tactics in Stalder 2018
understood as environments in
which one could act without directly representing a reality outside of
the media. Television was analyzed down to its own legalities, which
could then be manipulated to affect things beyond the media.
Increasingly, culture jamming and the campaigns of so-called
communication guerrillas were blurring the difference between media and
political activity.[^77[]{#Page_47 type="pagebreak"
title="47"}^](#c1-note-0077){#c1-note-0077a}
This difference was dissolved entirely by a new generation of
politically motivated artists, activists, and hackers, who transferred
the tactics of civil disobedience -- blockading a building with a
sit-in, for instance -- to the
internet.[^78^](#c1-note-0078){#c1-note-0078a} When, in 1994, the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in the south of Mexico,
several media projects were created to support its mostly peaceful
opposition and to make the movement known in Europe and North America.
As part of this loose network, in 1998 the American artist collective
Electronic Disturbance Theater developed a relatively simple computer
program called FloodNet that enabled networked sympathizers to shut down
websites, such as those of t
-note-0120a} The company thus
introduced explicitly political and economic criteria in order to
influence what, according to the standards of certain powerful players
(such as film studios), users were able to
view.[^121^](#c2-note-0121){#c2-note-0121a} In this case, too, it would
be possible to speak of the personalization of searching, except that
the heart of the situation was not the natural person of the user but
rather the juridical person of the copyright holder. It was according to
the latter\'s interests and preferences that searching was being
reoriented. Amazon has employed similar tactics. In 2014, the online
merchant changed its celebrated recommendation algorithm with the goal
of reducing the presence of books released by irritating publishers that
dared to enter into price negotiations with the
company.[^122^](#c2-note-0122){#c2-note-0122a}
Controversies over the methods of Amazon or Google, however, are the
exception rather than the rule. Necessary (but never neutral) decisions
about recording and evaluating data []{#Page_121 type="pagebreak"
title="121"}with algorithms are being made almost all the time without
any discussion whatsoever. The logic of the original PageRa
,"
*European Commission: Press Release Database* (April 15, 2015), online.
[120](#c2-note-0120a){#c2-note-0120} Amit Singhal, "An Update to Our
Search Algorithms," *Google Inside Search* (August 10, 2012), online. By
the middle of 2014, according to some sources, Google had received
around 20 million requests to remove links from its index on account of
copyright violations.
[121](#c2-note-0121a){#c2-note-0121} Alexander Wragge, "Google-Ranking:
Herabstufung ist 'Zensur light'," *iRights.info* (August 23, 2012),
online.
[122](#c2-note-0122a){#c2-note-0122} Farhad Manjoo,"Amazon\'s Tactics
Confirm Its Critics\' Worst Suspicions," *New York Times: Bits Blog*
(May 23, 2014), online.
[123](#c2-note-0123a){#c2-note-0123} Lucas D. Introna and Helen
Nissenbaum, "Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines
Matters," *Information Society* 16 (2000): 169--85, at 181.
[124](#c2-note-0124a){#c2-note-0124} Eli Pariser, *The Filter Bubble:
How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think*
(New York: Penguin, 2012).
[125](#c2-note-0125a){#c2-note-0125} Antoinette Rouvroy, "The End(s) of
Critique: Data-Behaviourism vs. Due-Process," in Katja de Vries a
tactics in Mars & Medak 2019
for the Public Library/Memory of the World resonated
with many people. After the project initially gained a large number
53
54
of users, and was presented in numerous prominent artistic
venues such as Museum Reina Sofía, Transmediale, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Calvert22, 98weeks, and many more, it was no
small honor when Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia invited us to
write about the project for an anthology on tactical media that was
to be published by the MIT Press. Tactical media is exactly where
we would situate ourselves on the map. Building on Michel de
Certeau’s concept of tactics as agency of the weak operating in the
terrain of strategic power, the tactical media (Tactical Media Files
2017) emerged in the political and technological conjuncture of the
1990s. Falling into the “art-into-life” lineage of historic avant-gardes,
Situationism, DIY culture, techno-hippiedom, and media piracy, it
constituted a heterogeneous field of practices and a manifestly
international movement that combined experimental media and
political activism into interventions that contested the post–Cold
War world of global capitalism and preemptive warfare on a hybrid
terrain of
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