Whistleblowing For Change: Disruption From Within

Whistleblowing for Change presents a critical perspective on both how to challenge power dynamics and how to expose societal injustices and wrongdoing. This book is an examination of the practice of whistleblowing in relation to cultural and artistic creation, which is a vital resource of inspiration for interventions that can generate political change. 

The anthology is based on a conceptual connection between the stories of whistleblowers, investigative journalists, members of the hacker community, political activists and researchers, artists and critical thinkers in the field of information technology, politics and society. It presents multiple theoretical perspectives and direct experiences in crucial fields of investigation, thanks to diverse contributions from writers who have been central in inspiring and developing the activities of the Disruption Network Lab. By symbolically appropriating the term “disruption”—a notion traditionally used as a strategy of generating economic innovation—and bringing it into the context of political criticism, this book opens a new terrain of investigation into the framework of whistleblowing. Whistleblowing is presented as an act of “disruption”, which is able to provoke the unexpected within closed systems. 

To make the idea of Whistleblowing for Change more accessible for readers, I will conceptually connect the beginning of this collective journey with my personal story, as many authors will do over the following pages.[1] Consequently, I will connect my individual perspective to the collaborative notion of whistleblowing, which is seen in this anthology as an act that is able to have an impact in and across cultures, politics, and societies, encouraging a mindset of exposing systems of power and injustice. 

The theoretical reflections that follow come from my situated analysis of political and technological resistance in today’s information society. They do not necessary represent the view on whistleblowing and societal matters of the individual authors of this book, who have very diverse backgrounds and experiences. However, my aim is to examine this growing phenomenon, to offer interdisciplinary pathways to empower the public by investigating whistleblowing as a developing political practice that has the ability to provoke change from within.

Is Another World Possible?

Exactly twenty years ago, in the summer of 2001, I was highly engaged in the so-called hacker movement in Italy, and specifically in the underground culture in Rome. I was part of a collective group, AvANa (Avvisi Ai Naviganti), a former BBS-Bulletin Board System active since 1994 within the Social Centre “Forte Prenestino”, which was (and still is) a very important squatted community space for experimentation at the intersection of music, culture, political antagonism, social interventions, self-organisation and Do-It-Yourself production, but also art and hacking. Together with many people in the grassroots scene in Rome, and with the Strano Network group from Tuscany, I sought to connect the discourse of hacking with artistic practices, as a form of critical reinvention of technology and culture.

In 2001, while we were all politically active, socialising knowledge around free software, cyber-rights, and a collective dimension of hacking, our activities intertwined with the so-called no-global movement—although we considered ourselves to be global. We wanted to fight the new course that global capitalism was taking, often using highly creative methods. It was an important time for local and international grassroots media, with the creation of many independent radios, self-organised TVs, and online media, including Indymedia Italy, which shared the idea of providing information by ourselves and for ourselves. In 2001, there were intense discussions about creating a form of political opposition that was effective, because it was a moment of change, not only in terms of technology and society, but also in politics. It was also the time in which we all experienced something very difficult.

In July 2021, a large international event in Genoa and many local events in different cities commemorated the three days of protests that occurred over July 19–21, 2001 during the 27th G8 Summit, which was exactly twenty years ago. For three days in 2001, across Genoa, the movement suffered a great repression from the Italian police and “carabinieri”. Protester Carlo Giuliani was shot in Piazza Alimonda by a paramilitary police officer, and a brutal assault occurred inside the Pascoli-Diaz-Pertini school complex, where special unit Italian police irrupted and violently beat up many of the demonstrators who had been using the buildings as a dormitory and media centre. Around ninety of them were arrested and, after being transferred to the temporary Bolzaneto detention facility, many were tortured.[2] The issue of whether this was torture or not has been debated for years—in Italy at that time, torture was not recognised as a crime, and the investigations suffered a huge delay. It was not until April 2015 that the European

Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy had violated the European Convention on Human Rights during the G8 Summit of Genoa, with Italy passing a law making torture a crime in 2017, although the law’s definition of torture appears to still be too narrow.[3]

During the July 2001 G8 Summit I was not in Genoa, but in Florence with the Strano Network group. We were running an independent radio programme which informed the public about the demonstrations from a public square in Florence, connected live with Radio GAP (Global Audio Project), an independent network based at the Media Centre at the Diaz School, where other grassroots media platforms and the Genoa Social Forum were also temporarily housed.

We were working in collaboration with many other independent local radios in Italy, with the shared aim of documenting the G8 protests in Genoa. During the police irruption inside the Diaz School, we were connected live with Radio GAP. Thus, we experienced the police raid live, and it was a real shock. As soon as the police entered the building, the radio was forced to cut the live connection. There was a sense of hopelessness; we understood what was happening, we knew that it was a moment of violent repression and innocent people were suffering, and it was very difficult to cope with.[4]

In the days that followed, there was much discussion inside the Italian movement, while the press focused on the agenda of violence, on the sterile dichotomy of “good and bad protesters”, with the important points that brought us together in the fight becoming secondary. The consequences of the repression were hard to forget; trials went on for years, and many people left the movement. The impact was so strong that many groups decided to stop. But it was only an apparent end. Many others continued, and projects were created anew, inventing new tactics to think about politics and activism.

After the three days of Genoa, as we called them, I started an important ref lection of my own. I moved to Berlin in 2003, and became part of the city’s hacker and queer scene, trying to understand how to imagine a form of political opposition that was not just frontal, but more fluid. I was ref lecting on how to confront the enemy in a way that was not merely oppositional, how to not become the victim of it, and how to avoid ending up in situations from which there was no escape.

This is what happened in Genoa; the repression was orchestrated in a way that trapped the movement in a situation we could not escape from. We needed to find new strategies.

From Opposition to Disruption

In 2006, I wrote the book Networking: The Net as Artwork, related to the history of Italian hacking and media art, tracing a connection with the grassroots activities of social centres and activists. As a consequence of what I experienced in 2001, and the repression of Genoa, I started researching the concept of disruption as an art form. In 2008, as a PhD researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, and later, as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, I came to rethink opposition in art activism, and in the business of social networking.

During these years, I also experienced another situation that totally changed my point of view, coinciding with the establishment of the so-called “social networking.” From the 1990s until today, I have considered the idea of networking to be creating a context for open interactions among people, and one in which people can experiment and create artworks by developing this context independently.

From the middle of the 2000s, networking became a business and the core interest of the network economy, transforming the idea of social relations into a commodity. The consequence of this was the progressive commercialisation of openness, Do-It-Yourself and hacker ethics by social media platforms and networking enterprises. Sharing values and business development became intertwined, generating a feedback loop that was instrumental to the development of users’ attention-based capitalism, despite the opposite intentions of many actors who had contributed to building up a free and open internet from the start. I felt that if we were just going to reject the business of social networking, we were going to fail. We had already failed many times before, in trying to oppose something that was clearly more powerful than us, with more resources and reach. My perspective became to imagine a critique that was not just a frontal opposition, but one that aimed to understand the inner logics of business, trying to change it from within. The outcome was the notion of Networked Disruption.

In the book Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking (Aarhus University, 2013), I analysed the concept of disruption from a socio-political perspective, in relation to art and hacktivism. [5] The notion of disruption is appropriated from business culture to reflect on different modalities of producing criticism and, in a sense, to dismantle the constant process of appropriation that we experience (i.e. the counter-culture is taken over by businesses, the DIY culture is taken over by the network economy, a radical form of political criticism is appropriated by the opponents who adopt the same language but change its meaning, etc.).

It is a feedback loop of constant appropriation, but how do we break this loop? In my theory of Networked Disruption (2011), I proposed to analyse critical practices that occurred through radical disruption of business logic instead of in opposition to it.

In the business world, disruption happens when an unexpected innovation is introduced into a market, displacing an earlier technology and producing new business values and behavioural tendencies. [6] Disruption is a concept that comes from business studies. It means to introduce something into the market that the market does not expect, and to provoke a perturbation inside a closed system.

Transferring the idea of business disruption to the field of art and activism, I imagined a speculative approach where disruption became a means to generate unexpected practices and interventions, which play within the business models of the media industry, and bend their limits. This conceptual shift arose from the need to find new activist strategies that are harder to appropriate and that go beyond the mere act of opposition, which might become a trap that reinforces power hierarchies.

Through a feedback-loop-model based on the co-existence of art, business development and their disruption, I proposed to bypass the classic power/contra-power dichotomy which often serves to indirectly legitimise the adversary, instead imagining new radical routes based on the act of provoking disruptive and subversive interventions from the inside of the media industry as an art and activist form. [7]

An earlier example of this concept could be the experience of Luther Blissett, a multiple-use name that was shared among various individuals between 1994 and 1999—first in Italy and then internationally. The “collective name” was created to expose how media businesses, and the construction of media stories, worked. The people involved in the Luther Blissett Project created fakes, media hoaxes, and unexpected events, to later reveal societal misconduct that needed to be exposed. The idea of subversion of the status quo through “collective situations” was central, even if Luther Blissett was never openly political; it was an experiment of applying the myth of a common cause. There was always a moment of realisation, questioning the meaning of the truth—and claiming responsibility under the name of Luther Blissett as a conclusion of the intervention. Later, we could conceptually connect the same discourse to the tactics adopted during the early phase of Anonymous. Anonymous represented the concept of disruption quite accurately, because it revealed the hidden logic and misconduct within society and the media industry and, at the same time, played with the concept of anonymity for facts that needed to be exposed.

Networked Disruption addresses both a methodology of business innovation (disruption as an economic model) and a methodology of generating criticism (disruption as a creative act of dissent). What these methodologies have in common is that they provoke a change from within. However, they operate within two different layers and have opposing scopes; the former feeds the business machine, and the latter deconstructs it to expose its limits.[8]

Following this speculative thread, Disrupting Business becomes a theoretical framework for artistic and hacktivist criticism to operate, and a media tactic where the logics of economic, political and technological systems are exposed. This is possible by first understanding how such systems work, and consequently stretching them to their limits, by imagining possible bugs and zones of intervention that function to provoke awareness, and to reveal malfunctions—a method of criticism that has been applied in the hacker scene for decades.

Networked Disruption can happen in the context of art, but also through political and social actions and other fields of technological experimentation. Instead of radically confronting business from an outside perspective that rarely exists, contributing to fuelling innovation through acts of dissent that are promptly appropriated, the scope becomes to analyse a disruptive feedback loop of innovation and its criticism, by studying its inner logics, identifying its contradictions, and subverting it from within. [9]

By further operating a symbolic appropriation of the term disruption as the radical act of generating criticism within closed systems, and transferring it to the contexts of whistleblowing and truth-telling, a new terrain of investigation and experimentation opens up. Disruption becomes a tactic to expose systems of power and injustice.