This has been the year in which the words ‘slacktivism’ and ‘hacktivism’ made it into the collective dictionary. In the eyes of many political and social campaigners, what often passes for protest in the digital world – signing an online petition or changing your profile picture on Facebook to demonstrate your support for a cause – is mere tokenism or, in the latest parlance, slacktivism. Malcolm Gladwell attracted a huge amount of unfair criticism when writing in The New Yorker how this type of low involvement, low risk activism hardly compares with the political battles of the 1960s, when people literally risked their lives in the cause of civil rights. By this way of thinking, social media is not heralding a reawakening of popular activism. It can play a major role in organising protest movements – whether against the imposition of student fees or what appear to be the tax avoidance strategies of major corporations – but the real battles are still being waged at street level. It is only when the windows of Topshop in Oxford Street are smashed or the stepson of a former rock star decides to swing on the flag at the top of the Cenotaph that the protest is deemed to be real.
The rise of hacktivism provides a counterpoint to this view that protests or other forms of direct action have to take place in the real, as opposed to the virtual world. The ability of a loosely aligned group of computer hackers to infiltrate the websites of companies accused of preventing the dissemination of Wikileaks material, has thrown the corporate security experts into a mad panic. Companies with a significant e-commerce business are particularly vulnerable. According to The Times, “Cyber security experts report a surge in calls from companies worried about their defences against such attacks.” This underlines how the distribution of power in the online world is asymmetric. All of the advantages now lie with the activists. They have the expertise to use the latest technology – the WikiLeaks team uses cryptography to hide the identity of its people and make it next to impossible to trace content to a specific internet address – and know how to get the online community on their side by playing the freedom of expression card. The activists may still, on occasion, take to the barricades, but the real victories are increasingly likely to be achieved in cyber-space.