Open source activism and individual targeting
Obviously, this thought experiment by John Robb poses all kinds of ethical questions (excerpt):
“Traditional non-violent protest is dead as a means of reversing bad organizational behavior. It’s so easily ignored in a media saturated environment and the methods of controlling and marginalizing it have become easy and widely practiced (from “free speech zones” to non-lethal weapons to crowdsourced identification of protesters). Further, shame doesn’t work anymore as a means of dissuasion. Given these impediments, the revival of protest means rethinking how it is used as a coercive tool. It means going beyond attrition (boycotts, physical damage, etc.) and moral suasion (signage, marches, etc.) and into the realm of systemic disruption. Here’s one approach.
In most large traditional organizations, whether they be corporations or bureaucracies, decision making is dominated by a small number of very powerful people protected by a phalanx of senior specialists. They are not democracies. Yet, in modern western societies, this elite group and their specialists are able to dissociate themselves from jobs when it comes to their private lives. They live unencumbered within our impersonal society. This window of vulnerability creates a yawning opportunity for innovative forms of disruptive non-violent protest. One that pierces the organizational and societal veil of anonymity for these individuals by turning them into systempunkts (vulnerable nodes within the targeted organization’s network that would cause the most damage if disrupted).
Early work on this type of protest can be seen in the work of 4Chan’s Anonymous and China’s human flesh search engine. Both of these open source movements have shown to be surprisingly powerful at targeting single individuals (and poor at disrupting organizations). By using thousands of contributers, they are able to gather intelligence information on an individual (and their family). In short, learn everything about the target down to bank account numbers. This then enables the movement to target the individual.”
