Introduction

New media technologies, especially mobile technologies, have come to the fore in the public eye on the recent wave of global protests. However, it is not the technologies themselves that have enabled the uprisings from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street Movement to #YoSoy132; it is the new algorithms, organizational structures, and unique gatherings that have given rise to technological innovation and the repurposing of existing tools. John Postill, in this special issue of Convergence, calls this phenomenon ‘protest formulas’: ‘the unique compound of societal forces […] that characterizes each protest movement’. Entirely organic structures, these new protest formulas morph, realign, and reconstitute in each context through their specific constellation of actors. The scope of the protests and their technological contexts addressed in this issue’s articles reveals the utter fluidity and adaptability of protest in the networked world of the 21st century.

The ‘global crowd’, as Susan Buck-Morss (2014) calls it, and countercultural insurgency supported by independent and social media have played a pivotal role in political change at least since the arrival of accessible networked communication. When the Canadian anticapitalist magazine Adbusters posted a call to arms on its blog on July 13, 2011, with the creation of the hashtag #occupywallstreet, Adbusters’ founder Kalle Lasn called on the magazine’s network to implement what he called a ‘Shift in Revolutionary Tactics’. Inspired by the radical revolt in Spain with the Indignados and in Egypt with the Arab Spring, he invoked protestors to occupy that soon-to-be-famous square at the center of the financial world. Within 2 weeks, the call had gone viral and the revolution began in Zuccotti Park on September 17. The origin of the revolution and the spirit at its heart, however, originated not from the Middle East or from Spain but from Mexico from contemporary protest’s spiritual progenitors, the Zapatistas. The media-savvy tactics the Mayan Zapatistas initiated on January 1, 1994, in protest of North American Free Trade Agreement were at that time a revolutionary form of protest that sought not to pull down regimes but to restore a voice and dignity to a people. These new methods have been powerfully influential. In her debates piece in this issue, ‘Networks, Insurgencies, and Prefigurative Politics in a Cycle of Global Indignation’, Rovira Sancho observes that Benjamín Arditi ‘calls these movements “insurgencies,” that is, political processes that abandon the “grammar of emancipation” as a predetermined script: “Insurgencies are more about opening up possibilities by challenging our political imaginaries and cognitive maps than about designing the new order” (Arditi, 2012: 2)’.

The insurgents enlist powerful tools in their service. The philosophy and practice of these toe-in-the-door insurgencies is a new 21st-century transnational Zapatismo that has spilled with such energy into squares around the world:

[that] has embraced indigenous rights and cultural diversity as well as antiglobalization and anticapitalist protests.…Rather than emphasizing class struggle they stress the need for broad coalitions and grassroots movements ([what’s known as] globalization ‘from below’) to oppose the neoliberal world order. Likewise, rather than furthering their objectives through armed conflict they have concentrated their strategy and discourse on the international media (being dubbed the first ‘virtual guerrilla’ movement in the world). (González, 2003)

The Zapatistas’ tactics have been admired and imitated by protest organizers: ‘transnational Zapatismo has generated new political imaginations and political subjectivities, and a narrative framework for ‘radical expressions of political possibility’ (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 697). These narrative frameworks are a technology that create an imaginational space, a space which operates through viral elements such as hashtags, the use and subversion of memes, and the circulation of socially broadcast links, photographs and videos as vehicles to carry ideas and seed the imagination of global indignation.

Memes encapsulate complex ideas and ideologies in a form that is easy to swallow, imitate, and spread; some of the most influential include ‘fair trade’, ‘Too Big To Fail’, ‘the 99% percent’, ‘Strike Debt’, ‘Idle No More’, and ‘#bringbackourgirls’. They are story-based strategies that work to inform and change the political conversation. Changing the conversation has been the great victory of the 21st-century protest, especially in Mexico, Spain, the Arab world, and in the camps of the Occupy Movement. In Re: Imagining Change, David Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (2010: 525) argue that ‘memes are an analytical tool for understanding corporate power, globalization, propaganda and misinformation’. Memes also spawn new narratives. The sincerest form of flattery in memetics is imitation, and that is what the Zapatista ‘movement of movements’ has generated. It has birthed the self-replication of story narratives, ‘collectives of collectives’ (Stringer, 2013), and protests all over the world. The #occupy movement invites people to intervene through direct action as a means of telling their own stories. The #occupy movement spreads like a virus across a wide variety of groups and demographics and encourages people to imitate and enhance these strategies. It encourages them to intervene at a local level through direct action as a means of telling their own stories about the fallout of globalization ‘from below’ (as Raul Zibechi calls it) in their own Liberty Plaza or Independence Square. ‘Unlike traditional labor and socialist movements, these new political actors do not merely counteract dominant global networks; they are building a new politics of autonomy and self-management rooted in local territories and identities’ (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 481–486). These insurgents simultaneously ‘reach …out horizontally across diversity, difference’, technologies ‘and geographic space to develop new forms of regional and transnational coordination’ (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 481–486). One of the most tangible measures of the movement’s success may be the surprise bestseller of 2014, French economist’s Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It confirms the movement’s narrative hook that capitalism is sinking under the weight of rising inequality on the basis of a broad range of evidence. This book is selling on its own merits to be sure, but the sheer volume of people who are reading it and talking about it can be attributed to the fact that Occupy made these issues news in the first place. As Rovira Sancho says, ‘These events are necessarily episodic, just as politics understood as the interruption of normality is, but they never vanish “without a trace” (Arditi, 2012: 159)’.

These locally situated yet global networks are collaborative and leaderless and often put forward indigenous or feminist strategies to achieve their ends. The ‘Idle No More’ movement and ‘Blue Dot’ meme that have emerged out of indigenous culture in Canada, and Occupy protest camps have a genealogy in second-wave feminist activism like the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. These networks are successful because they are complex and operate in three dimensions (Juris, 2008; Rovira Sancho, this issue): the network is a relaxed form of organization across groups. Communication in the form of ‘semiotic flows on the net does not make a revolution, but it helps any revolution to become horizontal and communicate with its participants and the outside world’ (Rovira Sancho, this issue). The network is an ideal structure for both horizontal and democratic relationships. Guiomar Rovira Sancho discusses this in this issue, as do Megan Boler, Averie Macdonald, Christina Nitsou, and Anne Harris in ‘Connective Labor and Social Media: Women’s Key Roles in the “Leaderless” Movement of Occupy Wall Street’. Horizontalism has its origins in the women’s movement, but we can see the same tactics employed in indigenous movements. This is what critics have called the Occupy Movements’ failure, as Brian Creech points out in his article ‘Digital Representation and Occupy Wall Street’s Challenge to Political Subjectivity’. It is in ‘the absence of a centralized leadership group’, Boler et al. say, that ‘[t]he plurality of Occupy messages’ prohibit ‘traditional media commentators from pursuing singular and simplistic sound bytes’ thereby defying ‘mainstream conceptions of what counts as politics’. The media’s refrain ‘What does Occupy want?’, discussed by Boler et al., sets that movement in a specifically gendered historical context, echoing Sigmund Freud’s famous remark, and making explicit the possibility for new configurations of actors. Boler and her coauthors propose a hidden world of women’s ‘connective labor’ represented in the constellations of roles they define as documentarians, connectors, and administrators. John Postill also proposes a trinity in his article, ‘Freedom technologists and the new protest movements: a theory of protest formulas’. The actors he identifies and analyses are hackers and geeks, tech lawyers, and social media journalists. It is in these new social groupings and subject positions that we see the power that comes through changing the narrative. As Janet M. Conway (2013) argues in her book Edges of Global Justice, social movements are knowledge producers. The world that persists after the global financial crisis and increasingly corporatized mass media is all too often in the business of disinformation rather than education. These new narratives and occupations (both personal and political) offer us the potential to rewrite our own stories.

As Carolyn Guertin has explored in her book on activist art practices, Digital Prohibition, women have long been agitators and the organizers of information networks. For example, long before the arrival of a so-called Twitter Revolution in Iran in 2009, there was Z-Netz and Chernobyl in 1985. Z-Netz was a feminist Bulletin Board out of Germany. It was born because of the nuclear meltdown, and because male bulletin board administrators branded the very act of publicizing the disaster as ‘terrorism’. Pioneering computer artist and activist Rena Tangens found her own voice and started her own online form to inform the world of this as yet unreported tragedy (see Waltz, 2005).

A few years later, native women increasingly became active in the United Nations and in the global justice movement. The IV World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 was:

a watershed for Indigenous women as they began to develop gender and ethnic perspectives on Indigenous and women’s struggles. The resulting Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women became the basis for subsequent demands at the global level. (Escárcega, 2013: 2636–2639)

Grassroots electronic media also plugged in many other women’s organizations in the 1990s, including Barbara Ann O’Leary’s Virtual Sisterhood, which set out to add grassroots activism to the UN Agenda.

The Acteal Massacre of Zapatista children, women, and men in Mexico in 1997 fostered another activist form: hacktivism. The term was coined in 1998 to describe an emerging hybrid practice that united the best attributes of peaceful social protest: activism and tech-savvy online civil disobedience (often called hackerism). One of hacktivism’s trademark features is its uncontainability. It spills out into the world in the form of political protest, such as at World Trade Organization and G8 events, in books, pamphlets, net.art, and, not least, performance art. It combines bodies and media-based dissent with real-time material concerns. Hacktivism is a narratological disturbance in the fabric of an event or place that starts a conversation and builds a community. Without protesting human bodies, there is no event. Feminists realized this a long time ago.

Hacktivism was first practiced by Critical Art Ensemble member and software engineer Carmin Karasic. She was so horrified by the Acteal Massacre – 45 Zapatistas died at the hands of the Mexican government – that she set out to create a Web interface that would perform political protest as an aesthetic act. Along with Ricardo Domínguez and two others, she formed the Electronic Disturbance Theatre. A progenitor of the Blocked Web and Interactive Mass Grave Map in the present-day Turkey discussed in Sarah Harris’s article ‘Networked Erasure: Visualizing Information Censorship in Turkey’ (which will be published in the forthcoming May 2015 issue of Convergence), the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s civil disobedience engine provided not information, but the ability to act on one’s conviction with a group of like-minded people. This engine, FloodNet, filled browser pages with the names of the dead and required a community to begin flooding to temporarily shut down government servers and return pointed error messages. In 2009 (from June 13 to June 21), Karasic reinvented this engine and used it in Iran for 8 days as a tactical media disturbance to target Iranian government sites (Global Electronic Sit-In, 2009).

Protesting in the streets is not stopping, no matter how many squares are ‘systematically and forcibly dismantled by the state’ (Escárcega, 2013: 1792). As the memes of the revolution spread, we have seen ‘a proliferation of hybridized actions that involve a multiplicity of tactics, combining actions on the street and actions in cyberspace’ with a new species of social networks and modes of public disobedience (Raley, 2009: 44). While social media dates back to the arrival of the Web 2.0 revolution in user-generated culture, it does have both low-tech and high-tech antecedents. There are a number of influential social media antecedents, which Rovira Sancho discusses in her article, and Indymedia is among the most influential. Indymedia was a photo- and video-sharing, open-source publishing, peer-2-peer (p2p) network. Advocating with slogans such as ‘be the media’ and ‘everyone is a reporter’, Indymedia ‘began as a way for social movements to tell their own stories, but it inadvertently served as a training ground for a new generation of [passionate, hands-on] journalists’ (Stringer, 2013: 5922–5925). Indymedia was ‘conjured by Zapatista dreams’ according to Tess Stringer, ‘and [was] the brainchild of several alternative media groups …in a Seattle storefront’; it enabled ‘grassroots firsthand coverage of those now historic events’ known as the Battle of Seattle (Stringer, 2013: 5936–5940).

Indymedia traces its roots to the Zapatista encuentros (gatherings) in Chiapas, Mexico. There are three main reasons for this. First, the Zapatistas, by pioneering the rapid diffusion of news and ideology through Internet-based e-mail listservs, bulletin boards, and activist websites, were able to build a transnational solidarity network and could sound the alarm, and mobilize international assistance rapidly when they encountered state repression. (2013: 5976–5979)

Secondly, as Stringer (2013: 5976) points out, the Zapatistas’ struggle was ‘a central pillar’ of the global justice movement that sought ‘resistance to neo-liberal capitalism’. And, most importantly:

the Zapatistas envisioned an international activist communications network as an alternative to a corporate-dominated media landscape. They communicated this directly to the very activists who would go on to form the first IMC in Seattle through a videotaped message from the Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos at the Freeing the Media Teach-in in 1997 (Stringer, 2013: 5976–5983).

Marcos said at that event, ‘there is a third option that is neither conformity, nor skepticism, nor distrust: that is to construct a different happening – to have a critical world view and to become interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit every corner of this world’ (Stringer, 2013: 5983).

With this genealogy, Indymedia sprang to life with its first post. It reads:

The resistance is global …[,] a trans-pacific collaboration has brought this website into existence. The web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding and some cheap equipment, we can set up a live automated website that rivals the corporates. Prepare to be swamped by the tide of activist media makers on the ground in Seattle and around the world, telling the real story behind the World Trade Agreement. (Stringer, 2013: 5966–5971)

Providing an upload point, Indymedia enabled a new kind of journalism and information sharing that is so different from the spyware that commercial social media technologies like Facebook were later designed to be, as Christian Fuchs (2009) has explored at length. ¹ As next generation journalists, the Indymedia makers in Seattle wore masks, committed to open software and sharing practices, and sought to protect their own and others’ privacy, just as Anonymous and other protestors who came after them would. ‘Indymedia is much more than the content it produces or a political critique or an intervention; it is a transnational social experiment in building alternatives’ (Stringer, 2013: 6053–6054). Eva Giraud explores the legacy, ongoing practices, and implications of this alternative experiment in her article in this issue, ‘Has Radical-Participatory Online Media Really “Failed”?: Indymedia and its legacies’. It is the pervasiveness of what we are calling transnational Zapatismo that is explored by the authors in this special issue of Convergence, and that is why this issue is bookended by Rovira Sancho’s discussion of a global cycle (that began with the Zapatistas) and Gómez García and Treré’s exploration of its continuation in the #YoSoy132 movement. The meeting of connectedness and personal expression is key to the new global cycle. Rovira Sancho says,

This form of ‘self-politics’ of the connected multitudes is linked to what Manuel Castells (2009) calls ‘mass self-communication’: the possibility that people be producers/receivers of their own messages and can recombine them, remixing codes and formats, and diversifying and multiplying the points of entry in the communication process. Being a node in the network is to exist inseparably from others and makes evident the impossibility of closing the system. (Rovira, this issue)

The system is pried open by injecting physical bodies and personal narratives into the mix. Bodies and stories unite two of the most compelling threads running through the new global Zapatismo zeitgeist. These are the use of masks and the use of social networking technologies by activists. Masks are ‘a symbol of resistance’ ranging from ‘the Zapatista pasamontañas (ski masks)’ to the balaclavas of Pussy Riot to the Guy Fawkes masks of Anonymous. See but don’t be seen is the philosophy; the mask also ‘foregrounds a collective rather than an individual identity’ (Stringer, 2013: 6116–6118). Therefore, as Rodrigo Gómez García and Emiliano Treré show in their article, ‘#Yosoy132 Movement and the struggle for media democratization in Mexico’, it is significant that students in the Mexican protest around the 2012 election refuse masks, insisting instead on both collective and authentic individual identities. Similarly, as Camilla M Reestorff discusses in ‘Mediatised affective activism: The activist imaginary and the topless body in the Femen movement’, the Femen movement blinds us to the individual by turning nakedness into a rhetorical tool and mediatized weapon, viralized through cameras and staged media events. These masking/unmasking dialectics are powerful. Witness how the Pussy Riot arrests are always accompanied by forcible removal of their balaclavas. As the Zapatistas have explained, ‘We were invisible and forgotten in Chiapas, but when the Zapatistas put on masks, all of a sudden everyone could see us’ (Stringer, 2013: 6119–6120).

Masks are not the only tools of visibility. Modes of personal expression include documentation, reportage, collective information sharing, monitoring, and storytelling, and they are all part of the fabric of the movement. As Brian Creech observes in this issue of Convergence:

The aggregate collection of documents from the movement allowed sympathizers to argue that the physical phenomena of the movement existed as evidence of democratic ideals in action, as if these values can in fact become empirically observed once they emerge, as captured by the following statement: ‘This is a healthy sign for our nation because it dramatizes that the people aren’t powerless in the face of extreme inequality’ [emphasis added]. (Collins, April 2, 2012)

In the style of the Take Back the Night Marches that second-wave feminists organized, taking back the square is an act of ownership that is newsworthy but refuses easy spectatorship by the media. In fact, this seems to be a large part of the mainstream media’s frustration with contemporary protest. There are many stories, but no simple, reducible, overarching narrative.

Insurgencies are in opposition to grand narratives in principle. These crystallizing ‘Indigenous movements challenge and delegitimize the modern dichotomy of “civilization” versus “barbarism”’; they shock us out of known paradigms, and, by troubling ‘this relationship’ between the so-called civilized and the barbaric, the inclusion of indigenous voices ‘becomes an important condition for a project of decolonization’ (Escárcega, 2013: 2568–2569). While arguably consequential documents like the ‘Declaration of the Occupation of New York City’ and the ‘Global Democracy Manifesto’ serve their purposes by attracting large numbers of followers in a cause (the latter had academic ‘celebrity’ names attached to it as well), they do not tend to critique their own position. The notion of ‘global democracy’ and the even thornier notion of ‘global citizenship’ are intensely problematic. Situated in a particular time and place such manifestos also do not ask questions about different kinds of globalization. What is important is that they start a debate. In time, #occupywallstreet too turned its eyes back on itself. It grew until it began to critique colonialist practices and the ‘occupation’ of Wall Street (as originally native land, too) with the movement’s own fraught terminology. As a movement of movements, Occupy in turn births new movements, including Idle No More and the Blue Dot meme.

In a barrage of e-mails in December 2012, three indigenous and one white woman started Idle No More in Canada. Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson, and Sheelah McLean decided to be ‘Idle No More’, after the Canadian Government introduced a bill attacking autonomy in native land management on reservations, changing land rights for indigenes, removing protection for water, and weakening environmental laws. Their Facebook page was designed ‘to brainstorm ideas and a plan for action. Gordon named the page “Idle No More” as a reminder “to get off the couch and start working”’ (Caven, 2013). The movement has grassroots, teach-ins, a twitter hashtag, and rallies and protests across the Canadian prairies:

Speaking to a reporter at one such rally, Wilson …said, ‘We are trying to help people get their voices back so that we can make more change and we are able to have more of a First Nations voice …not just a First Nations, but an Indigenous voice, and not just an Indigenous voice but a grassroots voice, because it affects us all.’ And it does affect us all, as it does the environment. (Caven, 2013)

Idle No More uses social technologies to issue ‘a call for renewal of the Indigenous identities and lifeways. The leaders and spokespersons of the movement have no hesitation linking the political to the personal, as the personal is very much a part of the movement’ (Caven, 2013). When Chief Teresa Spence spent 44 days on hunger strike in protest to gain an audience with the Canadian prime minister (PM, who never came), it demonstrates nevertheless that Idle No More is clearly part of the new story of global outrage. Idle No More went viral and drew in indigenous people from all over the world. It led to a global day of action on February 28, 2013, and to peaceful roundhouse demonstrations on the front lawns of all of the parliaments in Canada.

Ongoing threats to indigenous autonomy in Canada by the federal government resulted in a meeting in February 2014 where the attendees were divided into two groups: the invited guests received yellow dots and the rest were issued blue dots and segregated in a separate room away from the PM. Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began to arrest the blue dotted members of the crowd. What does the blue dot mean? According to Christi Belcourt:

The blue dot signifies all of us who care, and speak out and risk arrest. It signifies the ‘uninvited’ among us who are treated as ‘less than’ by child care systems, justice systems, or health care systems. It signifies all of us who don’t get a voice at the table with Atleo or the PM or anyone else who has the power to mark their ‘X’ and sign away our rights. Those blue dots they made people wear were not necessary. They could have kept the yellow ones for ‘invited guests’ and all others without, so why did they insist people wore blue dots? Why? Twila Singer was told to wear a blue dot, then she was kicked out for ‘tweeting’ when she didn’t even have a phone with her. She had previously protested. (INM Collective, 2014)

This isn’t the first time that a right-wing regime has color-coded people’s lapels. This is why Christi Belcourt started her blue dot meme under the slogan ‘We are the Uninvited’. This resonates across racial, gender, and class lines, and in this time of #occupation ‘from below’ it is key that the group with the most powerful narrative will be the most successful withstanding the encroachments of governments and capitalist organizations around the world. Powerful metaphors like the blue dot and slogans like ‘We Are the Uninvited’ resonate globally in a way that the news of a few arrests at a political event never would.

The response of nonnatives to these movements has been overwhelming with even Martin Lukacs in The Guardian saying, ‘First Nation’s Peoples – and the decision of Canadians to stand alongside them – will determine the fate of the planet’ (Lukacs, 2013). Many politically marginalized groups have not been so lucky, but new technologies and the technology of storytelling allow a greater, more flexible perspective. As Sarah K Harris discusses in her article in the forthcoming May 2015 issue of Convergence, new technologies enable new perspectives, and new perspectives enable us to see differently. In her study of massacres in Turkey, she discovers that a satellite perspective has a ‘unique capacity’; it ‘sustain[s] a sense of the complexity of a ground conflict, rather than fixing knowledge about it’. She demonstrates that using the satellites for close-ups is in fact far less effective than using it for mapping the big picture for, as Lisa Parks has discussed, ‘combining it with alternative viewpoints that forgo close-ups on the victim’s body or face – can introduce a new appreciation for the complexities of the issue (251–252)’ (Harris, forthcoming May 2015 issue).

In a similar way, at the Battle of Seattle, Indymedia enabled a new perspective. New technologies helped protestors organize and evade police. In the years since, social media has become a necessary part of avoiding the surveillance nets of high-tech militarized police units. Documentation is an important part of the protest – hence its increasing criminalization as laws are rewritten in the United States and elsewhere to suppress protest. During the Arabian Spring, protestors worked with journalist hackers to construct ‘dissemination strategies’ for metadata-rich information that is uploaded through Bambuser and other livestream portals (Ulbricht, 2012). When Internet access is shut down, as it invariably eventually is, low-tech couriers known as the Sneaker.net mobilize into action by running the information to the nearer available access point (Ulbricht, 2012). As the Arab Spring started its cascade effect and more and more cities saw uprisings, police started to infiltrate social media to spy on organizers and to gain an inside track on events. Protestors had to change tactics. They began to step out of their designated role as consumers and spectators and to become makers. Brian Creech observes that the uniqueness of these 21st-century protest movements is that ‘there was not a singular occupier, but a strategy of occupation abetted by digital technologies’.

The Occupy Movement has been very active in creating new apps and protective software to enable ‘The Uninvited’ to remain connected, protected, and masked. Open Street Map gives a user privacy as well as control over one’s own data and who shares it – as long as no one talks to the user’s phone company. Safer p2p networks that have emerged include Occupy.here, Serval Rhizome Retriever, and the geolocative chat room generator Geolocha. Monitoring technologies that control overzealous police include Cop Recorder (which has its own server) and Vibe, a time- and space-based microblogging software that enables protestors to post information on the fly while masking the poster’s location. TheGlobalSquare is a more radical undertaking and collective along the lines of Anonymous. It seeks to ‘perpetuate the creative and cooperative spirit of the occupations and transform them into lasting forms of social organization’. Designed as a ‘meshnet,’ it styles itself as an alternative, decentralized Internet that is supposed to be uncensorable (Roos, 2011). Such attempts to redefine public and private space are essential in a time when even copyright can become mobilized as a weapon to censor and punish personal expression and information sharing in a digital age (cf. Guertin, 2012). Of course, as the Zapatistas discovered, anonymity and adaptability are crucial to self-defense, protest and reform, and so if in doubt protestors do go no-tech – like the Sneaker.net – to ensure their safety when necessary. As a result, if mobile media and surveillance are part of the picture, so are the notably low-tech and do it yourself aspects of global protest. Ephemera ranging from handmade posters and signs, human microphones, drumming circles to communal libraries have all been very much in evidence.

Indignados, Arab Spring, #Occupy, The 99%, Idle No More, #Upsettler, GlobalNoise, Strike Debt, and The Uninvited are just some of the new terms to emerge from the global mass protests of the last few years. They are part of a sea change in global indignation that is using digital media as tools of organization, activism, and communication. These terms mark only one small part of a much larger shift in media production and distribution that is the result of the marriage of global communities, radical social organizations, and digital media ‘produced interculturally in multiple places and as part of ongoing struggles at multiple levels – local, national, regional, and international’ (Escárcega, 2013: 2611–2615). What we are seeing in a time when Western democracies are becoming oligarchies is the public pushing back through the rise of maker culture as an integral strategy of protest. The cornerstone of that making is in changing the stories we have told ourselves for so long and via those stories reinventing ourselves. As new narratives and organizational structures of protest are born, so too are new kinds of storytellers. It is those storytellers who just may possess the power to answer Mackenzie Wark’s question ‘what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world?’ (Creech, this issue).