Political sabotage can be enacted without coding by gently steering proprietary algorithms

Evidence

Dexterous coding skills were not required. Instead, these activists possessed a deep awareness of the nuanced politics of visibility and invisibility. Tulsa’s sabotage and the BLM hashtag hijackings were in their essence manifestations of a lightly encoded vernacular engulfing its targets like a cloud of smoke. While “lone wolf” hackings fundamentally represent an outsider’s unauthorized invasion into proprietary space (typically announcing itself suddenly), the TikTokers’ actions worked collectively within such a proprietary system by gently (and wholly legally) shepherding the platforms’ algorithms toward their own aims. At the same time, Tulsa’s saboteurs entered markets by buying rally tickets or, in a simultaneous coordinated offensive, by “holding” Trump campaign merchandise products in online shopping carts and indefinitely suspending checkout payments, both of which fed the campaign bad data and corrupted its election database. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s interest in how speculative logic migrates across self-presentation and dating platforms — same algorithmic-armature politics.