Updating civil disobedience Whistleblowing, anonymous hacktivism, and academic piracy

This thesis examines the extent to which new practices of principled acts of illegal resistance that involve the use of digital technologies can fruitfully be interpreted as new forms of civil disobedience. The study focuses on three kinds of digital acts: whistleblowing, anonymous hacktivism, and radical initiatives to open access to academic publications. Through a detailed reconstruction of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, some of Anonymous’ distributed denial of service (DDoS) actions, and Sci-Hub’s and LibGen’s academic piracy, the thesis interrogates a large variety of positions from traditional liberal theories to more recent radical democratic accounts of civil disobedience. The investigation centers on the problems of whether civil disobedience can take place within and against private organizations such as corporations, if it necessarily excludes anonymous actions, and if property damage and other forms of somewhat violent actions are unavoidably incompatible with civility. The author offers an interpretation of the ‘civil’ of civil disobedience not as decorum, reasonableness, or respect for the law, but as the enactment of a broadly construed citizenship that is not limited to those officially recognized as citizens of a state. The notion of performative citizenship is proposed as a non-substantive essentially pluralist notion of civility that, together with the conditions of non-militarism and self-restraint, makes the radical democratic minimal definition of civil disobedience better-suited to account for ongoing transformations of the practices of contestation due to their increasing globalization and digitalization.