The word “hacktivism” might elicit a range of images– a 17-year-old breaching high-profile Twitter accounts, a teenage girl retweeting a #BlackLivesMatter post, or maybe a trending LinkedIn statement from a Fortune 500 company on a new diversity & inclusion initiative.
As a form of civil disobedience, the term hacktivism has traditionally referred to intentional breaches (“hacks”) of computer systems to promote social or political change. Hacking activities have historically been limited to individuals with the resources and computer networking knowledge to perform them; however, the rapidly-evolving landscape of the internet and its more than 4.3 billion active users worldwide is disrupting this dynamic and revealing the potential of emerging hacker-activist identities.
Following the surge of social media-related activism around George Floyd’s death, Grace Liu wrote about slacktivism and how online platforms can raise awareness, albeit potentially performative and fleeting, for different humanitarian issues. While both share a digital medium, hacktivism is distinct from slacktivism in its focus on identifying and collectivizing around key weaknesses in systems (economic, political, racial, etc.) of interest. Hacktivism can take many forms, and while the medium of change is often digital, the systems it attempts to infiltrate are not limited to those of a computer or database. Hacktivism is disruption.
As complexities of computer systems grow and boundaries between the physical and virtual blur, hacktivism may serve as a useful mode of reconceptualizing activism itself.
One of the most interesting cases of global hacktivism is documented in a must-listen Radiolab podcast, Breaking Bongo. The episode follows bold activist communities in Gabon, a country in Central Africa that was colonized by France in 1885 and occupied until 1960. I first listened to this episode about a month before the U.S. election, and the juxtaposition could not be more striking: while claims of election fraud in the US were highly publicized yet baseless, political fraud and corruption in Gabon are persistent and yet largely unknown outside the country itself.
When France left Gabon in 1960, it appointed Omar Bongo, a man with no political experience, as head leader of the country. Bongo ruled Gabon from 1967 to 2009, a total of 42 years, continually serving the interests of French and Gabonese elite and funneling revenue from oil extraction into private interests rather than public goods, such as infrastructure or schools. “Papa Bongo” used various modes of manipulation, including a state army, control of the press, and buy-outs or assassinations of political opponents to suppress the Gabonese people. When Omar Bongo died in 2009, his son Ali was placed in power through an “election” overwhelmingly decided by paid and foreign votes.
At that point, a few Gabonese citizens residing in the U.S. took action, starting with small steps. One tweeted, using hashtags like #Gabon and #CNN, and while they didn’t initially receive any responses from major US press outlets, they did tap into a “digital Gabon”– Gabonese citizens living abroad who were connected, via family and friends, to the horrors back home, and yet who had the freedom to express their concerns more freely on the web. As widely as Barcelona, Paris, New York, and Washington D.C., people aware of the violence and corruption in Gabon began organizing. In particular, they set their sights on the 2016 Gabonese election, flooding social media with posts promoting Ali Bongo’s competitors and asking voters to document the democratic process– filming, posting, streaming on smartphones as ballots were cast– in an attempt to self-enforce a fair political process.
The election results were postponed as the country waited on tallies from a single province, Haut-Ogooué. Four days later, the Gabonese electoral commission declared 99 percent turnout in that province, significantly higher than that of any other province in the election. The commission alleged that of the 99 percent, 95 percent cast their vote for the incumbent dictator, Ali Bongo– just enough to give him the victory over Jean Ping, his challenger. No one in Gabon had expected the election to be fair, but this was a case of “profound election fraud”. Public outcry ensued, followed by further violence in the streets and swift silencing of any form of dissent.
While the political process in Gabon had been heavily suppressed, the Gabonese diaspora abroad remained relatively free to act on the injustice it had just witnessed from afar. A particularly striking example of its action came when progress based on social media activity alone seemed to have stagnated.
Two Gabonese activists living in the US, Franck Jocktane and Alain-Serge Obame, live streamed themselves from the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., one of the most opulent hotels in the city. They were there because a Gabonese official, the woman who signed off on Ali Bongo’s fraudulent election, president of the Constitutional Court, was staying there. Hoping to run into the official, they encountered her husband, putting up a fight and expressing their frustrations before being removed from the building by hotel security.
At this point, Franck and Alain might as well have given up. Instead, they went online and posted the hotel’s phone number, telling their fellow activists to “blow the line”. From thousands of miles away, individuals in Gabon saw the message. It started with a single call– a student dialed the hotel number and spoke to the receptionist, telling her the hotel shouldn’t be housing terrorists. The receptionist hung up, but the phone line was soon completely overwhelmed. After long enough, the Gabonese official had no choice but to leave the Four Seasons for another hotel. When she arrived, the activists took to the phone lines again. The official visited three hotels, each of whose phone line was flooded by Gabonese activists, before she resigned to stay at a daughters’ apartment for the remainder of her trip. While this particular instance of hacktivism did not result in long-term repercussions for Gabonese corruption, it demonstrates the tangible power of creative, scalable, low-budget interventions.
Such examples of collective, organic resistance are sparsely-publicized. A quick internet search shows little to no documentation of these acts of Gabonese hacktivism in D.C., and yet they were alarmingly effective. In a country where talk is often cheap and posting on social media often feels like shouting into the void, bold acts of hacktivism remind us that even dissent is a profound privilege.
As complexities of computer systems grow and boundaries between the physical and virtual blur, hacktivism may serve as a useful mode of reconceptualizing activism itself. At its core, the hacker mentality involves analyzing the mechanics of a system and exploiting its vulnerabilities to bring about desired change. Arguably all of the most dire humanitarian issues involve some institutionalized system or process– prison-industrial complex, healthcare, free-market capitalism– in need of reform.
Critically, power does not imply immunity, and the very behaviors which perpetuate inequities also serve to strengthen the fragility of such systems. Like a carelessly-configured firewall, systemic biases introduce blind spots and vulnerabilities into social, economic, and political systems that can be exploited with the appropriate tools and the force of collective action.
For example, a 2018 Harvard Business Review report on venture capital performance showed that “along all dimensions measured, the more similar the investment partners, the lower their investments’ performance”. Along the dimension of ethnicity, comparative success rates of investments (acquisitions and IPOs) made by homogenous teams were 26.4% lower than their more-diverse counterparts. Biases create blind spots in decision-making that can be exploited to disrupt these inequities.
It may seem obvious, but it’s a point worth making: flawed systems are flawed. Brokenness lends itself to susceptibility. By the very nature of their operations, systems that exploit are also vulnerable to exploitation; while fragility may be disguised, it is only as persistent as the facade that protects it.
If a 17-year-old can compromise the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates and elicit a system-wide security failure, few systems we’ve come to trust, digital or physical, may be as iron-clad as they appear. For the budding hacktivist, change may not be as close as a keyboard or phone call, but if there’s anything we can learn from a digital Gabon, it’s not a bad place to start.
- Activism, Meet Impact: Erika on GameStop, Hacktivism and Empathy - February 8, 2021
- Innovative is not Progressive: What Technology Means to Activists - January 5, 2021
- Hacktivism: Resistance from Digital Gabon - December 8, 2020