re:publica 2012: on the new digital civil disobedience

What kind of risk do digital network activists take in order to demand human rights from corporations and countries? Who protects especially those who want to save lives against blind idealism? At the re:publica12 in Berlin, LABKULTUR.TV talked with free activists and organisers of the highly developed and sophisticated communities of Global Voices and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both fighting against autocratic public terror, persecution, and assassination worldwide – and we asked them why they still haven’t been acknowledged as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) yet.

Ivan Sigal | Geschäftsführer Global Voices

Potentially, anyone can join Anonymous, but in the civil war in your home country, there is no comfy couch available for anonymous operations.
The populations of some autocratic states in North Africa have been able to get rid of their oppressive regimes in the spring of 2011 using specifically digital tools, software, and social media. Digital underground and the electronic frontier can make a big difference, but who is brave enough and faces the military tanks in the end?

Leila Nachawati Rego | spanisch-syrische Bloggerin

The war in Syria with all its various fronts is still covered second by second via the Twitter accounts of the national and international reporters and bloggers.

Who benefits from this information and how does it differ from sheer sensationalism? Governments take advantage of that: they criminalise journalists by blurring the difference between documentation of and incitement to violence.

In the meantime, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) uses the social network Youtube for their own agenda, posting instructions for weapons and fights as tutorials.

Text: Boris Alexander Knop