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Globalization & Global Inequality, Digital Activism, Political Action…
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Digital Activism, Political Action & Algorithms
Theory / Research
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Zeynep Tufekci Twitter and Tear Gas (2017)
Tufekci's book compares high-profile, horizontalist, anti-authoritarian street protests, arguing that digital technologies have reconfigured the public sphere itself. She engages with movements like the Zapatista uprisings, Occupy Wall Street, Gezi Park in Turkey, and the Arab Spring in Egypt, explaining how the internet helped organize medical supplies during the Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in Occupy, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul's Gezi Park. Her central argument: digital tools let movements scale up fast, but this same speed is also their fragility and they often struggle to persist in long-term quests for change because they skip the slow work of building durable organizational capacity.
https://www.twitterandteargas.org/
Artists / Projects
Trevor Paglen — Surveillance Visualization
Paglen photographs the physical infrastructure of state surveillance most people never see — NSA and National Reconnaissance Office buildings lit at night, looking more like server stacks than offices — often shot from helicopters or via deep-sea diving to reach undersea surveillance cable landing points. His stated aim: "What does a surveillance state look like? My intention is to expand the visual vocabulary we use to 'see' the U.S. intelligence community. https://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/11/artist-snaps-creepy-new-photos-of-the-nsa/photo/nro_inline2/
!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Swiss duo Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo built a bot with a weekly $100 Bitcoin budget that randomly purchased items on a darknet marketplace and shipped them to the exhibition space where they were unpacked and displayed. Purchases included fake designer goods, a hidden spy camera, master keys, and memorably, real ecstasy pills, which were seized by Swiss prosecutors along with the bot itself https://aksioma.org/mastersandservers/projects/mediengruppe-bitnik-random-darknet-shopper/
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Data / Case Studies
Hong Kong's "Be Water" Protests (2019) — Decentralized Coordination
The 2019 anti-extradition-bill movement was largely leaderless, with protesters using LIHKG, a Reddit-like online forum, and Telegram to communicate, brainstorm, and make collective decisions, spreading across 20 different neighborhoods with anonymous participation.During protests, strategies and decisions evolved organically... People protesting in one area would suddenly move to another location. It was so fluid the police couldn't catch them." The approach won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in 2020 — the first time the award went to an anonymous citizens' movement rather than a named artist.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_protests
Black Lives Matter and Algorithmic Downranking
During the 2020 BLM protests, Instagram and TikTok both publicly apologized for algorithmically silencing Black voices. Internal research later cited by Business Insider found Black users were 50% more likely than white users to have their accounts automatically disabled by moderation algorithms.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0277864
The Arab Spring's Role in Social Media (2010–2012)
Social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) played a key role in mobilization, information-sharing, and bypassing state-controlled media across Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Tufekci herself discusses how remote Twitter users helped organize medical supplies during the Arab Spring — a case study she uses to make her broader point about digital mobilization's speed vs. its long-term fragility.
Digital Platforms, Aesthetics & Race
Theory
Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology (2019)
Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a story of individually racist programmers, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral or even benevolent.
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Data / Case Studies
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"Blackfishing"
A term describing non-Black public figures and influencers who tan their skin, use makeup, or get cosmetic surgery, adopting hairstyles and fashion pioneered by Black women while avoiding the systemic discrimination Black women actually face.
Instagram Filters — Racial Bias
Beauty filters on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have been shown to lighten skin tone, sharpen chins, narrow noses, and enlarge eyes — systematically pushing users' appearances toward Eurocentric beauty standards. A 2024 academic study using an emulator to apply Instagram filters across thousands of scraped faces confirmed that certain beautifying filters measurably lightened perceived skin color across multiple race/ethnicity categories.https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/15/1031804/digital-beauty-filters-photoshop-photo-editing-colorism-racism/
Artists / Projects
Legacy Russell — Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020)
Russell reframes the "glitch" as a deliberate strategy of refusal rather than a flaw to be fixed: rather than trying to be correctly and smoothly "read" by systems built around cisgender, heterosexual, white, male bodies as the default, glitch feminism celebrates the productive failure to be legible to those systems as a form of liberation.
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