Democratic guerrillas in the midst of global crisis

This manuscript was completed in the middle of a global pandemic and international uprising. As we wrote our final words, the COVID-19 virus and Black Lives Matters movement were sweeping the world. It would thus seem a strangely appropriate time to theoretically and practically explore the possibilities of mobile resistance and viral revolutions. After decades of being convinced we were at the neoliberal end of history, the prospect of creating a different, freer society is suddenly not only probable but urgently necessary. This book is a work of revolutionary optimism based on our ability to reboot political resistance and radically reinvent our democracy.

For this purpose, this book seeks to fundamentally reconsider power and the basis of social order in light of recent and rapid technological changes. Established views associating strength with stability and hegemony with uniformity are being quickly dismantled by the sheer speed of events and how rapidly they spread across physical and digital borders. Instead, today, perhaps more than at any other time in history, power is strongest when it is mobile and hegemony when it is viral. Above all, it is adaptable, flexible and malleable to diverse cultural contexts and populations, allowing domination to be user-friendly and fully ‘customizable’.

We too need to learn to craft our struggle and promote our own radical alternatives in a way that similarly speaks across different networks and forges new ones. This demands that we embrace experimentation as much as we do opposition, that our movements are local in their focus and global in their ambitions, that we bring together the excitement and urgency of creative disruptions with the inventiveness of actual disruptive concretions. Doing so means that we embrace a new political ethos that is mobile, viral and totally transformative.

‘Smart’ technologies are rapidly expanding the capabilities of state and corporate authority, increasingly disciplining us to be ‘innovative’ problem-solvers, continually updating and discovering fresh opportunities for preserving and spreading their capitalist status quo. At stake, then, is how to stop the ongoing mutation and infection of this racist, patriarchal, free market social ‘virus’.