Abstract hacktivism as a model for postanarchist organizing

It has been claimed that historically, anarchism has adopted a ‘highly ambivalent’ relationship with technology, ‘oscillating between a bitter critique driven by the
experiences of industrialism, and an almost naive optimism around scientific development’ (Gordon, 2008: 111-113).

Early influential anarchists, including Malatesta, Goldman and Kropotkin, viewed technology as providing workers with
an emancipatory potential from capitalism, while oppositional readings of technology from the likes of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, however, reinforced the
pessimistic view that technology can only have ‘the needs of capital encoded into it from the start’ (ibid.: 129).

Within such a deterministic reading of technology what space is left for models of anarchist organizing in the twenty-first century? We currently live in a society
where technology is ubiquitous and increasingly responsible for mediating most, if not all, aspects of our lives. What space is left for a contemporary, technology-enabled organization of society along anarchist principles, if any?

Rather than seeking answers within these binary positions, this note will suggest a more complex reading of technology through its inculcation with contemporary social practices. Such a view will aim to reveal how any earlier ambivalence
between anarchism, organization and technology can be fruitfully explored and potentially resolved through the adoption of contemporary anarchist perspectives, such as postanarchism, as well as recent approaches to technology, such as abstract and critical hacktivism, which permit more open and complex readings of technology’s latent, socially progressive and radical potential.

Before we can address such issues, however, it is helpful to first offer a short commentary on some recent anarchist engagements with technology, such as Cybernetics, Web 2.0 and Network Theory. Such debates, while moving closer to
more pragmatic accounts of the contemporary technology’s radical potential have also revealed deterministic limitations similar to those experienced by earlier
anarchist thinkers.