Illegal Art and Other Stories About Social Media

Simona Lodi 

This is the cease and desist letter that I received from WORM in Rotterdam in 2010. That year, I included their work Suicide Machine in an exhibition on ‘Cease and Desist Art’, focused precisely on the legal troubles that can arise in art, which I organised and presented in Rome at the Live Performers Meeting.[1] Obviously I did not ask the artists’ permission to include them in the exhibition, as I considered it part of the curatorial concept. 

It was all, of course, a hoax. The letter, the legal firm’s website, and all the necessary paraphernalia to lend credibility to the affair was created by the WORM collective with the complicity of Florian Cramer. It was a joke on the provocative joke contained in the concept of the exhibition. All the stories I tell in this article, however, are bona fide and true. My purpose, in fact, is to shine a spotlight on artists whose work is a response to social media and the Web 2.0, and by doing so explore the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and provide a critical analysis of the artistic possibilities that centralized social networks seek to exclude. The aim is to understand socio-cultural transformations in the fields of art and technology in social space and what new forms of engagement and participation have developed, providing an opportunity to reflect on new concepts of democracy that are emerging in our global media age. More specifically, this work focuses on three main movements, representing three different types of response by artists whose work challenges the Web 2.0: Illegal Art, Ironic Artivism, and Spatial Art.

Illegal Art

What I call Illegal Art[2] is otherwise known as radical art. Artists working in this field have produced artworks that target Facebook, Twitter, and other centralized social networks – not anonymously, but putting themselves on the front line. For some years now, it has become popular among digital artists to focus on illegal art practices; in particular, it has become common practice among new media artists to attack companies that sell people’s privacy. A new form of art has emerged that can effectively be called ‘Illegal Art’, based on the capacity to provoke companies targeted by pirate artists, plagiarists, hackers, and troublemakers into sending out copious cease and desist letters.[3] Here we will take a close look at actions that have targeted companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google.

At the end of 2009, Mark Zuckerberg declared the end of privacy. The Facebook founder said it no longer made any sense to talk about online privacy. Social norms have changed, he claimed – just look at how profitable companies that base their business models on social networking and wikis have become.[4] Almost at the same time, Facebook blocked access of two applications to its system, Seppukoo[5] and the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine,[6] both of which invited users to close their accounts. The king of all social networks trembled before the threat of these viral suicide campaigns. For people who feel their time is being strangled by social networks and the mind-boggling procedures required to cancel their accounts, the applications turned the tables on Facebook, requiring users simply to insert their username and password and in an instant it was done. A farewell email personalized by the user would then be sent out to inform the user’s network of the ‘suicide’, inviting friends to do the same and cast off their digital identity to discover what lies beyond virtual life. Both applications were a Web 2.0 evolution of the dear old worm virus,[7] but with the key difference that they were activated knowingly and voluntarily by the user, and they attacked the very system on which they were based, the social network, and not people’s personal computers. Its logic had been turned on its head: rather than targeting users, it was users who chose to use the virus provided by the artists to assert their freedom, in an action of artistic appropriation of viral marketing strategies.

Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers claimed that everything users post on Facebook is the sole and exclusive property of Facebook, as they tried to halt an epidemic that in less than two months had led thousands of users to close their accounts. The mass suicide risked bringing the entire Web 2.0 to its knees. While the artists used their cease and desist letters to attract popularity, their projects made headway by exploiting snowballing media interest in the dominant position of corporations such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Netlog, and their abuse of such a position as concerns the management of users’ data, which are never deleted from their servers. Thus virtual suicide turns you into a virtual zombie, as Gordan Savicic puts it,[8] which is a set of photos, friends and memories that float detached from the person to whom they belong, and who cannot delete them. Why is there no right to oblivion on the Web 2.0? Legal action forced Facebook out into the open, compelling the social network to admit that the photos, videos and personal information posted by users are the property of the corporation and not the people who provide them, raising various issues of socio-political import, such as the right to privacy, data retention practices and the difficulty faced in controlling one’s own personal data. Adding a pinch of irony to it all was the clumsiness of Facebook’s lawyers, who in demanding that Web 2.0 Suicide Machine cease and desist from the activity misdated the deadline by one year prior to the date of the letter, rendering it legally null and void. The artists’ immediate response in their defense was to stress the fact that Facebook fails to eliminate from its systems information that does not belong to it, going against the express wishes of the true owners of the data, who choose to abandon Facebook. Not only does Facebook not protect the privacy of its users, it violates the right of people to choose how to organise their personal spheres freely and independently. 

Earning oneself a cease and desist letter has become the new frontier in art, a symbol of the cause for the freedom to create in the Corporation Era. Artists keen to take part go find themselves a good lawyer, rather than a good art dealer. What is going on with the future of art? What freedoms are these artists championing? Does it all have anything to do with the end of the technological utopia? How has business appropriated hacker values, exploiting open source principles, freedom and equality, and triggering the activist response? How did we come to all this? What was the cultural precedent? Ever since its beginnings, the overriding importance for the internet was to keep it free, as circulating information and the control of information is power. Having started with a Tech Model Railroad Club,[9] and with the logo, copyright and privacy bandwagons are exiting from the scene step-by-step.[10] This leads us to ask who, exactly, is the culprit? Cue to a court room. The hearing is in session. The lawyers are showing no mercy. The artists are in the dock.

Introducing the legal evidence: 

®™ark (pronounced ‘R-T-Mark’ or ‘artmark’)[11] is a fake corporation established around 1996 in the United States, which funds projects designed to sabotage the new myths of the digital age. Its subversion tactics involve the creation of sensational, though fake, scoops published in the press and media. In March 1996 it launched Digital Hijack[12] by etoy, which targeted the AltaVista search engine for its manipulation of online searches and restriction of true freedom. This was the first strike against a corporate shell that was routing people along pathways controlled and steered by advertisers. As the dragnet closed, user fish were left trapped inside. The response was to hijack the pathways. Masked as authentic hijackers, etoy crossed the line of the law to virtually hijack the search engine’s users, who, oblivious to the joke, found themselves in the nowhere land of ghost sites, hostage to a bunch of IT pranksters claiming responsibility for the hijack and calling for the release of social engineering maverick Kevin Mitnick. The work marked a crucial turning point through its use of illegal practices, transforming the entire activist side of Net Art into Illegal Art. According to Franco Mattes of 0100101110101101.ORG:

It’s not the artists who go out in search of legal troubles; nobody wants to be sued. If the number of lawsuits has increased it’s because people have got used to calling on lawyers to resolve problems, creating even more in the process. And it’s not just about corporations; we’ve been “attacked” by a publishing company, by a museum, by the Vatican – they’re the real pirates of the Web.[13]

I am not really sure whether such a definition of Illegal Art is actually necessary, or how long it will survive in art history. For now, though, its purpose is to identify an extremist fringe that has turned breaking the law into an art form. The streets have become a dead capital, and the old bunkers of power (the seats of government, corporate headquarters) are empty simulacra.[14] Electronic information flows need to be tracked and traced so as to challenge those in command today who decide, without any democratic mandate, the fates of people in the name and on behalf of the profits that the centralization of the Web 2.0 delivers through its free-wheeling ethic. Illegal Art takes up the politics of and voices the protests of activist movements. After becoming hackers, the artists have become activists, lending the rupturing force of art when it becomes a tool for social change to anti-globalist dissent. This brings us to the concept of ‘social’. In particular, the ‘social’ in ‘social networks’, which have no authentic social cause, but rather, are gilded cages that are a goldmine for those who exploit the people cooped up in them. Protests have therefore shifted towards the public consequences of Web 2.0 which people will carry with them throughout their lives. 

In recent years – Lovink identifies 9/11 as the start of a strategy of social terror and the defamation of the free and egalitarian internet[15] – the spectre of piracy has replaced the utopia of internet freedom with the vulnerability faced by users as a consequence of unrestricted access. In the wake of this shift, repressive regimes have clamped down on what is seen to be a threat to the information economy. Content industries have hired armies of lawyers to stop free exchange of any kind outside the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the likes, transforming the exchange-based economy permitted by the internet into a neo-liberal marketplace. Corporations, especially the big, multinational conglomerates, have come to be known as ‘data lords’ for their ability to control what can be seen, heard, read and done online, by whom, and how. The rationale underlying Illegal Art is that of the culture jam. Culture jamming aims to disrupt consumer experience so as to reveal the true meaning of a message that has been centralized by the powers that be and is falsely presented as shared when in fact it is designed to influence us as consumers. The artists’ aim is to show just how influential big corporations are through their control of the media, while laying bare their Achilles’ heel. A thread of posts on the nettime mailing list[16] discussing the cease and desist letters sent to Seppukoo and Web 2.0 Suicide Machine led to the dusting off of an old project by UBERMORGEN.COM, when Hans Bernard suggested spamming Facebook with fake injunctions and restraining orders via The Injunction Generator[17] – much more effective than traditional cease and desist letters in creating legal pressure and turning up the heat. The Injunction Generator was created in 2003 in response to the legal furor over the Vote-Auction website.[18] Produced by ®™ark as a commercial website ‘bringing capitalism and democracy closer together’,[19] Vote-Auction was a media hacking performance which offered U.S. citizens the chance to sell their presidential vote to the highest bidder during the 2000 U.S. presidential elections of Al Gore versus George W. Bush. Restraining orders and injunctions soon shut down the website. 

By providing a critical label to collect together various types of artwork that flout the law, the umbrella term ‘Illegal Art’ helped bring out into the media spotlight all those artists prepared to stick their neck out. As many battles were won, a change for the better was seen. Since the image of the artist sits comfortably alongside the idea of pranks and irreverent subversion, attracting legal action can be seen as something of a trophy. This is not, of course, to underestimate the seriousness of the consequences for the artists, or the burden of having to pay lawyers and dedicate time to litigation. Nevertheless, for the artists it proved a great opportunity for visibility. In interpreting legal action as a trophy, Paolo Cirio explains that it is ‘evidence of having raised a problem concerning freedom of speech. I see it more as the conclusion of an action rather than its ultimate purpose’.[20] Or as Guy McMusker, spokesperson for Les Liens Invisible, puts it:

In recent months we have been thinking a lot about what tone to give the supporter campaigns for works of ours that have attracted injunctions, cease & desist letters and prosecution. Striking a balance between martyrdom and the necessity of those actions being taken has always been of critical importance for us. The message that is very often conveyed, no matter what stance we take, is that there is a convenient, easy and safe way to express yourself and then there are things you just cannot do, for which we always end up becoming a living deterrent. The point is that an artist, especially a hacker, cannot bow to the rationale of power that lies behind these machinations; by going beyond it, you inevitably attract injunctions and legal action. Therefore we don’t believe so much in antagonism as a choice for making a stance; rather it is a necessity dictated by the desire for self-assertion, so we welcome turning the rationale of legal action on its head so that it becomes a trophy, if this can in some way incite people, rather than inhibit them for once, to question these so-called limits of the law.[21]

Last in order of appearance is the work Face to Facebook[22] by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, who stole the user profiles of one million Facebook users using software specially designed by them for the purpose. A professional job, if ever there was one! Putting this information together, they went one step further by importing and matching the profiles on a fake dating website (www.Lovely-Faces.com). As though reconstructing people’s histories from scratch, they invented a virtual website that was fake, but built on real data. As people still tend to confine what they do online to the visual space of the screen, Face-to-Facebook questioned online privacy in practice, through one of the web’s most iconic platforms. Face-to-Facebook was the final project of the series The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy, consisting of the works Amazon Noir, and Google Will Eat Itself.

Ironic Artivism

In 2010 Micah White, contributing editor at Adbusters and an independent activist, coined the term ‘clicktivism’. He says: ‘Clicktivism is the pollution of activism with the logic of consumerism, marketing and computer science’,[23] where ‘Its ineffectual marketing campaigns spread political cynicism and draw attention away from genuinely radical movements.’[24] It is ‘activism degraded into advertising’.[25] He comments on how convenient it is to be an activist without taking risks, seated comfortably at your desk instead of taking part in public sit-ins and seriously battling for a cause. Similarly he attacks the ‘slacktivist’ popularity of signing up to online petitions, which by unquestioningly adopting the methods of modern marketing are totally ineffectual, if not damaging to authentic activism. Exploiting the phenomenon of clicktivism, some artists have sought to make ironic use of such pseudo-activism to expose the absurdity of online petitions –what Slavoj Zizek calls ‘interpassivity‘ or the illusion of doing something.[26] As White puts it elsewhere, ‘Clicktivism is a Trojan horse, a tactical malware, […] What better way to cripple the revolutionary potential of a whole generation […] privileging a data-obsessed, metrics-oriented, technocratic approach which is closer to advertising than resistance’.[27]

The response of artists in this field has been to appropriate marketing campaigns for their own ends. In the work Tweet4Action by Les Liens Invisibles[28] – a tool to ‘broaden your armchair activism horizons’[29] – the artists use the rhyming slogan ‘Tweet for Action, Augment your Reaction’ to encourage people to create their ‘own insurrection’ using the communications and image strategies of an advertising campaign. They incite slacktivists to action with the promise of becoming a leader at no risk, using the king of the social media protest movement: Twitter. Wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, the spoof actually gives people the tools to create their own protest campaigns. It also parodies the renowned U.S. website MoveOn.org, created in response to the impeachment of then U.S. President Bill Clinton, and which has earned its founders millions of dollars while colonizing activism with questionable technocratic methods. In one section of the Tweet4Action website, all it takes is a click to be taken through the process by a fun and friendly cartoon figure representing the guiding image of the activist whose dream it is to be a tousle-haired rebellious type with a placard in one hand and a megaphone in the other. The cartoon figure is an activist-style copy of a comforting advertisement for selling something safe –  like a protest campaign on Twitter straight from your own smartphone. Admittedly, it does make you want to give it a go, to start your very own personal campaign of absolutely no interest to anyone at all, perhaps like the majority of posts that appear on Twitter. But that might just bring you face-to-face with the Twitter Cops,[30] vigilantes who for years have fought to stop people tweeting things nobody could care less about, like ‘I’m taking a shower’ or ‘The cat’s asleep’. 

A sister project to Tweet4Action, created by the same duo of artists[31], is Repetitionr,[32] an online petition service. Repetitionr, commissioned by the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, enables people to start their own petition, gathering together a million fake, though plausible, signatures and sending them to the authorities straight from home. It parodies the illusoriness of the belief that corporate, centralized social networks can rally the democratic spirit that characterized the utopias of the early life of the World Wide Web. Instead, social networks show the failure of representative democracy, as they have proven to be utterly ineffective from a political, social, and economic point of view. They also mark the emptiness of participatory democracy, as they create the illusion of taking action and being part of a decision-making process that ultimately does not give any cause a concrete outcome. For Les Liens Invisible, ‘In the post-idealist era the success of a campaign is increasingly reliant on instantaneous statistical surveys promoted to shift opinion towards defined positions’.[33]

According to Geoff Cox, who curated Repetitionr, in parodying the very concept of democratization,

The project reflects the acknowledged need for new institutional forms that challenge existing systems of governance and representational structures, as a blatant expression of non-representational democracy. [17] The approach challenges the limits of representational democracy and the discourse of neo-liberalism in general, offering a means to rethink politics within network cultures. If this is an example of over-identification with real existing participatory democracy, then the provocation is that we need to develop far better strategies and techniques of organisation.[34]

That provocation has been taken up by many artists who work on the development of new networks and new forms of participation.

Spatial Art. Alternatives in Social Media

While some artists set their sights on ‘clicktivism’, aiming their weaponry against the useless protest network that thrives on the internet, others focus their work on designing and promoting alternative spaces for expression. Artists who use augmentation, information and immersion in specific contexts, both in public and private spaces, without authorization, aim to create interventionist actions and collective experiences within an experimental, augmented framework, and alternatives to social media, by occupying collective space with new forms of collective communication. One of the results of all of this is ‘Spatial Art’,[35] which incorporates many of the aspects involved in developing new forms of social media. 

In Spatial Art, artists play on the ambiguities in defining what reality is –  how it is perceived, felt and detected, and how it is possible to evert the social network into physical social space. Recently Gibson went on the record to say, ‘Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical’.[36] Decentralized social networks have enormous potential to develop offline and bring new forms of civic engagement into collective space. The Invisible Pavilion is one such example; an exhibition organized using social media through a blog. The aim was to set up a joint protest with the artistic collective Manifest.A.R. within the spaces of the 54th Venice Biennale. The Invisible Pavilion[37] was an uninvited, experimental experience of squatting in the exhibition spaces of the Biennale. It itself was not a social network, but the way the exhibition was curated can be considered a model format for social media. The idea was not to use the augmented space to reproduce the same curatorial scheme as the visible Biennale. Rather, artists were asked not for one piece from a collection but for a ‘stream’ of pieces, which they unleashed on the Biennale at their leisure through blog posts. The connections and relationships between the streams spread to fill the Venice Biennale, in particular the Giardini concourse, with social media, as it was natural for the artists to dialogue spontaneously with the other artists and people sharing the same space. The Invisible Pavilion project led to a new partnership with the artistic collective Manifest.AR and their Venice Biennale 2011 AR Intervention. Together a format was built that stepped up the interventionist component of the projects. The curatorial experiment helped us understand how to make the most of augmented space to create a new sort of network.

Other artists are also exploring the potential of new forms of social media. Sander Veenhof’s work particularly focuses on this field, as he himself explained in an interview with Kevin Holmes:

I’ve foremostly been exploring the domain of dynamic multi-user augmented reality, by which I mean the non-static placement of content into the global virtual public space: a parallel reality with a radical lack of any kind of boundaries. I’ve been creating tools and mechanisms to open up this virtual space to anyone wanting to contribute, as with the Cityshapes[38] project in Dortmund, Germany. And to highlight what extent this new hybrid reality stretches out, I co-organized an uninvited AR guerrilla exhibition[39] within the walls of the MoMA in New York. Taking that approach one step further, Mark Skwarek and I launched virtual Twitter-connected items inside the Pentagon and inside the Oval Office of Barack Obama, creating a public communication hotline straight to the president’s desk.[40] If an iPhone were to be allowed inside the White House, that is.[41]

Tamiko Thiel’s mARp My City[42] is a new work in progress to create a crowdsourced narrative for a city. mARp is a term coined by Thiel to mean ‘map with Augmented Reality’. The idea is for participants to go to their favorite sites in a city and place augments and a brief text there using their smartphones. Once the augments have been placed, anyone can view them at the site through their smartphones, take screenshots and upload them onto the mARp. The augments are also marked on an interactive online map enabling anyone on the internet to view documentation of them, but to experience the augments, people have to visit the sites for themselves. Jonathon Baldwin has instead created ‘social maps for wireless community networks’ through the project Tidepools.[43] The map system he has developed is what he calls the result of a ‘Ushahidi’ meets ‘The Sims’ map interface for local needs and culture, to provide and sustain low-cost internet mesh networks’.[44] The project highlights the importance of maps today – not just any kind of map though, but maps that are crowdsourced and designed to drive social change. The project is based on the implementation of a wireless local area network and a game-inspired interface.

Another project based on mesh technology, created by the Weise7 collective, takes the shape of a book that acts as an internet-independent wireless server. Run by a portable, custom-made Wi-Fi device, The Weise7 in/compatible Laboratorium Archive[45] is a record of the Weise7 Studio for Labor Berlin 8, featured at transmediale 2011. This clever little object is notable both for its utility and for the aesthetic choice of giving it book-form, considering that books were one of the first analog archives to be digitized. 

Tales of Techno-activism and Turning Business on its Head

Reflecting on the new concepts of democracy that are emerging in our global media age, it is interesting to note that in the lead-up to the Occupy Wall Street protests, radical thinker Micah White called on ‘culture jammers, augmented reality game designers, live action roleplayers, revolutionary flashmobbers, clandestine street artists and activists from the future’ to ‘show us that what comes after clicktivism is a people’s revolution’.[46] That call was answered by many such creative types. Augmented reality, for instance, was used by artists such as Patrick Lichty, Will Pappenheimer, and many others for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. It shows that new revolutionary work by artists coming out of the centralized Web 2.0 is confronting and spreading throughout society. 

The appropriation of consumerism, marketing, and advertising strategies by artists working on new forms of decentralized social media is a response that Tatiana Bazzichelli sums up as, ‘Don’t hate the business, become the business’[47] – playing on the famous line ‘Don’t hate the media, become the media’ by Jello Biafra, musician and founder of San Francisco punk rock band Dead Kennedys. This approach to activism critically embraces the ideology of marketing to use it against itself, attacking it with the very same advertising tactics and market research techniques used to sell soap, with a view to promoting social movements built on more brilliant solutions. An example is the decentralized application developed by Salvatore Iaconesi for activists during street demonstrations, designed to be citizen-centric.[48] The app is currently only available for activist groups, encouraging drastic action for a real social revolution. It works as a platform that captures information from a range of social networks, such as Flickr, Instagram, FourSquare, Facebook and Twitter, and processes it using natural language analysis to understand what the messages are saying. The system counts the messages evoking danger and those suggesting the situation is safe, and ‘synthesises it into an easy-to-read interface’.[49] Users simply point their phone in a certain direction; areas suggested to be dangerous show up in red, safe areas in green. The system harvests the emotions of people, the way they express themselves through natural verbal communication, not by following a hash tag. It was tested during the UK riots in 2011, as well as at student protests in both London and Milan, as a real-time system for environmental and social change using digital ethnography studies.

All these artworks demonstrate that artists are directly engaged in the issue of what exactly is the ‘social’ in social media,[50] using techno-activism to usher in new forms of equality and social change. Bearing in mind that it is intrinsic to the nature of technology that it should fuel change above and beyond the control that we believe we have over it, it is imperative that we ask ourselves if this really is the sort of ‘smart society’ that we want and what the future holds in store? We need to take a critical and consistent approach to technology so as not to support and adopt the wrong solutions. It is in this way that it is possible to see techno-activism accomplishing an emancipatory, egalitarian social revolution that is decentralized and which faithfully embodies the social uprisings and true wishes of the people, instead of reflecting the ideology of consumerism, marketing and advertising.

References

• Bazzichelli, Tatiana. ‘Networked Disruption: Rethinking Opposition in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking’, PhD Diss., Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark, 2011. 
• Cox, Geoff. ‘Democracy 2.0’, http://www.anti-thesis.net/contents/texts/democracy.pdf.
• Cramer, Florian. ‘Facebook Demands Cease & Desist for the “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine”’, posting to the nettime mailing list, 13 January 2010, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1001/msg00009.html.
• Deseriis, Marco and Giuseppe Marano. Net.Art: L’Arte della Connessione, Milan: Shake Edizioni, 2003.
• Gibson, William. ‘Google’s Earth’, The New York Times,**31 August 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html?_r=2.   
• Holmes, Kevin. ‘User Preferences: Tech Q&A With AR Visionary Sander Veenhof’, The Creators Project, 17 August 2011, http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/user-preferences-tech-qa-with-ar-visionary-sander-veenhof.
• Johnson, Bobbie. ‘Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder’, The Guardian,11 January 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy.
• Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
• Lodi, Simona. ‘Cease & Desist Art: Yes, this is illegal!’ in Cary Hendrickson, Salvatore Iaconesi, Orianna Persico, Federico Ruberti and Luca Simeone (eds) REFF–Roma Europa Fake Factory. La Reinvenzione del Reale Attraverso Pratiche Critiche di Remix, Mashup, Ricontestualizzazione, Reenactmen, Milan: Derive e Approdi, 2010, pp. 30–40. 
• Lovink, Geert. Networks Without a Cause, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.
• Rossiter, Ned. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006. 
• White, Micah. What is Clicktivism?, http://www.clicktivism.org/.
• ______. ‘Clicktivism is Ruining Leftist Activism’, The Guardian, 12 August 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism.
• ______. ‘Why Gladwell is Wrong’, Adbusters,*Blackspot blog,* 8 October 2010, http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot-blog/why-gladwell-wrong.html.
• ______. ‘A Vision of Post-Clicktivist Activism’, Adbusters,*Blackspot blog,* 26 July 2011, http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot-blog/vision-post-clicktivist-activism.html.
• Zizek, Slavoj. ‘The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel’, in Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, http://www.lacan.com/zizprayer.html.