Todd Wolfson reveals how aspects of the mid-1990s Zapatistas movement—network organizational structure, participatory democratic governance, and the use of communication tools as a binding agent—became essential parts of Indymedia and other Cyber Left organizations. From there he uses oral interviews and other rich ethnographic data to chart the media-based think tanks and experiments that continued the Cyber Left's evolution through the Independent Media Center's birth around the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.
Melding virtual and traditional ethnographic practice to explore the Cyber Left's cultural logic, Wolfson maps the social, spatial and communicative structure of the Indymedia network and details its operations on the local, national and global level. He looks at the participatory democracy that governs global social movements and the ways democracy and decentralization have come into tension, and how "the switchboard of struggle" conducts stories from the hyper-local and disperses them worldwide. As he shows, understanding the intersection of Indymedia and the Global Social Justice Movement illuminates their foundational role in the Occupy struggle and other emergent movements that have re-energized radical politics.
| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: History, Capitalism, and the Cyber Left Part I. Origins 1. The EZLN and Indymedia: "One No, Many Yeses" 2. Activist Laboratories: The Road to Seattle 3. The Battle of Seattle and the Birth of Indymedia Part II. Logic of Resistance 4. Structure: Networks and Nervous Systems 5. Governance: Democracy All the Way Down 6. Strategy: Communications and the Switchboard of Struggle Conclusion: Social Movement Logics—Past, Present, and Future Notes Bibliography Index |"Makes an original contribution through the depth of the empirical case studies of Cyber Left organization. . . . I cannot think of another book that puts so much of the story of the U.S. left's experiments with the creation of an 'electronic fabric of struggle' within a single volume. . . . The author's knowledge, thoughtfulness, and political passion is evident."—Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games"Combining the passion of an activist and the reasoned arguments of a scholar, Wolfson wonderfully details the emergence of the Cyber Left. In Digital Rebellion he not only celebrates its political potential but also, and more importantly, provides a lucid critique of the forms it has taken thus far."—Michael Hardt, co-author of Declaration and Empire
"A major contribution. . . . Eminently readable, Digital Rebellion is a mixture of reporting and theory all designed to move beyond the horizontal-vertical duality and achieve a synthesis that draws from the best of both worlds."—Counterpunch
|A trained socio-cultural anthropologist, Todd Wolfson is currently an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He is also a community organizer and in 2006 cofounded the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia.
