Sand in the Information Society Machine: How Digital Technologies Change and Challenge the Paradigms of Civil Disobedience

Digital technologies have fostered the rise of new forms of civil disobedience that change and challenge established notions of this form of political action. This paper examines digital civil disobedience using the concept of friction to explore contested entanglements of this kind of protest and its new technological adaptations, as well as tensions on the conceptual level of civil disobedience. The paper is split into in three sections which offer analyses of (a) the historical dimension of this form of protest, (b) seven factors that represent some of the features of contemporary digital forms of civil disobedience, and (c) the recurring motif of power of information within digital civil disobedience. The paper is centered on the notion that transformations of civil disobedience demand a reconsideration of traditional understandings of civil disobedience to meet the conditions of our current society.