Anti-corporate movements instantiated their political principles in their own network structures
Evidence
The anti-corporate movement protested the rise of multinational corporations, their environmental impact, the homogenization of mass culture, media consolidation, and the pervasiveness of advertising. These criticisms were brought to popular attention in Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, the films The Corporation and Super Size Me, and the magazines Adbusters, Stay Free! and The Baffler. Anti-corporate activists advocated ethical consumption, supporting small businesses, and boycotting major multinational corporations, and they organized events like “Buy Nothing Day” and “Turn Off Your TV Week.” These organizations used networked, distributed structures and technologies to create nonoppressive collaborative strategies and principles. Jeff Juris writes that anti-globalization practices enact a “dual politics” by “intervening within dominant publics while generating decentralized network forms that prefigure the utopian worlds they are struggling to create.” Like open-source software, the movements themselves are instantiations of political principles. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 102
Categorization
- QUESTION: How did the anti-corporate movement’s ideal of nonoppressive, prefigurative networks get repurposed by the very commercial self-branding culture that followed it?
- XREF: Juris’s ‘dual politics’ and prefigurative organizing connect to the reader’s lines of work on infrastructure and governance of self-presentation. — connects to: Movements transformed ideologies from justification into organizational principles; Mobilizing through commercial platforms simultaneously strengthens the order being opposed — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 587; Platform use by anticolonial movements can inadvertently reinforce the corporate systems they resist. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 22
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 102