MARXISM AND NEW MEDIA @ DUKE UNIVERSITY

keywords: New Forms of Collectivity,  Hacking and Hacktivism, Creative Commons, Open Access and Open Source Practices, and Virtual Property

The Occupy Wall Street movement is demonstrating that it is not through established and traditional forces that politics will reinvent and reinforce itself, but more likely through the action of a social group that we will call here “young technoactivists”, whose goal is to build new territories for technologically-mediated common social causes.
This paper will address four Brazilian networks that represent the expression of the Brazilian Zeitgeist related to Digital Culture and are connected to contemporary global movements: CulturaDigital.Br, the Transparency Hacker Network, MetaReciclagem and the Fora do Eixo Network.
The first (1) characteristic of these movements is that they result from arrangements which are not rooted in party structures, unions or social movements that have emerged in the past three decades (such as the Movement of Landless Rural Workers – MST – or even large association struggles for social and human rights). Rather, they are a kind of networked group of forces heavily influenced by the use of new information and communication technologies, which cannot even be called “organizations” in the traditional sociological sense.
Another important aspect (2) is that these groups are not attached to rigid ideological affiliations. Their brand is the action. They are ideologues of practice. One can try to understand them by looking for references in the libertarian left, where several of the principles of these social arrangements can be identified, but many of their participants would shy away from looting methods and symbols drawn from corporate culture. There is a strong connection with the anti-globalization movement (for another globalization) that spread in the late 1990s and 2000s), with the Global Days of Action of the World Social Forum. But that kind of “get together to change the world” alone does not explain what is happening.
If we look through our magnifying glasses, the image of the growing digital culture, which is forged from the emergence of the Internet and the popularization of personal computers (processes that started in the late 1970s), we can see that this culture gained momentum and assumed its most visible aspect with the arrival of the web in the 1990s. The Digital Culture is a culture based on recombination and collaboration that has spread across the planet and produced a short-circuit in economics, arts, media and, of course, politics.
Finally (3), another aspect of the articulation of these “young technoactivists” technologies is the search for the radicalization of politics and democracy, which are being gradually trapped by economic interests and the vacillations of traditional political representatives. Therefore, it is not a denial of the political movement, but rather a confrontation against the structures and representatives of this obsolete and outdated world.