Geert Lovink (representing the Institute of Network Cultures  and Hogeschool van Amsterdam) in his opening speech
referred to the Unlike Us Limassol event as the global launch of the research initiative of Unlike Us Network. Unlike us is an initiative which is about how and why social media bring us together.

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Korinna Patelis from Cyprus University of Technology welcomed the participants launching the idea of the creation of Unlike Us network.

It might seem that Unlike Us, is a network created by people that opposed to social media but this is not the truth. A badge of academics that have a lot of love of social media created this network.  This love is the one that make us enjoy the use of social media and social networks. This love is essential  for the research on social media.

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A blog report from Unlike Us #1 Limassol, 23-11-2011.

In the session ‘Social Media Activism and the Critique of Liberation Technology’, Greek journalist and activist Achilles Peklaris’ talk ‘Send tweets, not troops’  focussed on a shift in diplomacy methods and tactics of the United States. According to Peklaris social network dynamics have a major impact on how diplomacy is practiced since three years ago.

An important example is how the United States and its institutions supported and ‘facilitated’ network diplomacy during the Arab spring. When the Egyptian government shut down the Internet, the U.S. helped by offering alternative connections to the world, e.g. a Google service that would let people post to Twitter through voice messages over landlines.

Referring to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as the ‘backbone of the revolution”, Peklaris argued that these popular social networking sites were the catalyst: “(..) the new weapon that finally turned the tide”. Moreover, he reminded us that the USA has acted as a quite aggressive military superpower over the last decades. Now providing ‘the people’ with the means to self-organize, discuss, decide and act instead of sending troops or bombs, clearly is a better strategy for getting rid of tyrants.

According to Peklaris, the power of social networking services in this context lies in meeting and encouraging fellow people in struggle, sharing real news with each other as citizen reporters and getting support for people all over the world.

Moving from the Arab world to Greece, Peklaris explained that the Greek Left was inspired and driven by what happened in the Arab world, and also started using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in their protests on Syntagmaga square. If it wasn’t for the Arab Spring, Greek Leftists group would have never used these services.

An interesting set of questions that Peklaris posed: What if American people decide to use social networking services in protests against their own system? Would the State Department keep the Internet from shutting down, when people use it to organize angry anti-government rallies in front of the White House? On whose side would Mark Zuckerberg be? The protesters of the U.S. government?

In times of crisis and turmoil, we need large networks, Peklaris argued. Alternative social networking services could provide a ‘solution’ in case the bigger ones are shutdown, but -supposedly- are not eligible to communicate with people most important to you: “Facebook is great because everyone is on Facebook”.

The root of the problem in controlling social networking services is the attitude of people when they gain power: “Corruption comes next, it’s just human nature”. Hence that we should be careful who we put our trust into. Even when we start using alternative social networking services.

Finally, Peklaris pitched three ideas to be ‘(..) trained, prepaid and educated (..)in using these services, while also exercising our legal, political, consumer and democratic rights:

1: Social media education: inform and educate all the students in elementary and high school in full detail about privacy issues, legal, social behavior, do’s and dont’s.

2: Self-organization in a consumer’s movement of sorts. A union trade of users to make a stand for a large group(s) of people by reaching consensus.

3: Create a ‘shelter’ for Facebook , Twitter, YouTube and other networks. A meeting point for ‘e-refugees’ and a storage for all your important data in case of a ‘shutdown’.

In the second session of the Unlike US! meeting, Oliver Leistert and Marc Stumpel addressed the entity that is rapidly becoming synonymous with the term social media: Facebook. As the giant among other platforms like Twitter, Youtube and such, Facebook seems to singlehandedly dictate the list of issues raised by the Unlike Us! network in general. Leistert and Stumpel focused in their talks on the possibility of defiance.

Leistert’s talk was representative of the wider criticism on Facebook. He presented the main findings of his recently co-edited critical volume on Facebook and added several observations of his own.

Coming from a “techie” background, connected to activism, the main point of criticism Leistert directed at Facebook is the extremely poor trade-off between being able to use a software platform for social activities and have your data collected and kept on a central server, uncontrollably beyond the reach of the user and concurrently bundled, sold and monitored.

This leads, in the words of Andrejevic as expressed in his essay in the above-mentioned bundle, to a ‘digital enclosure’ in which the goods formerly considered to be ‘common’ now fall in the hands of private companies. Other authors note that the development of Facebook features over time strategically allow for maximization of data gathering for commercial purposes.

The resulting ‘like economy’ is, according to Leistert, a logical outcome of the ongoing neo-liberal subjectivication. People are enticed to see themselves as subjects and produce snippets of personalized subjectivity in a performative arena that requires continuous production and maintenance, an ‘immaterial labour 2.0′ floating the boat of cognitive capitalisms.

Shortly touching on privacy issues, Leistert notes with amazement that privacy legislation does not unction when millions decide to sign it away. Leistert returns to the subject of defiance, pointing out that with the above features, using Facebook for activism seems rather absurd. In his final remarks he poses the question how privacy can be retained and offers Kristina Irion’s suggestion to implement EU legislation.

Marc Stumpel and Oliver Leistert

Stumpel’s topic is interestingly opposing to Leistert’s. Where the latter’s critical contributions amassed lead to the conclusion that to overcome Facebook’s inherent issues “the dragon should be slain”, Stumpel explores the possibilities of subverting and perverting Facebook from within. Presenting the work of the artist’s collective “FB Resistance”, Stumpel dwells on strategies and tactics to reappropriate Facebook, while continuing use in its current shape.

In worldwide brainstorm sessions, users were asked in what way they thought Facebook was lacking. One often heard complaint was the absence of a ‘dislike’ button, others were the inability to change color schemes and backgrounds and features, and the current importance of advertising.

An answer to many of the raised issues, stated Stumpel, are already technically feasible and some are widespread. By installing Greasemonkey plug-ins, browserside interventions allow for the lay-out of websites to change. This augmented browsing offers many opportunities to adapt a Facebook page to the wishes and needs of a user. Not only can certain feeds be blocked or the chat function be adapted, at the same time functions can be added, like the popular Unfriend Finder that allows you to keep count of the friends that flicked you off their list.

Stumpel ended his presentation with several future ideas for interventions, with the most hardcore being a complete diversion of the chat and message data around the central Facebook server not to have them stored and monitored.

Responses to both talks  drew into focus the dilemma found when addressing the issue of resistance. Will working ‘on the inside’ and reappropriating the system from within hollow out its power as it is planned, or will it not only sustain, but also corroborate the validity of the system? It may seem that continuation of Facebook use on their own terms is hardly a threat to Facebook, but it needs also to be noted that when a plug-in that hides advertisement starts being used on a large scale, advertisers will pull out and Facebook’s business model will be affected. The other option is conceptually a lot more simple: have people minimalize their time on the site and quit their accounts. But here we may note that the ‘how’ question will give rise to another debate altogether.

A presentation of Pavlos Hatzopoulos (Greece)

Mr Pavlos Hatzopoulos tried to explain the way occupants of Syntagma Square acted by comparison to cockroaches. But not as a collective identity or just another of the insect’s aspect, but how people tried to find ways to express themselves through the occupy movement, how people got out and avoided censorship, as well as cockroaches survive and find way out to light.

This was not just an ephemeral transformation of the 99% of collecting identity, not even a political project or a public spaces conversation.

Mr Hatzopoulos believes that their commons can be placed in their becomings, not in linear or genealogical reasons, a new generation of activists trying to change the world. It was a happening that came out of the economic/material happenings of the crisis that is affecting the world which unites. People who suffocated because of the crisis, tried to endure it and survive just like cockroaches do best.

When we become cockroaches, we do not become less than we are, but we expand ourselves beyond the Syntagma Square, creating possibilities. As people are disassociating themselves from the social networks, they adopt a kind of asymmetric politics using the call to occupy everything, creating occupying zones.

In these occupy zones, the movement is being created by multiple becomings. One of these becomings and occupy zones is the internet. Where Social Media are being “occupied” by protesters. Even if in some occurrences, online social media are being censored but people like cockroaches, like machine cockroaches this time, they find their way around, either by protesting to facebook to take back a page it deleted or by changing IPs in order to keep a site/blog active to a censoring country.

These movements and becomings are being absorbed by hashtags, pages and groups of social media.

These are different than previous forms of activism, such as clicktivism and petitioning online.

Even the Social Media that try censor, delete them or the governments that try to cut off their connections to the web cannot stop them, because they act like cockroaches and they find their way around.

Pavlos Hatzopoulos (left)

But these becomings, are not just some people with commons that are becoming groups, but people with different mindsets, opinions and views that through similar instances of becomings, are connecting with each other, spreading among a medium and through different mediums to create a movement as such that no-one has seen previously.

That is our era, our networked 21^st century. People are becoming cockroaches, in order to survive, transform and bring change, both on the online and the offline world.