobedience. However subsequent movements, like
Anonymous, have taken a different view of identification, responsibility, and state participation.
Anonymous,
which maintains anonymity as an aspect of their culture, refuses to buy the claim that the state is
engaging with digital activism in good faith. Moreover, Anonymous for the most part refuses to
acknowledge that national governments, particularly that of the United States, have any
legitimate role in governing the internet at all.
Anonymous and its offshoots, rather than viewing the state as legitimate and attempting to influence
its actions, act in the tradition of Barlows Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace: You have no
authority that we are bound to recognize. Insofar as they engage in disruptive behavior, its not to
reform the state or set it to rights, but to disrupt its ability along with the corporate interests it
serves to function, so as to create breathing room for the emerging counter-institutions of the
successor society.

SHOW COMMENTS

All content on this site is available for republishing

under a Creative Commons Public Domain
Dedication.

RReeggiioonnss

IIssssuueess

CCoonnttrriibbuuttoorrss

CCoom
mm
muunniittyy

RReessoouurrcceess

LLaanngguuaaggeess

about | press room | contact us

5 of 5

12/27/14, 11:53 AM