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Power and the Spaces in-Between
On the places we forget to look when we look for power
It’s strange, the relationship between power and the body. When I was an undergraduate political science student, I wrote my thesis on hacktivism and the relationship between online activism and the state. What interested me about it was the way anonymity could (at least, in the early days of the Internet) be enacted online, and how that changed the negotiations of power and punishment for law-breaking.
Because the Internet is not a physical space, because it can so easily cross boundaries of borders where state power is enacted, it presents a conundrum for the enforcement of state power. The state, by Max Weber’s oft-recycled definition, is “a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Physical force, here, is a euphemism for “violence,” but I want to pause on the notion of the physical.
If state power hinges on physical force, if the enactment of its laws necessitate the regulation and punishment of physical beings, then its power only extends to physical space. I don’t think this is necessarily its only realm of power — it also shapes minds and thinking, hence the point of the phrase “decolonize your mind” — but it is the one that defines it. Without a physical body in a place, the state cannot exert its domination. The state requires bodies: both to form the human community that enforces its laws and its monopoly, and as places for its force to be enacted upon. Only bodies can be imprisoned or executed. Only bodies can be handcuffed, detained or forced to do community service.
Because of this, there is a profound subversive power to anonymity.
If action in the etheric space of the Internet cannot be linked to a body, then it is much harder to police. The argument I made in that undergraduate thesis, more than ten years ago, was that the crackdown on digital activism heightened substantially when the activists went anonymous. Think of the state’s disproportionate response to groups like Anonymous and Wikileaks, when compared to the previous milder treatment of individual (known-bodied) whistleblowers or early Internet disruptors who made no effort to hide their identity. The Computer Fraud and Abuse…
