Are smartphones tools of oppression or resources for mobile resistance? This question is perhaps especially relevant for a rising new class of precarious workers who rely on ‘smart’ platforms for their employment and livelihood. Workers at Deliveroo, for instance, need to have access to smartphones in order to sign up to the platform. This means that all the workers have access to the means for mobile organizing. At first, some platforms, like Deliveroo, encouraged workers to join or start WhatsApp groups to keep in contact about shift patterns and changes to the platform. Where these were set up, it is very easy for workers to branch a new conversation out, excluding managers. In other cases, workers start WhatsApp groups to share knowledge about their work, routes, accidents, traffic and so on.

As Woodcock (2017) has found at Deliveroo, the ‘action was organised primarily on WhatsApp, building on pre-existing networks, some of which were formed at the meeting points assigned in each area by Deliveroo. What followed was a lively campaign which was widely circulated on social media’. Furthermore, “on WhatsApp groups used by delivery riders in the UK, workers post jokes and memes to pass some of the idle time while waiting for work, but also share tips on how to increase earnings’. Likewise, when waitstaff at the restaurant chain TGI Fridays were told that the company was reducing the amount of money they took home from credit card tips, workers began to organize against the change through the very digital networks initiated and originally encouraged by the company. Such communication soon branched into mass and localized WhatsApp groups. This may sound inconsequential, yet it indicates how through such mobile-based social struggle, individuals can concretely challenge their alienation as capitalist workers. ‘In all cases, what we are seeing is people refusing to accept the idea that they are atomized workers, and refusing to accept the idea that connectivity only runs vertically rather than horizontally’, Woodcock and Graham (2019, p 133) observe: ‘Even if workers like drivers and domestic workers rarely if ever see each other, they can start to collectively challenge ways of structuring the work processes that they are enrolled in’.

Organizing is politics made durable. From co-operatives to corporations, Occupy to Facebook, states and NGOs, organizations shape our lives. They shape the possible futures of governance, policy making and social change, and hence are central to understanding how human beings can deal with the challenges that face us, whether that be pandemics, populism or climate change. This book series publishes works that explore how politics happens within and because of organizations and organizing. We want to explore how activism is organized and how activists change organizations. We are also interested in the forms of resistance to activism, in the ways that powerful interests contest and reframe demands for change. These are questions of huge relevance to scholars in sociology, politics, geography, management and beyond, and are becoming ever more important as demands for impact and engagement change the way that academics imagine their work. They are also important to anyone who wants to understand more about the theory and practice of organizing, not just the abstracted ideologies of capitalism taught in business schools.

Our books will offer critical examinations of organizations as sites of or targets for activism, and we will also assume that our authors, and hopefully our readers, are themselves agents of change. Titles may focus on specific industries or fields, or they may be arranged around particular themes or challenges. Our topics might include the alternative economy; surveillance, whistleblowing and human rights; digital politics; religious groups; social movements; NGOs; feminism and anarchist organization; action research and co-production; activism and the neoliberal university, and any other subjects that are relevant and topical.

‘Organizations and Activism’ will also be a multidisciplinary series. Contributions from all and any relevant academic fields will be welcomed. The series will be international in outlook, and proposals from outside the English-speaking global north are particularly welcome. This book, the second in our series, explores the potential of the digital to alter the possibilities of the social, producing new sociodigital arrangements which can and are reshaping what we mean by organizing. Historically, we have tended to assume that organizations were entities that were bounded in time and space, requiring a certain kind of proximity to centres of power in order to achieve co-ordination.

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’.

In an era that was meant to signal the supposed ‘end of history’, it is perhaps worthwhile to think back to a different ‘age of revolutions’. The late 18th century was marked by profound political conflict and mass movements to radically transform society. Here the fight for universal liberal rights and the values inspired by the philosophical Enlightenment mixed with the blood of violence and armed rebellion. From the relatively comfortable vantage point of history, the events and their radical implications appear obvious and easy to discern. Yet, at the time, these revolutionary currents were as much rumours as they were facts. They were murmurs of possibilities, viral discourses of fact and fiction, hope and fear, spread within communities and across otherwise separate populations.

This retelling of history reveals surprising truths about the complex realities of these epochal social changes. The American Revolution is now retrospectively celebrated as an exemplar of the struggle for independence and liberty. Yet at the time its radical sentiments were both a source of excitement and worry for those involved. The initial seeds of rebellion, for instance against the Stamp Act in 1765, more than a decade before the Declaration of Independence, were a source of inspiration and worry for the White colonists. While they opened up, even if only briefly, the possibilities of liberty, they were just as concerned that these desires would spread to Black slaves, inspiring their own revolt (see Nash, 2005). When the actual revolution arrived, rumours continued to swirl in directions that profoundly challenge dominant narratives of today. The British promised the slaves freedom if they were to fight against the colonists, an offer that, in an age before mass communication, circulated unevenly, as much in whispers as in official pronouncements. This led those in bondage to the very revolutionaries proclaiming to be freedom fighters to make a difficult decision, as the promise of liberty for slaves ‘had reached a crossroads … with one large contingent casting their lot with the British and the others hoping against hope that white Americans would honor their founding principles by making all people free and equal’ (Nash, 2005, p 427).

As part of a campaign at Picturehouse Cinemas in the UK, workers experimented with a new form of digital activism. As Kelly Rogers, one of the organizers, explained, “We are going to start pushing cyberpickets … where supportive members of the public who can't come down to a picket line spend their day block booking seats and keeping them in the online basket, so they can't be sold on tills or online.” She argued that this “makes the strike much more effective when they keep cinemas open on strike days – and Hackney had managed to keep their cinema pretty much empty this way!” (quoted in Caramazza, 2019). In response, the Picturehouse sacked Rogers. She fought this later and was found to have been unfairly dismissed.

In a particularly amusing blog post from an employment law solicitor, Toby Porchon (2019), who provides legal advice to businesses, he warns of the risks of ‘cyber picketing’. He argues that it ‘ha[s] the potential to be vastly more detrimental than simply calling for a boycott. Or even standing in front of their premises so members of the public [can] make their own decisions about which business they choose to support.’ He observes that ‘this practice would have prevented unaware customers from being able to make bookings without ever knowing why.’ Equally, in the case of Picturehouse, it meant the cinema could have been open and operating with full staff but without customers ‘coming through the door’. To this end, he notes that ‘the cyber picket could have happened at any time without anyone really knowing when. Such is the nature of a remote or diffuse style of disruption.’ However, he also points to some advantages this type of digital activism may hold for workers. As Porchon explains: ‘At least with a strike the employer has the ability to not pay staff who aren't providing services. And they’d have been forewarned their operations were going to be undermined on a set day, for a set purpose.’

This book has focused on the fundamental and increasing mobility of power and virality of order. In particular, it has sought to highlight the infectious character of hegemonic discourses and their wider epidemic threat. By contrast, it revealed the possibilities for building up ‘glocal’ resistances to these dominant infectious discourses and ultimately even contagious alternatives that can spread into revolutionary pandemics. Crucial, in this respect, is the challenging and evolution of social innovation for disruptive forms of political creation – ones which materialize and solidify new possibilities for a more egalitarian, free and commons-based existence locally and globally.

In many of the examples discussed throughout this book, workers have been able to use digital technologies to facilitate mobile organizing, often using them in interaction with offline methods, or combining them in new and important ways. Most workers have some kind of shared workplace – whether a physical building, some kind of space that they frequently pass through or transient points where they come into physical contact. Yet in some forms of digital work this is no longer the case. For example, with microwork, digital platforms are used to break work down into small (or micro) tasks that can then be completed very quickly by a large group of distributed workers. Perhaps the most famous of these platforms is Amazon Mechanical Turk (or AMT). The platform breaks work down into HITs – socalled Human Intelligence Tasks – often things like image labelling, transcription and so on, that can be completed in very short amounts of time. The name of the platform – as well as that of HITs – is a reference to the famed fake chess automaton that hid a person within it. The use of HITs also indicates the way that AMT presents humans as a service, completing tasks without having to be visible. Indeed, there have been cases of start-ups like Expensify, which pretended to have developed machine-learning algorithms for automated tasks, but which in fact had outsourced them to workers on AMT.

Turkopticon is a response to the challenges that AMT workers face. Two Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, make the case ‘that human computation currently relies on worker invisibility’.