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ONE Doing Things with Words and Saying

Words with Things

That things we say and do through the Internet have permeated our lives in unprecedented ways is now a cliché that needs not repeating. That this has happened practically throughout the world despite digital inequal- ities is also accepted. That both corporations and states have become heavily invested in harvesting, assembling, and storing data—for profits or security—about things we say and do through the Internet is practical- ly the strongest evidence of the significance attached to our connected digital lives. That for many people Aaron Swartz, Anonymous, distrib- uted denial-of-service (DDoS), Edward Snowden, Christopher Wiley, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Julian Assange, LulzSec, National Security Agency (NSA), Pirate Bay, PRISM, Bitcoin, Cambridge Analytica, Mark Zuckerberg, or WikiLeaks hardly require introduction is yet further evidence. That artificial intelligence, augment- ed reality, autonomous robots, driverless cars, Internet of Things (IoT), 3D sensors, or delivery drones once thought to be the stuff of sci-fi are now at various stages of adoption attest to the speed, reach, and disrup- tion of digital technologies. That hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #NotInMyName, #StopBrexit, #ClimateChange, #BringBackOurGirls, #MeToo, #HongKong, or #RefugeesWelcome, both name and spread so- cial movements is emblematic of digital politics. That presidents and footballers tweet, governments use social media to influence national elections, hackers leak nude photos, murderers and advertisers use Face- book, or that people post their sex acts on the Internet are not so contro- versial as just recognizable events of our times. That Airbnb disrupts the hospitality industry or Uber and Lyft that of urban transportation is tak- en for granted. It certainly feels like saying and doing things through the

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 2 0 . R o w m a n & L i t t l e f i e l d P u b l i s h e r s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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Chapter 12

Internet has become an everyday experience with dangerous possibil- ities.

The worldwide debate over the social, economic, and cultural conse- quences of digital life connected to the Internet has been in full swing for about twenty-five years now. 1 Early and notable books such as Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen (1995) and Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995) were by and large celebrations of digital lives being connected to the Internet and enabling people to do things through it. 2 Yet within twenty years the mood has decisively changed. Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion (2011), Turkle’s own Alone Together (2011), or Jamie Bartlett’s The Dark Net (2014) strike much more sombre, if not worried, moods. Although Morozov draws attention to the consequences of giving up data in return for so-called free services, Turkle draws attention to how people are getting lost in their devices. Bartlett draws attention to what is happening in certain areas of the Internet when pushed underground (removed from access via search engines) and, thus, giving rise to new forms of vigilantism and extremism. Perhaps the spying and snooping by corporations and states into what people say and do through the Internet has become normalized. 3 Shoshana Zuboff’s characterization of these de- velopments as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) or David Lyon’s The Culture of Surveillance (2018) warn that ‘watching’ through the Inter- net has become a way of life and, as such, is a sign of such normalization. Seen from another angle, novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013) practically bookmark an era. Although Gibson projects an experimental and explorative, if not separ- ate and independent, cyberspace, almost like a frontier, Eggers an- nounces the arrival of the guardians at the gates of the frontier. As Ro- nald Deibert suggests, while the Internet used to be characterized as a network of networks it is perhaps more appropriate now to see it as a network of filters and choke points. 4 The struggle over the things we say and do through the Internet is now a political struggle of our times, and so is the Internet itself.

If indeed what we are saying and doing through the Internet is dra- matically changing political life, what then of the subjects of politics? If the Internet—or, more precisely, how we are increasingly acting through the Internet—is changing our political subjectivity, what do we think about the way in which we understand ourselves as political subjects, subjects who have rights to speech, access, and privacy, rights that consti- tute us as political, as beings with responsibilities and obligations? Like those who approach the study of the Internet as remaking social net- works, identities, subjectivities, or human-technology interactions, we are interested in how the Internet involves the refashioning of relations not only between people but also between people and vast arrangements of technologies and conventions that have become part of everyday lan- guage, such as tweeting, messaging, friending, emailing, blogging, shar-

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Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 3

ing, and so on. We are specifically interested in the consequences of these conventions for political life, which we think is being reconfigured in novel ways. Moreover, with the development of the IoT—our phones, watches, dishwashers, fridges, cars, and many other devices being al- ways already connected to the Internet—we not only do things with words but also do words with things. (We are going to elaborate on this awkward but necessary phrase ‘saying and doing things through the Internet’ and its two sides, ‘doing things with words’ and ‘saying words with things,’ in chapters 2 and 3 when the figures of the citizen and cyberspace and then speech acts and digital acts are discussed.) These connected devices generate enormous volumes of data about our move- ments, locations, activities, interests, encounters, and private and public relationships through which we become data subjects. When joined up with other data collected by private or public authorities concerning our taxes, health, passport, travel, and finance, the data profiles that can be compiled about people is staggering. 5 Who owns the data generated by the digital traces of people and their devices? 6 The Internet has not only permeated our social, cultural, and economic lives, but it has also resig- nified political life by creating an interconnected web of relations among people and things. It has influenced almost every aspect of politics, and its presence in politics is ubiquitous. It has not only disrupted conven- tional politics with concerns about shaping voter behaviour (e.g., claims about Cambridge Analytica) but also created new kinds of politics where there is ostensibly no previous equivalent. The Internet has also given rise to new subjects of politics such as Anonymous, cypherpunks, hackti- vists, influencers, and whistle-blowers.

Along with these political subjects, a new designation has also emerged: digital citizens. Subjects such as citizen journalists, citizen art- ists, citizen scientists, citizen philanthropists, and citizen prosecutors have variously accompanied it. 7 Going back to the euphoric years of the 1990s, Jon Katz introduced the term to describe generally the kinds of Americans who were active on the Internet. 8 For Katz, people were in- venting new ways of conducting themselves politically on the Internet and were transcending the straitjacket of at least US electoral politics caught, as it were, between conventional Democratic and Republican par- ty politics. Considering this as the birth of a new political subjectivity entirely owing to the Internet, Katz thought that although digital citizens were libertarian, they were neither alienated nor isolated. Rather, digital citizens were a political movement struggling to come together with a common cause mobilized by values of sharing, prosperity, exchange, knowledge, and openness. 9 Katz’s optimism has not been entirely borne out by our subsequent (and international) experience. 10 One website, for example, calling on people to become digital citizens seems to be more about personal safety and personal security than Katz’s libertarian politi- cal subjects dedicated to openness and sharing. 11 It promises, for exam-

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Chapter 14

ple, that through becoming digital citizens you will ‘learn how to protect yourself and your family. Be a voice for real solutions. Help us take our online neighbourhood back from the criminals and predators.’ As this indicates, these different imaginaries of being or becoming digital citizens are contested. This contestation is not entirely a product of the Internet, as we shall see later, and perhaps expresses the paradox of the late mod- ern citizen with conflicting and ambiguous callings. 12 The question that we face in relation to this contestation or struggle as both an object of theorizing and of politics is: What kind of political subject, if not a citizen, is coming into being through the Internet? What are the callings that mobilize people with ever more force to become digital citizens, and what are the closings that generate dread and motivate withdrawal?

In posing these questions our focus is thus on the political subject that arises from acting through the Internet. To state from the outset, we understand the political subject not as a coherent and unified being but as a composite of multiple subjectivities that emerge from different situa- tions and relations. We ask how it is possible for political subjects to make rights claims about how their digital lives are configured, regulat- ed, and organized by dispersed arrangements of numerous people and things such as corporations and states but also by software and devices as well as people such as programmers and regulators. This question con- cerns not only well-known activists through their spectacular acts who are mostly male and Euro-American but also the innumerable and often anonymous subjects whose everyday acts through the Internet make claims to its workings and rules. And, as we have already suggested in the questions raised, how these everyday acts come to produce a political subjectivity that we call ‘digital citizens’ is our central concern. We have already implied two key ideas of this book; let us now specify them.

First, by bringing the political subject to the centre of concern, we interfere with determinist analyses of the Internet and hyperbolic asser- tions about its impact that imagine subjects as passive data subjects. In- stead, we attend to how political subjectivities are always performed in relation to sociotechnical arrangements and interfaces to think about how they are brought into being through the Internet. 13 We also interfere with libertarian analyses of the Internet and their hyperbolic assertions of sove- reign subjects. We contend that if we shift our analysis from how we are being ‘controlled’ (as both determinist and libertarian views agree) to the complexities of ‘acting’—by foregrounding citizen subjects not in isolation but in relation to the arrangements of which they are a part—we can identify ways of being not simply obedient and submissive but also sub- versive. Although usually reserved for high-profile hacktivists and whis- tle-blowers, we ask, how do subjects act both in spectacular and ordinary ways that transgress the expectations of, and go beyond, specific conven- tions and, in doing so, make rights claims about how to conduct them- selves as digital citizens? 14 Second, by focusing on how digital citizens

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Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 5

make rights claims through the Internet, we ask, how are their relations mediated, regulated, and monitored, and how is knowledge generated, ordered, and disseminated through the Internet? We consider both con- cerns as objects of struggle and ones through which we might identify and conduct ourselves otherwise as digital citizens when we engage with things and others and act through the Internet.

When the sociotechnical arrangements and subjects that make up the Internet traverse not only national borders but also legal orders, both borders and orders become permeable and reinforced simultaneously. The implications of this are evident in struggles over the Internet; from Anonymous to WikiLeaks, from activists to security professionals alike, acts can and do cut across national borders and multiple legal orders. 15 Some of the Internet’s novel aspects, such as the speed and reach of interactions and transactions, have spurred concerns about high-frequen- cy trading, the hacking of financial and banking services, state and corpo- rate spying on citizens, deliberate cross-border virus attacks, covert cyberwars among states, and the rise of often anonymous racism, xeno- phobia, and homophobia along with cyberbullying and issues of freedom of speech. These are just a few prominent issues of how technical, materi- al, cultural, ethical, and political matters collide and collude across multi- ple and overlapping orders. 16 The challenge we set for ourselves in this book is to find ways of investigating how people enact themselves as citizens by negotiating their rights such as privacy, access, openness, and innovation and their rights concerning data. We investigate these rights not in terms of their substance but in relation to who the subject is of these rights, or more precisely, who is constituting themselves as political subjects of these rights by saying and doing things—and, thus, making rights claims—through the Internet.

BETWEEN DIGITAL LIFE AND POLITICAL LIFE

There has been a remarkably limited discussion let alone theorization of the relationship between citizens and the Internet. 17 Although that started to change over the past five years (which will be detailed), it is helpful to review two limitations of work on the relation between digital and political life because these limitations continue to dominate scholar- ship. First, discussions of the relationship have focused on issues con- cerning the provision and delivery of public services through the Inter- net, variously described as e-government and measured by indicators such as the United Nations e-government readiness index or other indi- ces and metrics. 18 This is also the case for studies of government transpa- rency and citizen rights to open data that have led to initiatives such as the International Open Data Charter. 19 Although open data and the pro- vision and delivery of public services through the Internet are important

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Chapter 16

aspects of contemporary citizenship, to limit citizenship to these mean- ings is obviously too narrow for understanding various broader, if not fundamental, issues we have just mentioned. Second, discussions under the rubric of ‘digital citizens’ overlook how citizenship itself in contem- porary societies is undergoing fundamental changes that are related to a series of other transformations similar yet different from those concern- ing the Internet. The issues of transnational mobility and migrations, resurgence of nationalism, assertions of sovereignty, internationalization of capital, the decline of the social state, and the rise of neoliberalism are all forcing the boundaries of citizenship as an issue of concern. Just as the extensity of the Internet enables digital life to flow across state regulatory jurisdictions, so, too, do the rights claims of citizens increasingly traverse multiple legal orders. 20

To an extent, these issues are addressed in the field of critical digital studies. 21 Questions concerning who shapes the Internet, who uses it, and who shapes law and regulation regarding it are now being debated. It is well recognized that digital studies concerns itself with not only underlying digital technologies but how these technologies are embed- ded in sociotechnical arrangements and subjects who shape these ar- rangements both as users and producers, or prosumers. 22 More signifi- cantly, digital studies spans both social sciences and humanities as well as interdisciplinary fields such as science and technology studies and asks questions concerning the relation of digital technologies to social and cultural change. For Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, especially, criti- cal digital studies revisits the question concerning technology and its embodiment in political, social, and cultural lives. 23 For Kroker and Kroker, ‘what is truly critical about critical digital studies is the emphasis on not only understanding the dominant codes of technology, politics, and culture in the digital era but also on digital studies that excel in breaking the codes and in introducing new visions of the digital future by disrupting the codes, disturbing boundaries, and adding uncertainty to established patterns of (code) behaviour.’ 24 As we shall see in chapter 6, breaking codes or conventions is an essential aspect of the performativity of digital acts, and hence, being critical is inherent in a performative understanding of acts.

If indeed we want to engage with critical digital studies concerning the connectivity of people and things through the Internet, our premise is that even in critical digital studies that explore ‘the politics of the Inter- net’, the figure of the citizen makes a faint appearance. As we explain, we do not mean that either the term ‘citizens’ or ‘citizenship’ has been absent from digital studies. On the contrary, since the 1990s, the terms ‘citizens’ and ‘citizenship’ have been used to describe politics of and on the Inter- net. The question is, rather, concerned with the faint appearance of the figure of the citizen as a subject making rights claims. A brief survey of exceptions to this absence will help us explain what is meant by this.

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Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 7

An early work by Kevin Hill and John Hughes, Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet (1998), explores the role and impact of the Internet on democratic politics in the United States. 25 Hill and Hughes conclude that ‘politics on the Internet is dominated by a relative- ly savvy, conservative minority’, and perhaps for this reason, ‘the Inter- net is not going to radically change politics’. 26 A later work, R. J. Mara- tea’s The Politics of the Internet: Political Claims-Making in Cyberspace and Its Effect on Modern Political Activism (2013), also explores the politics of mak- ing claims in cyberspace. Maratea argues that ‘the ability to publicize claims and have them disperse through cyberspace does not guarantee that they will connect with prospective supporters, because the Internet has increased audience fragmentation’. 27 Yet for Maratea it is clear that the increased state surveillance of the Internet has shown that those with power will use Internet technologies ‘to expand social control and dis- seminate propaganda’. 28 What is important to recognize is that although the Internet may not have changed politics radically in the fifteen years that separate these two studies, it has radically changed the meaning and function of being citizens with the rise of both corporate and state surveil- lance. 29

It is also in the fifteen years that separates these works that several studies demonstrated that gradually, if not quite significantly, what it means to be a citizen on the Internet has changed. This includes studies that continue to monitor and assess the impact of the Internet on citizen politics, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, as illustrat- ed in studies of online conduct, participation, and engagement. 30 Karen Mossberger, Caroline Tolbert, and Ramona McNeal, for example, demon- strate in Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation (2008) how online participation in society has become a necessary element of democratic citizenship. 31 By defining ‘digital citizens’ as ‘those who use the internet regularly and effectively—that is on a daily basis’, they have shown how inclusion in prevailing forms of communication have af- fected the ability to participate as democratic citizens. Stephen Coleman and Jay Blumler in The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy (2009) have shown that the Internet has a huge potential to deepen democratic citizenship when invested by imaginative govern- ments. 32 Phillip Howard, by contrast, has shown in New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (2006) how information technologies are used in producing a managed digital citizen. 33

These studies also started to expand in scope beyond the United States and United Kingdom to include international developments. 34 In part, this reflects the increased involvement in the politics of the Internet of social groups such as youth, women, and minorities whose actions in- creasingly cross national borders and legal orders and have opened up various meanings and functions of being citizens. 35 Mark Poster, for ex- ample, argues that these involvements are giving rise to new political

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Chapter 18

movements in cyberspace whose political subjects are not citizens, under- stood as members of nation-states, but instead netizens. 36 By using the term ‘digital citizenship’ as a heuristic concept, Nick Couldry and his colleagues also illustrate how digital infrastructures understood as social relations and practices are contributing to the emergence of a civic cul- ture as a condition of citizenship. 37 Yet, they argue, it is not quite clear what kinds of subjects are emerging from these digital citizenship prac- tices.

We argue that despite this proliferation of the term ‘citizen’, the figure of the citizen is lost in digital studies by both its presence and absence. When it is present, the figure of the citizen appears as a recipient of rights, a figure that already exists, and whose conduct already pertains to good civic behaviour such as participation. The citizen, it is observed, engages (or fails to), participates (or fails to), and receives (or fails to) rights and entitlements. The figure, then, is largely an already present figure or a problem figure. To put it differently, the figure of the citizen is a problem of government: how to engage, cajole, coerce, incite, invite, or broadly encourage it to inhabit forms of conduct that are already deemed to be appropriate to be a citizen. What is lost here is the figure of the citizen as an embodied subject of experience who acts through the Inter- net for making rights claims. We will further elaborate on this subject of making rights claims, but the figure of the citizen that we imagine is not merely a bearer or recipient of rights that already exist but one whose activism also involves making claims to rights that may or may not exist.

The figure of the citizen is also lost in descriptions of the experiences of subjects who act through the Internet. This absence is evinced by the fact that the figure of the citizen is rarely, if ever, used to describe the acts of crypto anarchists, cyberactivists, cypherpunks, hackers, hacktivists, whistle-blowers, and other political figures of cyberspace. It sounds al- most outrageous if not perverse to call the political heroes of cyberspace as citizen subjects because the figure of the citizen seems to betray their originality, rebelliousness, and vanguardism, if not their cosmopolitan- ism. Yet the irony here is that this is exactly the figure of the citizen we inherit as a figure who makes rights claims. It is that figure that has been betrayed and shorn of all its radicality in the contemporary politics of the Internet. Instead, and more recently, the figure of the citizen is being lost to the figure of the human as recent developments in corporate and state data snooping and spying have exacerbated. As Rikke Jørgensen has doc- umented, increasingly, rights to privacy, access, and protection are solely articulated as human rights arguments. 38 There are, of course, exceptions to this, perhaps most famously Edward Snowden’s pseudonym Citizen- four and scholars such as Timothy Luke and Mark Poster. 39 Nevertheless, the figure of the citizen is dimly visible in these early works and instead is either a problem subject of government or a problem subject of human rights.

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Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 9

The situation in citizenship studies is the opposite of digital studies. It is the figure of cyberspace that is practically lost in citizenship studies. As we observed about the citizen in relation to critical digital studies, cyber- space is both present and absent in critical citizenship studies. When the figure of cyberspace is present, it often refers to a nebulous space, often separate if not independent of physical space and one to which only some people belong. There is a certain mysticism that surrounds the figure. Its absence is often evinced during major political events such as Occupy Wall Street, los indignados of 15M, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Mat- ter, or Arab uprisings by the difficulty of accounting for the role of digital media in them. 40 But the figure of cyberspace is also absent in citizenship studies as scholars have yet to find a way to conceive of the figure of the citizen beyond its modern configuration as a member of the nation-state. Consequently, when the acts of subjects traverse so many borders and involve a multiplicity of legal orders, identifying this political subject as a citizen becomes a fundamental challenge. So far, describing this travers- ing political subject as a global citizen or cosmopolitan citizen has proved difficult if not contentious. 41

To summarize, when we say that the figure of the citizen is lost in digital studies and that the figure of cyberspace is lost in citizenship studies, our aim is to bring attention to the question concerning political subjectivity in cyberspace. So, rather than defining digital citizens nar- rowly as ‘those who have the ability to read, write, comprehend, and navigate textual information online and who have access to affordable broadband’ or ‘active citizens online’ or even ‘Internet activists’, we understand digital citizens as those who make digital rights claims, which we will elaborate in chapter 2. 42

Since 2015, scholars began crossing digital and citizenship studies. Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (2019) focuses on the ‘social, politi- cal and discursive contexts of digital citizenship and possibilities for dis- sent and resistance’ 43; Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture (2016) maps digital citizenship in relation to policy makers, edu- cators, and activists to explore varieties of contest and activism 44; Citizen Media and Public Spaces: Diverse Expressions of Citizenship and Dissent (2016) examines how citizens reclaim public and digital spaces through a variety of media and practices 45; and, Digital Citizenship and Political En- gagement (2017) examines how advocacy organizations mobilize and or- ganize citizens into political participation by moving modes of direct action and social movement tactics into a digital environment. 46 This work is part of a growing literature that seeks to discuss and theorize who is the citizen subject of the digital. 47 It provides rich empirical and conceptual contributions in developing a theory of digital citizenship as political subjectivity through the Internet.

To understand what it means to be digital citizens requires theorizing between digital life (and its digital subjects) and political life (and its

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Chapter 110

political subjects). Both are simultaneously undergoing transformation, and understanding the dynamics of these changes is a challenge. It is a challenge that critical citizenship studies amply illustrates by focusing on citizenship as a site of contestation or social struggle rather than bundles of given rights and duties. 48 We approach rights not as static or universal but historical and situated things arising from social struggles. The space of these struggles involves the politics of how we both shape and are shaped by sociotechnical arrangements of which we are a part. From this follows that subjects embody both the material and immaterial aspects of these arrangements where distinctions between online and offline be- come untenable. 49 Who we become as political subjects—or subjects of any kind, for that matter—is neither given nor determined but enacted by what we do in relation to others and things. If so, being digital and being citizens are simultaneously the objects and subjects of political struggle and understanding the relations between these struggles is the aim of this book.

Towards developing a theory of digital citizenship as political subjec- tivity, we draw on a number of scholars who typically study the technical workings of digital devices and platforms and their social, cultural, and political effects. We have learned a lot from the burgeoning literature about the Internet. 50 Our goal is not to focus on the specificities of how technologies like Google or Twitter algorithms work. Although we do give many examples, our aim is to develop an empirically grounded but theoretical conception of the digital citizen as a political subject. We also recognize that our examples are predominantly from Anglo-American sources, which in part says a lot about the concentration of technologies, ownership, and the scandals of our digital lives. However, examples and scholarship from South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East dur- ing the past five years have expanded and diversified as we discuss in chapter 8. We mention these issues to especially foreground that our focus is on theorizing what we call digital acts and being digital citizens and that such theorizing is necessary to clear the ground for more de- tailed and penetrating investigations. It is an approach we share with others and especially with J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, work that we take up in chapter 3 to develop our conception of digital acts drawing on his theory of speech acts. 51 Austin understands language as a means of social action. We take this up to interpret digital acts as a kind of speech act and means of social struggle. As previously noted, critical digital studies and empirical analyses of specific digital platforms are proliferating, yet it is important to understand what these mean for being digital citizens. Many of the conventional concepts with which we are familiar, such as online, offline, virtual, and real, for example, do not hold up to critical scrutiny but instead serve as placeholders in search of concepts. Yet having concepts is critical because they shape our percep- tions and imaginaries, and it is through concepts that we make sense of

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Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 11

our experiences. Our aim, then, is to provide a theoretical framing that might help us to think across the numerous studies and accounts, so that when we consider Twitter, for instance, we can ask: How do conventions such as microblogging platforms configure actions and create possibil- ities for digital citizens to act?

BECOMING DIGITAL CITIZENS

We use the term ‘critical’ to indicate a tradition that is marked by critical reflexivity but also by an open, engaging, and political style of thought. More specifically, however, ‘critical’ designates a style of thought where we investigate the acts of those who rupture contemporary conventions of being political and enact creative, autonomous, and inventive ways of becoming political. Through this approach, we have marked out what we consider to be several moves in how we theorize being digital citizens. We outline them here, recognizing that one can grasp their fuller mean- ing and function only by reading the chapters that follow.

In chapter 2, we develop an understanding of the space of digital life as the figure of cyberspace and an understanding of the figure of the citizen that we inherit. Rather than a separate or independent space constituted by the digital interactions and transactions of people, we define it as a space of relations between and among bodies acting through the Internet. We develop our approach to being digital citizens by drawing on Michel Foucault to argue that subjects become citizens through various process- es of subjectivation that involve relations between bodies and things that constitute them as subjects of power. We focus on how people enact themselves as subjects of power through the Internet and at the same time bring cyberspace into being. We position this understanding of sub- jectivation along with interpellation, which signifies that subjects are also formed and inhabited by external forces. We argue that citizen subjects are summoned and called on to act through the Internet and, as subjects of power, respond by enacting themselves not only with obedience and submission but also subversion. If indeed we understand cyberspace as a space of relations between and among bodies acting through the Internet, ways of being digital citizens is a site of struggle between virtuous, mali- cious, righteous, and indifferent acts. Our performativity always involves relations between ourselves and others. In this way, conducting our- selves means to act with others as we place ourselves and take up and carve out social positions—something that Foucault captured by defining power as ‘action upon action’ or ‘conduct of conduct’. 52

Chapter 3 develops a conception of how we say and do things through the Internet by defining digital acts as a kind of speech act. We do this by taking up Austin’s definition of five classes of speech acts that have performative force: judgements, decisions, commitments, acknowl-

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edgements, and clarifications. To this we introduce a sixth class of speech act, which we think these classes do not account for: claims. We arrive at this through our consideration of the citizen subject who articulates ‘I, we, they have a right to’. Although subjects perform all classes of speech acts and not only through the Internet, making rights claims are specific to our definition of citizens as not sovereign rights-bearing but performa- tive rights-claiming subjects. We argue that making rights claims in- volves not only performative but also legal and imaginary forces. We then argue that digital acts involve conventions that include not only words but also images and sounds and various actions such as liking, coding, clicking, downloading, sorting, blocking, and querying. If Austin showed how we do things with words, we also try to show how we do words with things. 53 We argue that these digital acts resignify four political ques- tions about the Internet: anonymity, extensity, traceability, and velocity.

In chapters 4, 5, and 6 we then specify how these contestations are enacted through three groupings of digital acts—callings, closings, and openings—and outline the various conventions and actions that compose them. Chapter 7, rather than considering the substance of digital rights, attends to the processes involved in enacting digital rights claims. We do so by bringing together those political subjects who make digital rights claims by their acts through the Internet (performativity) and those who make digital rights claims in or by what they say about those rights in declarations, bills, charters, and manifestos (imaginary) and call on au- thorities for the inscription of those rights (legality). Chapter 8 develops the concept of ‘digital citizens-yet-to-come’ by considering the conditions under which making rights claims produces citizens as political subjects. By largely drawing on recent scholarship on ‘digital activism’ or ‘data activism’ it addresses the question of who is the subject of digital rights.

Collectively, these moves refine our approach to enacting digital citi- zens. We work through a complex terrain of openings and closings that cyberspace occasions but also raise a fundamental—and increasingly uni- versal—question: How do we conduct ourselves through the Internet? Given the rights cyberspace occasions and we demand, should we em- brace it without question? Given the perils it elicits, should we avoid it? Given the dangers it creates, should we abandon it? Given its potential- ities, should we tout the dawn of a new era? All these questions are being asked today, yet they may not be the questions that really matter. Given its pervasiveness and omnipresence, avoiding or shunning cyberspace is as dystopian as quitting social space; it is also certain that conducting ourselves in cyberspace requires, as many activists and scholars have warned, intense critical vigilance. Because there cannot be generic or uni- versal answers to how we conduct ourselves, every incipient or existing political subject needs to ask in what ways it is being called on and subjectified through cyberspace. In other words, to return to the theoreti- cal framing of this book, the kinds of citizen subjects that cyberspace

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Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 13

cultivates are not homogenous and universal but fragmented, multiple, and agonistic. At the same time, the figure of a citizen-yet-to-come is not inevitable; although cyberspace is a fragile and precarious space, it also affords openings, moments when thinking, speaking, and acting differ- ently become possible by challenging and resignifying its conventions. These are the moments that we highlight to argue that digital rights are not only a project of inscriptions but also enactment.

NOTES

1. We recognize that digital life has preceded the Internet. The connectedness of digital lives is a more recent phenomenon associated with the Internet, especially the World Wide Web protocol. Our focus in this book is the political consequences and implications of digital lives being connected through the Internet rather than digital lives in general. See J. E. Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); N. Negroponte, Being Digital (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995); Z. Papacharissi, ed., A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites (London: Routledge, 2011).

2. Negroponte, Being Digital; S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

3. E. Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011); S. Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011).

4. R. Deibert, “The Geopolitics of Internet Control: Censorship, Sovereignty, and Cyberspace,” in Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, ed. A. Chadwick and P. N. Howard (London: Routledge, 2009), 324; see also discussion in: R. J. Deibert and L. W. Pauly, “Mutual Entanglement and Complex Sovereignty in Cyberspace,” in Data Poli- tics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights, ed. D. Bigo, et al. (London: Routledge, 2019).

5. M. Venkataramanan, “The Data Industry Is Selling Your Life,” Wired, Nov. 2014; L. Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (New York: Vintage, 2014). As we shall see, what is also staggering is the emergence of a commercial and non-commercial security industry that advises data subjects that they are individually responsible for protecting their privacy and safety, thereby individu- alizing what is essentially a political and hence a collective problem.

6. A. Hern, “Sir Tim Berners-Lee Speaks out on Data Ownership,” Guardian 2014 [accessed 8 October 2014], http://bit.ly/1t2DEPR.

7. O. Bowcott, “Bullied Man Uses Video from Sunglasses to Mount Private Court Case,” Guardian, 7 October 2014 [accessed 12 October 2014], http://bit.ly/ZVoTBF.

8. J. Katz, “The Digital Citizen,” Wired 5, 12, Dec. 1997, 5. 9. Ibid., 7–8.

10. W. J. Miller, “Digital Citizen,” in Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics, ed. K. Harvey (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014), 2.

11. Digital Citizens Alliance, Become a Digital Citizen: Get Involved in Making the Internet Safer, 2019 [accessed 31 August 2019]. Source: http://bit.ly/2PwaLNq. The site states: ‘Digital Citizens is a coalition of consumers, businesses, and Internet experts focused on educating the public and policymakers on the threats people from all walks of life face on the Internet.’

12. S. White, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 2009).

13. D. Bigo, “The Transnational Field of Computerised Exchange of Information in Police Matters and Its European Guilds,” in Transnational Power Elites: The Social and Global Structuration of the EU, ed. N. Kauppi and M. R. Madsen (London: Routledge, 2013); D. Bigo, “Security, Surveillance and Democracy,” in Routledge Handbook of Sur-

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Chapter 114

veillance Studies, ed. K. Ball, et al. (London: Routledge, 2012). For Bigo, the rights of data subjects depend on their behaviour within digital networks. If their behaviour conflicts with targets identified by algorithms, their rights will come under question.

14. This is a question posed with respect to surveillance by Z. Bauman, et al., “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance,” International Political Sociology 8, no. 2 (2014). The authors raise the question about how multiple actors would need to resist surveillance strategies but also the question of how Internet users will adjust their everyday conduct. It is an open question whether Internet users ‘will continue to participate in their own surveillance through self-exposure or develop new forms of subjectivity that is more reflexive about the consequences of their own actions’ (124).

15. Ibid., 128. Using the Möbius strip as a metaphor to capture the transversal nature of the Internet, especially concerning surveillance, Bauman et al. argue that ‘while big data collection blurs categorizations of what is “domestic” and what is “foreign,” the consequent reconfiguration of the boundaries of the sovereign state into a Möbius strip has in turn become a site, in and of itself, of political struggles, resis- tance and dissent. Along the Möbius strip, states, social movements, and individuals can play a variety of games, reenacting the meanings of sovereignty and citizenship, security, and liberty.’

16. We must heed Didier Bigo’s work, which documents how an international field of security professionals emerged and how its professionals are heavily invested in the hyperinflation of dangers and threats of cyberspace. Often, Bigo argues, interventions to quell such dangers serve to expand the security apparatus itself rather than enhanc- ing security. See Bigo, “Security, Surveillance and Democracy,” 278.

17. Some examples include T. W. Luke, “Digital Citizenship,” in Emerging Digital Spaces in Contemporary Society: Properties of Technology, ed. P. Kalantzis-Cope and K. Gherab Martín (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); M. Poster, “Digital Networks and Citizenship,” Proceedings of Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 117, no. 1 (2002).

18. K. Mossberger, et al., Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); K. Mossberger, et al., “Measuring Digital Citizen- ship: Mobile Access and Broadband,” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012).

19. The International Open Data Charter was adopted in 2015 and currently adopted by seventy-one governments and endorsed by fifty-two organizations. Open Data Charter, The International Open Data Charter, 2019 [accessed 30 August 2019]. Source: https://opendatacharter.net/.

20. See, for example, Elspeth Guild’s discussion of data rights. E. Guild, “Data Rights: Claiming Privacy Rights through International Institutions,” in Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights, ed. D. Bigo, et al. (London: Routledge, 2019).

21. The field of critical digital studies not only comprises the impact of digital technologies but also their increasing connectedness. As such, digital studies includes but is broader than another incipient field, that of Internet studies. The broad scope of Internet studies includes not only the technologies that make the Internet possible but also uses of these technologies and the development of national and international policies to govern and regulate their functioning. C. Ess and M. Consalvo, “Introduc- tion: What Is ‘Internet Studies’?,” in The Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. M. Consalvo and C. Ess (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); W. H. Dutton, “Internet Studies: The Foundations of a Transformative Field,” in The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. W. H. Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). A related field is that of critical data studies, which specifically focuses on critiques of the deployment of data to govern and organize social and political life. See, for example, A. Iliadis and F. Russo, “Critical Data Studies: An Introduction,” Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016).

22. G. Ritzer and N. Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Na- ture of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’,” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1 (2010).

23. A. Kroker and M. Kroker, Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

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Doing Things with Words and Saying Words with Things 15

24. Ibid., 14. 25. K. A. Hill and J. E. Hughes, Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet

(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 26. Ibid., 180, 182. 27. R. J. Maratea, The Politics of the Internet: Political Claims-Making in Cyberspace and

Its Effect on Modern Political Activism (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014), 117. 28. Ibid., 126. 29. This is quite evident in a large collection of already established essays on the

politics of the Internet. W. H. Dutton and E. Dubois, eds., Politics and the Internet, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2014).

30. S. Coleman, “The Lonely Citizen: Indirect Representation in an Age of Net- works,” Political Communication 22, no. 2 (2005); Mossberger, et al., Digital Citizenship; P. N. Howard, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); S. Coleman and J. G. Blumler, The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

31. Mossberger, et al., Digital Citizenship. 32. Coleman and Blumler, The Internet and Democratic Citizenship. 33. Howard, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. 34. J. C. Santora, “Crossing the Digital Divide: Do All Global Citizens Have Their

Passports?,” Academy of Management Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006); J. James, “The Digital Divide across All Citizens of the World: A New Concept,” Social Indicators Research 89, no. 2 (2008); G. Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); K. L. Schlozman, et al., “Who Speaks? Citizen Political Voice on the Internet Commons,” Daedalus 140, no. 4 (2011); K. Tartoussieh, “Virtual Citizenship: Islam, Culture, and Politics in the Digital Age,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 17, no. 2 (2011); M. Gillespie, “BBC Arabic, Social Media and Citizen Production: An Experiment in Digital Democracy before the Arab Spring,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 4 (2013).

35. T. Kern and S.-h. Nam, “The Making of a Social Movement: Citizen Journalism in South Korea,” Current Sociology 57, no. 6 (2009); W. Y. Lin, et al., “Becoming Citi- zens: Youths’ Civic Uses of New Media in Five Digital Cities in East Asia,” Journal of Adolescent Research 25, no. 6 (2010); Tartoussieh, “Virtual Citizenship: Islam, Culture, and Politics in the Digital Age”; L. Herrera, “Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt,” Harvard Educational Review 82, no. 3 (2012); Y. M. Kim, “The Shifting Sands of Citizenship: Toward a Model of the Citizenry in Life Politics,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 644 (2012).

36. Poster, “Digital Networks and Citizenship,” 101–3. 37. N. Couldry, et al., “Digital Citizenship? Narrative Exchange and the Changing

Terms of Civic Culture,” Citizenship Studies 18, nos. 6–7 (2014). 38. R. F. Jørgensen, Framing the Net: The Internet and Human Rights (Cheltenham,

UK: Edward Elgar, 2013). 39. Poster, “Digital Networks and Citizenship”; M. Poster, “Cyberdemocracy: Inter-

net and the Public Sphere,” in Politics and the Internet, ed. W. H. Dutton and E. Dubois (London: Routledge, 2014); Luke, “Digital Citizenship.”

40. Neither of the two major handbooks on citizenship studies surveying the entire field globally, for example, features a chapter on digital citizens or discusses broadly the impact of the Internet for citizenship studies. H.-A. Van der Heijden, ed., Handbook of Political Citizenship and Social Movements (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014); E. F. Isin and P. Nyers, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (London: Routledge, 2014).

41. The debate over global or cosmopolitan citizenship is now extensive, but it has proved to be a contested concept. H. Schattle, The Practices of Global Citizenship (Lan- ham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); D. Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

42. Mossberger, et al., Digital Citizenship, 140.

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Chapter 116

43. A. Hintz, et al., Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 9.

44. A. McCosker, et al., eds., Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Cul- ture (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016).

45. M. Baker and B. Blaagaard, eds., Citizen Media and Public Spaces: Diverse Expres- sions of Citizenship and Dissent (London: Routledge, 2016).

46. A. Vromen, Digital Citizenship and Political Engagement: The Challenge from Online Campaigning and Advocacy Organisations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

47. For example: V. Barassi, “Digital Citizens? Data Traces and Family Life,” Con- temporary Social Science 12, nos. 1–2 (2017); M. Z. Fauzanafi, “Searching for Digital Citizenship: Fighting Corruption in Banten, Indonesia,” Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (2016); R. Kane, et al., “Conceptualizing and Contextualizing Digital Citizenship in Urban Schools: Civic Engagement, Teacher Education, and the Placelessness of Digital Technologies,” Citizenship Education Research Journal 6, no. 1 (2016); E. Siapera, “Reclaiming Citizenship in the Post-Democratic Condition,” Journal of Citizenship and Globalisation Studies 1, no. 1 (2017).

48. J. Clarke, et al., Disputing Citizenship (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014). 49. K. Hayles, “The Materiality of Informatics,” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993). 50. Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self; E. G. Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics

and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); R. Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013); C. Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014); P. Ger- baudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto, 2012); T. Jordan, Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet (Lon- don: Routledge, 1999); L. Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 (New York: Basic, 2006); Morozov, Net Delusion; Papacharissi, ed., A Networked Self; H. Postigo, The Digital Rights Move- ment: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); J. van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

51. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

52. Commenting on this understanding of power, David Lyon notes that this is a nuanced way of seeing the emerging subjects of digital rights that ‘is reminiscent of Bauman’s sociology of hope where understanding how power works is to participate in its exercise’. D. Lyon, “Bauman’s Sociology of Hope,” Cultural Politics 13, no. 3 (2017): 298.

53. This is inspired by Bruno Latour’s reversal of Austin’s statement—doing things with words—to ‘doing words with things’. Though he does not refer to Austin when he uses this phrase in this chapter, we think his approach very much follows Austin’s conceptualization of speech acts. B. Latour, “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000). However, in another writing, Latour references Austin’s How to Do Things with Words in his analysis of how legal texts are made up of not declarative but performative statements. There he argues that a weakness of Austin’s concept of speech acts is his reliance on grammar and short interactions rather than ‘the whole regime of enunciation.’ B. Latour, An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 225.

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