[Reader-list] Virtual sit ins and electronic disturbances

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

The discussion on electronic disturbances and protest evokes a 
comparison with protest forms like demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, 
etc.

- I would like to draw attention to another form of protest that was 
worked out by the transport workers in South Korea sometime back. (I 
think the Mumbai transport workers also tried this form of protest 
some three to four years back.) These workers had to address the 
immediate problem of the effect to ordinary commuters if they stop 
work. And also, this makes them very vulnerable to sharp orchestrated 
press propaganda and they tend to loose public sympathy and thus 
solidarity. What they did as a counter measure, was to start running 
the transport carriages and refused to charge fares. The argument was 
very simple, we are with the commuters and against the management, so 
our protest form should be able to articulate this basic fact. 
Non-charging of fares creates many possibility of thoughts and 
dialogue and does have a completely different effect than the 
traditional form of work stoppage.

It will be interesting to see how to think of forms of protest that 
think differently about the constituency that they are addressing and 
being in an increasingly networked society with a large dimension of 
our work being online, this will be a critical debate.

- Another fact that can be looked at when we are working out the 
virtual space of a protest is the investment and legal architecture 
of a corporation or a firm. These gigantic entities are intricately 
enmeshed within a very complex network of financial institutions, 
pension funds, mutual funds, investment companies, insurance 
companies, trading companies, saving schemes, and various taxation 
protections and benefits.

A virtual protest can work out parallel multi-nodal dispersed forms 
that can create a different kind of pressure on this extended network 
of interests and compress on the `implicit contract/ consensus` of 
economic activity.
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