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’.

Uber drivers in the UK have used WhatsApp extensively in their organizing of drivers – like for Deliveroo, TGI Fridays, Wetherspoons and McDonald's workers, this built upon pre-existing networks and online groups. In the UK, this mobile organizing has developed further, as witnessed in their recent strikes on 9 October 2018. They called a 24-hour strike from 1 pm, demanding increased fares of L2 per mile, for Uber's commission to be reduced to 15 percent, an end to unfair deactivations (or sacking of drivers) and bullying, and worker rights protections. ‘After years of watching take-home pay plummet and with management bullying of workers on the rise, workers have been left with no choice but to take strike action’, the branch chair of United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD) (the branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) that organizes Uber drivers), James Farrar (quoted in IWGB, 2018), argued, continuing: ‘We ask the public to please support drivers by not crossing the digital picket line by not using the app during strike time.’

As Farrar notes, the drivers redrew the notion of the picket line for their dispersed and digitally mediated workplace. Rather than maintaining a picket outside meeting points, taxi ranks or offices, they argued that the app should be the picket line. This was supplemented with protests outside Uber offices to provide a physical point to focus on as well. On a global level, Uber drivers have coordinated through WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter to take joint action in the run up to Uber's IPO (initial public offering). These platforms have been key for providing the opportunities for workers to contact each other across borders, greatly lowering the administrative and logistical costs that would have been involved in doing so previously.

This growth of ‘digital picket lines’ reveals the importance of understanding (im)material power and politics. Here, discourses and ideologies not only operate but are framed within the public consciousness in these epidemic terms. This epidemic discursive framing can be traced back, at least, to the beginnings of the Cold War. The ability to see viruses in the decade after the Second World War fascinated scientists and the general public as, according to Wald (2017, p 158), ‘unlike their bacterial counterparts, viral microbes existed on – and seemed to define – the border between the living and non-living.

The memory of the Vietnam struggle for liberation continues to loom large even into the new millennium. For many, it was the war that gave birth to the US counterculture, the catalyst for a radical energy spurred on by their conviction that their own freedom should not be won by the blood of a repressed people halfway across the world. For others, it remains a testament to the possibility of a heavily outgunned and out-resourced force defeating a colonial oppressor. At the time though, driving this deadly military conflict was the fear, above all else, of contagious revolutions. It was the threat of one country after another falling like dominoes to Communism. In his now famous introduction of the ‘domino theory’, which helped give birth to this war a decade later, then US president Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed the danger of the ‘falling domino principle’, whereby, similar to dominoes in a row but with countries, ‘you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly’.

Indeed, in retrospect, scholars have critically described this perspective as ‘the notion of a contagious epidemic process in the incidence of political violence’ (O’Sullivan, 1996, p 106). Even after its genocidal consequences in the 20th century, it retains its relevance into the present – now rebooted to explain, for instance, the Arab Spring (see Fregonese, 2011). While the symbol of dominoes falling may be at this point bordering on the laughable, the spectre of viral social change is as potent as ever. The popularity of social media has made information, and hence politics, one of competing viral ideologies vying for dominance and power. It is fundamentally altering politics in ways previously almost unimaginable. One study drawing on data from the 2014 Hungarian general election campaign ‘showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing’ (Bene, 2017, p 513).

Guerrilla warfare is often thought of as something which emerged only in the modern era of revolutionary struggle. Yet, in truth, it has a long history stretching back to Sun Tzu's The Art of War (1963). Indeed it was prominently used in the US Revolutionary War in the late 18th century, where an outnumbered army was able to use a range of harassing attacks against invading British forces to successful effect (see Dederer, 1983). These same tactics would be adopted famously by Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists, where Mao succinctly described the strategy: ‘The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue’ (1965, p 124). Significantly, guerrilla tactics were viewed as more than simply a military technique. Rather, they were a way of being that emphasized values of adaptability, covert actions and resilience in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. According to US Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, what makes guerrilla warfare and its practitioners so dangerous is that ‘guerrillas are masters of the arts of simulation and dissimulation. … Their tactical concepts, dynamic and flexible, are not cut to any particular pattern.” (Mao Tse-tung & Griffith, 1964, p 26).

What lessons then, if any, would such a guerrilla ethos hold for present-day activism and social movements? At first glance, they may appear reserved for only armed insurrections or a rather duplicitous – indeed anti-democratic – mode of political operation due to their emphasis on simulation and dissimulation. Digging deeper, though, the contemporary relevance of guerilla tactics starts to emerge more fully. They speak to the possibilities of pursuing effective resistance and potential transformation in a social order whose domination is paradoxically marked by flexibility and innovation rather than stability and stagnation. While their rootedness in violence and duplicity may stand out, perhaps their true legacy will be in providing valuable insights into how to construct an insurgent revolutionary politics that is every bit as mobile – and often more so – as the power they are seeking to challenge and replace.

Che Guevera, opening his famous book Guerrilla Warfare, proclaimed that the Cuban revolution ‘showed plainly the capacity of the people to free themselves by means of guerrilla warfare from a government that oppresses them’. These words were written over half a century ago. Since then, the world and politics have changed dramatically. The Soviet Union has fallen, neoliberalism reigns supreme, and Cuba and China have almost completely abandoned ‘really existing socialism’ for the promises of capitalist progress. And yet the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. The 21st century has been marked by disastrous US imperialist adventures, a global financial crisis, a pandemic wherein the poor and precarious have suffered disproportionately to the wealthy, and the resurgence of socialist ideas the world over. New movements are arising, challenging the ideology of the free market and the rule of corporations. And just as importantly, new populist reactions have emerged embracing the rebirth of ethno-nationalism and political authoritarianism.

It is precisely in this contemporary context of revolution and reaction, radical change and an evolving status quo that guerrilla politics becomes once more so socially inspiring and strategically significant. Yet the terrain and composition of these insurrectionary movements have necessarily changed with the times. Now it is not professional armies that are the primary combatants but predictive algorithms which shape our behaviour and guide our exploitation. It is not only armed insurrections that will bring about revolutionary conditions but international mobile movements aided by digital platforms. And it is not the countryside that will be the main field of battle but a digital commons through which outdated capitalist structures and divisions between city, town and countryside can be subverted and new collaborative social relations can arise and thrive.

These rebooted guerrilla revolutionaries, admittedly, are more incipient than fully formed at this point in history. Yet their presence is being felt as insurgent groups are emerging, ushering in technologically sophisticated forms of ‘insurrectionary’ actions. Perhaps the best known of these is the hacktivist group tellingly named Anonymous, which has ‘incited online vigilantism from Tunisia to Ferguson’ (Kushner, 2014).