Mathieu O'Neil

Online Collective Identity: The Case of the Environmental Movement

Abstract Social movements are making extensive communicative and organizational use of the Internet in order to identify social problems and bring about change. We present a model of an online social movement, where actors exchange practical and symbolic resources through hyperlink and online frame networks. Our positioning of these exchanges within a continuum of conscious and unconscious expressive behavior informs our framework for the empirical analysis of online collectives. An application using data collected from the websites of over 160 environmental activist organizations reveals significant fragmentation in this field of contentious activity, which we suggest reflects offline social divisions.

Hacking Weber: legitimacy, critique, and trust in peer production

This article examines the acceptance of control in anti-authoritarian environments. It argues that the use of the Weberian notion of legitimate domination or authority is appropriate in the context of collaborative online projects. The central argument is that legitimacy in collaborative projects constitutes itself in response to critique. In the realm of knowledge, the critique of external expertise forms the basis for the individualized, charismatic authority of founders who know the project inside out. In the realm of justice, the critique of opaque deliberations and decisions forms the basis for the collective, procedural authority of administrators who implement community decisions. These critiques can be generalized, challenging the social order, but their effectiveness is conditioned by how much is known about the identity of participants.

Rebels for the System? Virus Writers, General Intellect, Cyberpunk and Criminal Capitalism

In recent years there have been numerous reports of attacks against computer systems around the world by viruses created by ‘computer hackers’. It is asserted in the media that the time and energy required to assess and repair the damage caused by this malicious software, sometimes known as ‘malware’, is proving increasingly costly to corporations. The seriousness of the threat posed by rogue computer programmers to the economic system seems to be borne out by actions such as that undertaken by Microsoft in November 2003, when it offered a bounty of

Labour out of Control: The Political Economy of Capitalist and Ethical Organizations:

250,000 for information leading to the capture of the authors of the Sobig virus and MSBlast.A worm. In our networked world, nothing, it seems, could be more disruptive than the break up of the global flows of data resulting from this electronic sabotage. ‘Hackers’ are commonly divided into law-abiding and lawbreaking programmers. This article aims to question whether the distinction is justified, in the context of globalized capitalism. However, for clarity’s sake, the terms ‘virus writers’ or ‘computer intruders’ will be used when referring to lawbreaking individuals and groups, and ‘legitimate hackers’ when referring to law-abiding individuals and groups. Yet since all of these individuals and groups share a commitment to autonomy, for example the freedom to access information without restrictions, the term ‘hacker’ will be used when referring indiscriminately to those people who engage in ‘hacking’, the unauthorized or uncontrolled use of computers.

Engagement with news on Twitter: insights from Australia and Korea

Digitally networked voluntary associations such as free software projects and Wikipedia can be distinguished from capitalist firms in two respects. First, their predominant logic is ‘ethical’. Participation is primarily motivated by self-fulfilment and validated by a community of peers, rather than by earning wages. Second, their governance is ‘modular’, understood in a design sense (decomposable blocks sharing a common interface), but also in political economy terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and control by individually socializing their works into commons. In recent years capitalist-centralized firms have increasingly engaged with ethical-modular organizations, in some cases paying wages to participants (such labour is thus both ‘alienated’ or sold, and ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to produce commons). This article reviews the literature dealing with the relationship of these two organizational types. It argues that the manner in which scholars approach a central characteristic of ethical-modular organizations – participants relinquish exclusive property rights over the resource they have created – leads to highly diverse interpretations. Four hypotheses are presented. A ‘panoptic’ view overlooks the abjuration of exclusive property rights, so that ethical-modular organizations can be defined as a variant of the evolution of capitalist firms into post-bureaucratic networks. ‘Skeptics’ view this abjuration as irrelevant, and ethical-modular organizations as increasing worker exploitation. In contrast, ‘activists’ celebrate the abjuration of exclusive property rights, and present ethical-modular organizations as key actors in a historical process leading to the disappearance of capitalism and hierarchy. Finally ‘reformists’ suggest that the co-optation of communal labour by firms will benefit business practices and society. The article examines the analytical focus of each hypothesis in terms of labour, loss of control by firms over workers, and societal impact. Where appropriate, it raises questions and objections. The conclusion addresses communal labour’s effective dependence on capitalist-centralized firms and suggests factors which may contribute to its emancipation.

Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes

ABSTRACT This study examines the patterns of news engagement among news consumers with different political affiliation and cultural background. We use computational methods and data from Twitter in a cross-country comparison of engagement with six online news sources in Australia and South Korea. For our analysis, we used a subset of Twitter users who retweeted at least one political story during the period of collection, and for whom we were able to predict political affiliation using correspondence analysis and data on Twitter follower ties to politicians. We find that right-wing Australian retweeters are more intense in their news engagement, compared with their left-wing counterparts, whereas in South Korea it was the opposite. Australian right-wing political retweeters have more diverse information sources, while there was no difference in information diversity between the right and left in South Korea. We discuss how the political situation in South Korea at the time of data collection may have affected our analysis. We emphasise the methodological contributions of our research and its connection to on-going research into the behavioural foundations of ‘filter bubbles’.