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 Thylstrup 2019

of their work on a
free text-sharing network such as Monoskop. 38

How might we understand Monoskop’s legal situation and maneuverings in
infrapolitical terms? Shadow libraries such as Monoskop draw their
infrapolitical strength not only from the content they offer but also from
their mode of engagement with the gray zones of new information
infrastructures. Indeed, the infrapolitics of shadow libraries such as
Monoskop can perhaps best be characterized as a stratagematic form of
infrapolitics. Monoskop neither inhabits the passive perspective of the
digital spectator nor deploys a form of tactics that aims to be failure free.
Rather, it exists as a body of informal practices and knowledges, as cunning
and dexterous networks that actively embed themselves in today’s
sociotechnical infrastructures. It operates with high sociotechnical
sensibilities, living off of the social relations that bring it into being and
stabilize it. Most significantly, Monoskop skillfully exploits the cracks in
the infrastructures it inhabits, interchangeably operating, evading, and
accompanying them. As Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey point out in their
meditation on stratagems in digital media, they do “

 

Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.