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Elisabetta Ferrari, "Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies" (U California Press, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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All right. Hello everybody. My name is Megan Finn. I'm an associate professor at American University. I am here with Elisabetta Ferrari to talk about her book Appropriate Negotiate Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies. This book came out November 2024 with University of California Press. Welcome, Betty. I'm so happy you're able to talk about your book. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to work on this topic?
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Thank you so much for having me. I have a little bit of an interdisciplinary journey in my career. I have an undergraduate and master's degree in Political science. I have a PhD in communication and a postdoc in Digital Studies. I taught in a sociology department for a few Years. And now I'm a fellow at the Orus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarus University in Denmark, which is a truly interdisciplinary venue. But throughout sort of this interdisciplinary journey I've been on, really the topics that I've been interested in have been kind of the same. So in general, I'm interested in the social and political implications of digital technologies and the core of it. My focus is the relationship between the Internet and activism and social movements. And I'm particularly interested in how Internet technologies become relevant within sort of the. A group setting of an activist project or a social movement. So how technologies make sense within the collective, within the collective life of social movements. And I do this work through qualitative and creative research methods. And whenever possible, I also like to think about these topics across different countries, like thinking about how different cultural and national political settings might have an impact on how the relationship between technologies and social movements unfolds.
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That's great. So what brought you to take this set of really super interesting, but also very broad interests and write this particular book?
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So there has been a quite big and very interesting literature on activism and digital technologies that has sort of steadily grown over the past maybe 20 years. A lot of it sort of came out of reflections around the experience of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, the indignados in Europe. And a lot of that literature, which has been really sort of formative for me, focus on how social movements have used technology. So what, you know, and what activists can do with technology. And this has also been how kind of popular media commentators have also thought about. About activism in relation to technology. And I thought that this was really interesting, but only part of the. And what really drew me to writing this book was trying to make sense of how activists, well, people in general, but activists in particular think and talk about technology. So what are the kinds of political ideas that come out when we were thinking about technology as part of our daily lives or as part of our political understanding of the world? And I wanted to do justice to how I thought activists talked about technology internally sort of within. Within their groups, not just as tools or, you know, instruments that they could decide to use or not, but. But really how they perceived it already as political, how they saw it as something political that they had to approach sort of in. In. In some kind of way that made sense with their political understanding. And I wanted to see whether this, this relationship, these different ways of thinking and talking about technology changed across different movements within different countries. And so this became the core really of the book and how I went about researching this topic.
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Excellent. So the book really outlines what you call the technological imaginary of Silicon Valley, among other things. Can you explain what you mean by this and sort of, what's the purpose of identifying this logic within your sort of bigger project?
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So the project of the book is about activists and how activists think about technology. But I knew that in order to really explain how social movements approach technology, I also had to explain what the more dominant sort of ways of thinking about technology that are circulating in society, sort of how they have been constructed. And what I argue in the book is that over the past 30 years, really the dominant mainstream way of thinking about technology in relation to social change has been constructed and popularized by Silicon Valley by the technology companies, the technology actors that we commonly call Silicon Valley. And there's been a lot written about sort of the ideas about tech coming out of Silicon Valley. But I wanted to really focus on what I think thought were the political, the clearly political undertones of this dominant way of thinking. And this is relevant not just for the book, but in general, because we've all been immersed in these discourses around technology created by Silicon Valley. They've become sort of such familiar refrains. And so it's important that we pinpoint where they come from and what is their function. So for me, the dominant technological imaginary of Silicon Valley is based around three sort of key ideas. The first one is that digital technologies are seen as inherently about freedom, democracy, and autonomy. And this is a way of a very powerful way of thinking about technology that really equates sort of the use of technology with liberation. But it is a very specific way of thinking about freedom. It is a freedom that comes through the consumption of technology acquired in a market right. It is a very specific view of what sort of that, that freedom means. But it also has generated a lot of enthusiasm around the world of technology and what technology can do for us. So the second idea, closely related to this is what has been called in different ways by different scholars. But I use the notion of techno solutionism as developed by Yogini Morozov. And this essentially is the idea that Silicon Valley sees technology as the avenue through which social problems should be discussed and addressed, as opposed to social intervention, political decisions, policy. It is the development of technology that is supposed to address any problems that plague sort of people, countries, the world. And the third key idea around which this imaginary is constructed is simply sort of the adherence to neoliberalism and not just sort of the embrace of neoliberal economic views, but also really sort of the upholding and in a way, sort of the lending of a cool aura to ideas that really come from neoliberalism. So, yeah, Silicon Valley is making neoliberalism cool. And really, as I'm talking about this, and in the book, I really come back to this a lot, is that these ideas about technology and the imaginary in general is as they're as much about technology as they are about politics. This is very clearly a political view, and it is political at a foundational level of politics. I mean, it's not just about sort of party allegiance in the context of US Elections, but it is really a foundational level of politics. It's about sort of how Silicon Valley envisions the relationship between the individuals and the state and the market and society. In addition to these three core ideas in the book, I also make the case for how Silicon Valley has demonstrated both technocratic ambitions and populist justifications. So with this imaginary, they're bringing together two concepts that are not really often thought to go hand in hand, technocracy and populism. But the technocracy of it comes out in how Silicon Valley pitches technology as a substitute for political decisions, but also, in many ways sees technology companies as above the reach of nation states, and in many cases, better than nation states. So there's a lot of sort of language around tech actors being better at solving societal problems than public institutions. And I think we've been seeing a lot of this, particularly in the past year of US Politics. But at the same time, within sort of, with these technocratic ambitions also come populist ways of justifying them. In a way, this technocracy only flies because of the populist rhetoric that accompanies it and legitimizes it. And the populist justifications come out in terms of how Silicon Valley portrays itself as a true democracy full of underdogs who are fighting against the elites on behalf of the people. With this very insurgent view of technology, which doesn't really correspond to the type of power that Silicon Valley is actually able to wield in the political process. And in thinking about technocracy and populism explicitly in relation to Silicon Valley, it really shows how this is and has always been a political project, even before the alliance between Musk and Trump that has been so much discussed and has brought a lot of these discussions to the forefront and within the context of the book, to me, it was particularly important to understand the Silicon Valley way of thinking about technology, because, just like everyone else, activists have also been exposed to it For a very long time, it has shaped a lot of conversations around what technology could do for activists and what that relationship should be. And also because this imaginary influence is how the technologies themselves are shaped and are designed in many ways. And so the book then moves on to think about how these different activist groups make sense of this imaginary coming out of Silicon Valley. But I also think that thinking about the power of this imaginary is also important, even if you're not necessarily interested in reading about activists. But I think this is something that is particularly important for society in general to make sense of where the power of Silicon Valley comes from. Also at a discursive level.
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Yeah. And the juxtaposition between technocracy and populism is really sort of fascinating. And it's very productive to think with as you've outlined it in the book. The book really centers upon these contradictions between what you've just described, the technological imaginary of Silicon Valley, but then also the fact that the activists, the social movements that you're looking at them, they themselves have their own social imaginaries. And you have this really nice framework for thinking about how the sort of clash of these different imaginaries, the contradictions. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how the sort of framework you came up for thinking about these contradictions and what strategies the social movement activists have for working through them.
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So the core concept that I develop in the book is that of technological imaginary, which I think I slipped already in some of my answers, but sort of I this is a concept that I sort of develop, drawing on different literatures from media history, science and technology studies, and cultural sociology. And I define technological imaginaries as sets of practice based beliefs, individual and collective, implicit and explicit, about the role of technology in social life and social change. What does this mean in practice? I was looking for a concept that sort of helped me make sense of what I was saying before, how movements think and talk about technology in an explicitly political way, and how these ways of thinking about technology come into play in terms of how activists envision sort of society and social change. And so with that in mind, what I the framework that I built sort of takes into account how these activists respond, interpret, counter the dominant views coming out of Silicon Valley. And I come up with sort of three different categories of possible responses coming from activists to the dominant imagineer of Silicon Valley. And they are the three sort of concepts that give the title of the book appropriation, Negotiation and Challenge. So imaginaries of appropriation are imaginaries that sort of accept the key ideas of Silicon Valley and also sort of accept the use of Silicon Valley technologies within activism. In contrast, imaginaries of negotiation are imaginaries that reject the core ideas of Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley imaginary, but allow for the use of the digital technologies that are coming out of Silicon Valley. And this creates a lot of tensions, a lot of friction, and also generates a lot of work for the movements that develop these imaginaries in order to make these technologies kind of fit with the political ideas that they hold. And the third category of imaginary is imaginaries of challenge, which reject both the imaginary of Silicon Valley and the technologies of Silicon Valley. And then in the book, as I am introducing these different imaginaries, I also go in depth into some of the political elements that I find influence the construction of these activist imaginaries. And these three the main the three main political elements that I identify are the ideology of the activist groups that are developing these imaginaries, the political context in which they are embedded. So what is going on around them, both at the time and kind of historically, and also whether there are other technological imaginaries within their context that are prominent in some way. So are there other political parties that have a specific technological imaginary? Are there other movements that are relevant and that have a specific view of technology? So these are sort of the main building blocks of this framework. And the way that I see it, this framework was never about trying to predict how movement would develop their own technological imaginary. But I see it as sort of a framework to understand and to map how different actor, how different movements have different processes for arriving at their technological imaginaries and developing their relationship to technology. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart Move Being financially savvy Smart Move Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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So I knew that I wanted to bring in different cases of activist groups and really juxtapose them to try and figure out how these imaginaries would be similar or different across these different contexts. And so I tried to select movements that had things in common and things that were different. Very plainly said. And the three cases that I ended up choosing are the Hungarian Internet tax protest, and particularly sort of the core group of organizers that were really the engine behind these protests that took place in 2014 in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. And this was a movement that mobilized against Viktor Orban and a particular proposal that came out of the Orban government, which was to introduce a tax on Internet consumption, an Internet tax that would be based on how much Internet you had access to. We don't really know the details because the tax was withdrawn due to the success of these protests, but the idea was to make people pay some kind of levy based on how much Internet they consumed. And as I said Sort of these protests were very successful. They were one of the few successes of the opposition to Orban ever. And these demonstrations were so large that they were at the time the largest demonstrations in Hungary after 1989, after the transition to democracy. So that is the first case that, that I considered. The second one is that of Lume, the Laboratorio Universitario Metropolitano from Milan, Italy. And this is a student collective, an anti sexist, anti racist, anti fascist and anti capitalist student collective who occupy a building in the center of Milan. And they're part of a long tradition of Italian social movements called occupied social centers, whose chief political practice, instead of occupying unused buildings and then using them for political activity, for shows, theater plays, meetings, and all sorts of. And all sorts of different community activities. And the third movement is the Philly Socialists, which is a socialist organization based in Philadelphia in the US and this is an organization that really grew a lot during the first Trump presidency alongside other socialist groups in, in US Politics, getting a little bit of visibility during that time. And unlike other socialist groups that have become very well known nationwide, the Philly Socialists reject the electoral process. So they're not interested in participating in elections or endorsing candidates. They want to build power outside of the electoral process. So these are the three movements that I considered, and they are in many ways different. They obviously embedded in different political contexts, but they also are similar in that they are all to the left of the mainstream left in their respective context. And they're also part, I would say, of the same cohort of activists that have been mobilizing against right wing populism. So the Italian collective has mobilized against Italian right wing politicians like Matteo Salvini and now Giorgio Meloni. The Hungarian protests were directed at Viktor Orban, and the Philly Socialists, of course, were very active against Donald Trump. So these movements can be thought of as part of this sort of group of worldwide movements trying to contrast global right wing populism. And they also are activist groups that share similar tactics. They are run in a more democratic way. They do sort of similar activities in terms of demonstrations and direct action and these sort of things. One of the, one of the motivating elements that drew me to these movements is also that I wanted to study what I think of as movements that are not necessarily particularly interested in technology. And by this I mean that I. That I didn't want to study techies or people that were drawn to activism because of a specific skill or interest in using media or digital technologies in a certain way. And this is Because I think the literature on activism and tech has already. We learned a lot about these type of more tech oriented movements. And this is very normal. I think as scholars interested in communication and technology, we're drawn to seek out people who share the same interests. But I wanted to see what we could learn from movements that didn't necessarily start that way, but from activists that sort of got involved in a cause, in a different cause, and then had to figure out what role media and tech would play in their activism. And just quickly, about methods in general, sort of. I use qualitative methods in all of my work for this particular project. I mean, obviously I've attended meetings and protests and events organized by these activist groups. I've looked at their social media and their website. I've read any and all of the internal documents that I could get my hands on. But the core of the empirical data came from in depth interviews with the activists of these of these three groups. And then also I developed a creative method for, specifically for this project, which I call the visual focus group, which embeds a collective drawing task within the structure of a traditional focus group. And this is meant to give participants a way to create sort of reflexive conversations among each other about the role of technology. And the drawing task that was assigned to them in the focus groups was for them to draw what they thought the Internet was like. And this really generated a lot of in depth conversation about their visions of technology and how tech could be improved and what role tech had in their activism in a way that I probably wouldn't have gotten from a traditional focus group or an interview. And so that was my way of sort of getting to these sometimes hidden thoughts that we have about our relationship to technology.
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Super interesting. And your analysis, as you noted, you yielded several tactics for addressing the universalism of the Silicon Valley technological imaginary. And firstly, you note that people appropriate technology or these groups appropriate technology. So can you talk a little bit about the appropriation tactic and how it arose in your field work?
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Yeah. So the category of appropriation for me, it describes these activist imaginaries that sort of accept both the core ideas of Silicon Valley and the technologies of Silicon Valley. And in the book, it is the case of the Hungarian Internet tax protest that exemplifies the idea of appropriation. And. And these Hungarian activists construct a technological imaginary that I term that of mundane modernity. And in many ways, in how they're talking about the relationship to the Internet, they reproduce some of the tropes of Western modernity that have been around For a very long time, they think about the Internet as an instrument for equality and development. They think about the Internet as a symbol of the future and of progress. They think technology as an expression of rationality. So much so then when they. That when they are criticizing the Orban government for this idea of taxing the Internet, they, you know, they say that it's something foolish, that is something crazy, that it's something that goes against reason. But they also sort of really attach a mundane character to how they think about the Internet. They depict sort of digital technologies as crucial for daily lives, something very personal, very private. They talk about the Internet as something that is with you in your bedroom. And they sort of describe this, particularly in terms of the Internet, as something that is about consuming entertainment content. This is how they envision this. And so in adopting these ideas about Western modernity, they're also sort of depicting them as a modernity that is experienced through these mundane practices of looking at entertainment content, pirating TV shows, these sort of really kind of mundane practices, but that take on a political character because they can be pitched in oppositions to Orban, who in their mind, sort of, in adopting this Internet tax, is going against modernity and is going against sort of their particular vision of modernity. But in doing all this, they are developing sort of an idea about technology that connects sort of these ideas about modernity to specific notions of freedom that these activists see in turn as completely connected to Western liberalism and democracy. So they are talking about these very mundane practices, but they become sort of a symbol of a particular idea of freedom and a particular conflation of political and market freedom that is entirely in line with how Silicon Valley sees technologies. And this is where we see sort of really how they're appropriating these ideas of Silicon Valley. They're not reproducing them. They don't talk like CEOs of Silicon Valley tech companies, but they are reinterpreting sort of these core tenets of Silicon Valley to make sense in the post communist context that they inhabit. And in the book, I really spend a lot of time to sort of explain what this means in the context of Hungarian politics. And I won't go in depth into the. The context of Hungarian politics that would is. That would deserve a podcast in itself. But, but this is sort of the. The politics of this imaginary appropriation is really about making these ideas around as they are attached. Digital technologies resonate in a post communist context in which a lot of these ideas about the relationship of the country to the west and to modernity and to liberalism have become salient under the governments of Viktor Orban. And so, again, this is all about the politics of this as much as it is about the Internet as a technology.
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Another tactic you talk about in the book is that of negotiation. So can you talk a little bit about how your cases revealed what negotiation can look like for social movements and how the different cases sort of differed in their approaches to negotiation?
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So the other two cases that I look at in the book are both cases of negotiation, so of imaginaries that reject the Silicon Valley ideas, but allow for the use of Silicon Valley technologies. So first, the Italian student collective Lume develops an imaginary that I term fighting the system with the tools of the system. And this is an imaginary that comes out of two critiques that these activists wage against digital technologies. And this is one is an anti capitalist critique in terms of how they see power operating online. So they are really critical of all the processes that are well documented of extraction, exploitation of our data, things that we are now unfortunately, very familiar with. But they see sort of, they see this as the expression of how corporate power dominates how digital technologies operate. And their second critique, which is connected to the first, is that they are really skeptical about the promises of democraticness and empowerment that have long been attached to digital technologies. And they're critical because they see digital spaces as being profoundly unequal, again because of the operations of corporate power. So these two critiques really lead them to think of digital technologies in a very critical way, as very flawed and as weapons of a capitalist system. But in their experience, these technologies are also crucial, and there's no alternative to them. And so these might be very flawed technologies, but they are indispensable for social change. They might be a weapon of a capitalist system and an expression of it, but they might also be a way, a tool to fight back against the same system. And this imaginary, as you might imagine, sort of is not frictionless. This requires a lot of continued discussion to make sure that in the activist sort of words, these technologies can be used within the think a lot about how to draw on the power of digital technologies while sort of remaining aligned with their own political visions. The Philly socialists also develop an imaginary of negotiation that I have sort of thought of in terms of or termed organizing where people are. And this is an imaginary that rests on sort of three critiques of Silicon Valley technology that they see as not ideal. And these technologies are not ideal because they can be toxic in terms of leading to harassment, but also infighting within Political groups, they see these technologies as being not that conducive to real connection or debate, unlike in real life political spaces, sort of offline. And the third sort of critique that they have is that these spaces are conducive to surveillance. And here they're not thinking necessarily about sort of data commodification and the extraction of our personal information, but rather how these technologies can be used by law enforcement to surveil activists. And this is sort of the experience that they're having. But while these spaces are not necessarily ideal, they're also good enough for right now to recruit people into the socialist camp because they are effective and because people are already there. And so this becomes a way in which the Philly socialists really think about sort of their use of digital technologies as reaching out, out to people where they already are. And they have a lot of justifications around sort of socialists having to be where people are, even if that ends up being Facebook. And they are thinking about their use of digital technologies as part of a larger strategy of organizing, which they spend a lot of time discussing in detail and that I also discuss in detail in the book. But this also appeal to this logic of socialist organizing also ends up downplaying discursively how much digital technologies actually matter to their organizing. And one thing that I'll note is that these imaginaries are both imaginaries of negotiation, as we've said, but they're also kind of different. They rest on different political ideas and different interpretations of very similar critiques of the same technologies. And for instance, one thing you can say is that the Philly Socialists are much less interested in an anti capitalist critique of, for instance, social media platforms. And this is not because they, you know, particularly love Facebook, but they're sort of developing different combinations of political justifications to bring into their visions, their visions of technology. The way that they arrive at these imaginaries are different and grounded in different political understandings, different political contexts. And this is one of the things that I wrestle with in the book in terms of highlighting also the importance of, of understanding the processes and the political reasons that lead activists to a certain view of technology.
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The last piece of the framework that you look at is you note that social movement activists might challenge a particular sort of technological hegemony, but none of your cases actually did this challenge. So what does it mean to challenge? And why is it so hard for people to do on the ground?
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So an activist imaginary challenge for me rejects both the imaginary of Silicon Valley and the technologies of Silicon Valley. And yes, in the book I don't have any case of challenge. And that is in a way a result of the research design of the book, which was really inductive. And so I didn't set out to find the cases of specific types of imaginaries, but it was the other way around. I first sort of found movements that I wanted to study and then these different categories of imaginary sort of came out of the analysis. But in the conclusions of the book, I reflect on what a case of challenge would look like. And based on the existing literature on activism and also on sort of just what is out there, what is happening on the ground. And I distinguish two different sort of subsets of imaginaries of challenge. The first one is challenge as refusal. So a collective decision to abstain from the use of digital technologies. And this is sort of different from maybe kind of individual sort of decisions to do a tech detox or, you know, to abandon one platform in favor of another one. But this is more about disconnecting as a political practice that is taken within, within activist groups. And the second sort of sub type of challenge would be challenge as alternatives. So the reimagining and rebuilding of technological platforms that are more oriented towards activism. And obviously this has a long history in the history of activists and alternative media. And we've seen some of this, we've seen some of these discussions, for instance, in the attempts to move to Mastodon in the wake of the collapse of Twitter. But also there are other small scale experiments out there by activist groups. And there's a lot of interesting work going on in the US on abolitionist technology. So there are sort of some experiments out there. But in general, and this is something that I talk about in the conclusion of the book, challenge is hard. Challenge is probably less popular than the other sort of categories of imaginaries among contemporary social movements. It requires resources in terms of funding and time and expertise, especially if you are trying to build alternate technological alternatives. And there's also always the risk of alienating potential supporters. And this is something that the activists that I do interview in the book sort of always come back to when they are talking about their own imaginaries and how they might be considering seeking alternatives or dropping out of social media entirely. But they're really afraid that this would, would risk disconnecting them from people rather than just technologies. But I also sort of make the case for the fact that the difficulty of even thinking about challenge really comes from the reach of the power of Silicon Valley and its imaginary and that is making it really difficult to even think about challenging sort of the dominance of these technologies and the dominance of these ideas around technology. And I think the cases that I examine in the book and how and sort of the imaginaries that I describe really make it clear how difficult it is to escape the reach of the Silicon Valley imaginary, even if you are vehemently opposed to it.
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Well, I mean, it's such a really interesting and helpful framework in all of the theoretical groundwork that you laid down. Building off of these cases is really so productive and interesting, I think, for people working in this area. I certainly, in my own work, I'm curious about where this has taken you and what you're working on now.
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I am working on a book on mutual aid activism during and after the COVID 19 pandemic. So you might remember, but from the very first weeks of the pandemic we've seen an extraordinary grassroots mobilization bringing together neighbors, friends, activists to help communities get access to food or to face masks, masks, even money to cover rent and expenses, et cetera. And these grassroots solidarity effort decided to call themselves mutual aid, which is a concept that has a long history in anarchism, in the workers movement, but also in communities of color, queer communities, indigenous people, disability activism. And I've been interested in sort of tracing how these ideas about mutual aid have come up again during and after the pandemic. But also how a lot of this activism, this mutual aid work in the pandemic, was mediated through digital technologies and how these technologies enabled and constrained this extraordinary solidarity effort. And so the connection with the book that we've just talked about is sort of in thinking about what is the role of technologies for these movements, but what is the role of technology for solidarity, particularly under sort of conditions of emergency, as we have lived through during the pandemic. And so I've been doing interviews with mutual aid activists in three different countries in the US in the UK and in Italy. And I've also done some digital ethnography in trying to think about the meaning and the promise of mutual aid and also exactly what the role of digital technology has been in this movement. So I am still writing. I look forward to talking about it more.
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C
Awesome. I am also looking forward to it and huge congratulations on the book and thank you for taking the time to chat with me and tell everybody about it. This awesome work.
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