This week’s readings offer critical views on the developments of digital protests in the last twenty years pertaining the Zapatista movement.
Lane’s analysis breaks down how the Zapatistas started the first postmodern revolution by juxtaposing the performativity of war as a Zapatista method towards entering the public arena, with their sophisticated Internet presence from the start—despite the lacking infrastructure in Chiapas itself. Lane contends that cyberspace affords populations new ways of protesting, and the ways in which Zapatistas mobilize dissidence through websites reveals the ways in which cyberspacetime is viewed and utilized more as a comercial and private space, rather than a public one. Cyberspace, then, is not an isolated virtuality, a world of images according to Plato: it produces a new spatiality, is produced by material conditions and social relations that in turn are affected by cyperspace, creating an open loop, a dialectic, which makes possible a porous space of appearance with real repercussions in each.
In a similar vein, Ricardo Domínguez, a founding member of Critical Arts Ensemble and Electronic Disturbance Theater, relates how the emergence of the Zapatistas in the early 90s modified and amplified his early notions of electronic civil disturbance. With the advent of web browsers and accessible html in the dawn of the new century, Domínguez centers on how the Zapatistas were spurring northeastern communities in the US to utilize emergent tactical media as a way of compounding their grassroots community organizing in Chiapas. Therefore, what the Zapatistas were accomplishing through their dialectic between the real and the virtual involved uniting solidary communities on and off the grid, those with infrastructure and power and those without, from NYC to Chiapas, and displacing these very structures of power through unprecedented cyber activism. Domínguez also brings to the conversation the idea of uniting an ethics to an æsthetics, and how these new tactical media experiments respond to a poetics as well as a call for change: electronic disturbance could be done directly from the margin to the very center, and it could be done æsthetically, informed by Mayan indigeneity.
Subcomandante Marcos’s speech on 25 May 2014, “Entre la luz y la sombra”, also illustrates the changing tendencies in the Zapatista movement and the need for new blood to take over in his absence, then declared. He reiterates that the Zapatista movement has chosen the path of life, has chosen to offer their constituents and the inhabitants of Chiapas a better quality of life, liberated and autonomous from the neoliberal policies that aim to bleed the continent dry. In twenty years, the movement has shifted its aims towards bettering indigenous communities directly, and el Sub now recognizes that his persona has been a mirage, una botarga, that the movement has transcended the need of a single caudillo at the lead, that now communities should be able to organize for themselves and have a collective voice away from the traditional models of Left organization in Latin America.
What this week’s readings have me pondering now are the myriad of ways in which communities have historically used the Internet for grassroots organization despite the consumerist frame in which the Internet was created and continues to operate. With new legislation aimed at limiting freedoms in Internet use, how can the Internet truly be democratic? How is the Left, as much as the Right, utilizing electronic civil disobedience as a means for defeating and erasing their enemies, and how is all this hubbub continually shifting the ground for politics to take hold?