As the internet plays a major part in our lives mostly as a form of communication to each other and the rest of the world, it was inevitable that civil disobedience would ‘embrace’ a new form which now is known as online civil disobedience. One of the most widely known forms of online civil disobedience is Hacktivism. To many the term is still new. We all have quite a fair idea what hackers do, but what does hacktivism involve? The term covers breaking into a computer system for a politically or socially motivated purpose. Few particular groups have been known to act in this manner. One of them and probably one of the most widely known one is called ‘Anonymous’.

Anonymous is an online community acting anonymously all across the globe in a coordinate manner to reach a certain goal. Lately (more so since the start of 2008) this group has been asociated with hactivism. According to CNN it is one of the three major succesors to WikiLeaks. One of the latest victims of Anonymous includes Vatican (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/07/vatican-anonymous-hacking-victim, dated: 7th March 2012). According to Anonymous “this attack is not against the Christian religion or the faithful around the world but against the corrupt Roman Apostolic Church”.

Another world wide known group of hacktivists is known as Lulzsec. This group has been known since the start of 2011, after they had taken the responsibility for hacking into Sony Pictures user accounts and compromising them. Also the group is known for taking down a CIA website. Their attacks have drawn attention to the insecure systems of their high profile victims. Lulzsec is known to consist of 7 members. Their ideology is that they do hacks because they find it entertaining.

In my opinion what those groups do, although illegally, is quite possitive. They draw attention to the certain matters that need to have attention drawn to. That to be said everything has it’s own limits including these activities and as long as they are with ‘good or a non harmless intentions’ (for the society) and not for the financial profit I do support hacktivists. 

I do believe that I could be persuaded to become politically active through an online setting. Online media is the type of media that is very relevant to my age group. It is an intense medium and one that I deal with every single day. My attention would be drawn eventually regardless of what pollitical issues it deals with. I am a selective person, and I do tend not to get pollitically involved with matters, but if the topic is being projected to you constantly it is hard not to form an opinion about it. That is why I believe that online media is such a powerfull tool when it comes to online activism.  

Yet as much as the November 10^th day of action was a success, it also had its disappointments. And these disappointments need to be publicly analyzed, discussed and learned from (just as successes should be celebrated) if further mobilizations are going to continue to grow and are going to succeed at saving the Canadian higher education system from being completely privatized and commercialized by the corporate elite and the Canadian bourgeoisie.

So the first hard fact that we need to look at is the turnout. And let’s be honest here, 20,000 to 30,000 students out of 200,000 to 300,000 students is not a success—that is 10%. As I tried to demonstrate in my previous post “Class Wars & Cultural Wars in the University today”, Universities are composed of 3 sociological/economic classes and these 3 classes are paramount and vital to understand if the Quebec student movement is going to significantly increase its support base. For summary/discussion purposes those are:

1) The overclass: people with power & money; those that run our universities and society.

2) The anxious class: those who are paralyzed in an existential angst and fear over their social standing and material well-being—which is pretty much the whole university lower administrative staff, professoriate and student base that have heavily vested interests in the current operational activities of Universities (i.e. their livelihoods/careers somehow depend upon it). And unfortunately, this is the class that will probably never participate in street protests unless some sufficiently large animal comes around and bites them in the ass.

3) The underclass: those are the students in the streets (the 10%) that have—or are being—completely steamrolled by the system. And thankfully, many of them were accompanied by a few of their compassionate friends.

The underclass and their friends are already 100% behind the movement—in fact, many of them are probably sleeping in tents tonight and have been participating in the occupy wall-street movement for weeks now. But it is the anxious class and the middle-class demographic that the Quebec student movement and their leaders need to learn how to communicate with if they are to significantly increase their participant base.

It has been said nauseatingly that we live in the information age and we have all witnessed on several different occasions how social media can overthrow oppressive and obsolete worldviews. So why is the Quebec student movement desperately attached to street protests and strikes when it is no longer the only means? Besides every time there is a strike/street protest—the general media and the working class slams students and labels them as juvenile little shit disturbers that are skipping class.  “Ouch” is right! Because the truth hurts. When students skip class and protest in the streets they are wasting taxpayers’ dollars—and to boot, they are not disturbing the overclass and the rich, they are actually inconveniencing the heavily stressed-out and anxious middle-class.  Don’t get me wrong, street protest and civil disobedience is a valid means. But come on people, the 1960’s are over.

My suggestion to the Quebec student movement and its leaders is that they move the protest and civil disobedience online—particularly, if they want to win over the anxious and heavily in debt middle class. And the sort of online civil disobedience and protest that I have in mind here is not of the Mickey Mouse sort either—I am talking about the equivalent of the Bank Transfer Day that we witnessed on November 5^th in the United-States by radical consumer activists against commercial banks. Could you imagine what sort of media frenzy 20,000 to 30,000 Quebec students that are publicly refusing to pay back their student loans would create? And then throw in a few street protests on the weekend instead of skipping class during the week?

For one, I guarantee you that there would be a participation ratio much greater than 30,000 individuals. The current federal and provincial student debt load is at 20 billion dollars and growing—and most of which is owed by graduates, not current students. Consequently, participation in some sort of online civil disobedience aimed at student debt would actually bridge the underclass and middle class within universities along with reaching-out to the working underclass and middle class in the larger society—which is actually where most of the student debt is currently being saddled. In other words, the Quebec student movement would actually be helping the working underclass and middle class rather provoking them with the idea of higher taxes and annoying them with endless traffic on their way home from work.

The other flop I would like to highlight and bring forward besides the low turnout and archaic protest methods—is the focus on tuition freezes. As Matthew Brett clearly outlines, in his great article in the gazette entitled: “the emerging student movement: it’s about more than tuition”, students are fighting for accessibility, equality, fairness, and the quality of their education “due the current state of affairs, not only here in Quebec, but globally.” As he continues “students played a major role in the civil-rights and antiwar movements of the past, as they continue to do in matters of environmental and economic justice today.” Thus contrastingly to the general media, students are not a group of self-interested partygoers (as they are so often portrayed) but are actually young idealists and concerned citizens that are worried about their families and their future.

But unfortunately, due to their youthful idealism and lack of worldly experience, their advocacy for accessible university studies through freezes and uniformly low tuition for all actually represents a huge wealth and knowledge transfer to the rich and overclass—which is entirely counterproductive to their cause.  As Youri Chassin and Germain Belzile argue in their article: “Surprise! Low tuition fees are a benefit – to the rich”, the Quebec student movement might want to learn a few things from the Occupy wall-street movement. In fact, they should probably join efforts and pressure the government to close massive tax loopholes and implement measures to prevent the growing gap between the rich and poor.

“In Canada, income inequality is by some measures the worst it’s ever been in 90 years of recorded history, worse even than at its previous peak in the roaring twenties” according to a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives –quoted in an interesting piece in the Montreal Gazette on November 5^th, 2011(Occupy wall street: reining in the rich). In fact, (and according to the same article) “Canada’s wealth disparity is growing faster than that of the U.S. and is now ranked 12^th of 17 for inequality (the worst in 17^th place being the U.S.), making [us] the only nation of the 17 to see its grade slip since the mid-1990s. Regardless of who is worse, […] the rich-poor gaps in both countries have translated into greater political power for the wealthy and the businesses they control [which in return leads them to lobby the government] for further financial deregulation” which in various ways leads to the privatization and closure of public institutions.

As Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said (the leader of the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante in his November 10^th day of action address): “corporations and the bourgeoisie have captured our democracy and policy agenda and their interest can be seen and reflected in every part of our society.” Granted, it’s a tougher proposition to think about how to stop our political and education system from being corrupted by corporate lobbyists, greedy investors and corrupt tax regulators, than skipping school and lamenting in the street against tuition increases. But those are the historical events that the Quebec student movement is facing and if it is to be successful it needs to enlarge its myopic lingo beyond tuition hikes and develop a larger vision and mission of socio-economic justice that embraces (rather than disgruntles) the working underclass and middle-class across Canada.

In other words, taking to the streets with signs of “stop corporate greed” – as the wall-street folks have been doing for weeks now– would actually be a more effective message than protesting with signs “for free education” and “tuition freezes”. But again, the best tactic would be for the Quebec student movement to invest their energy by developing their presence online and by articulating various reforms strategies that will help the working underclass and middle-class and raise their awareness. However when all fails, organized acts of online and street civil disobedience can always be called upon.

But those are just a few of my thoughts and suggestions—the rest, I leave up to you.

You might wonder how I can make such a claim.  Well the simple truth is that since the Howard Government was first elected in 1996, it made continual and significant changes to the ‘freedom’ of the Internet in Australia.  The most significant of these policy changes was the introduction of the Cyber Crimes Act.  While it seems like a relatively innocuous piece of legislation aimed at doing away with the evil Internet nasties, the legislation prevents Internet users using the Internet for civil disobedience as well as prevents access to some information and data.  Yes there are some things that should never be allowed but there are limits.

Even its introduction of the filtering package was designed to negate free access to information available through the Internet, and could lead to some people accidently running afoul of the Cyber Crimes Act.  At the same time as restricting Internet freedoms and censoring the Internet, the Howard Government would meekly complain about the human rights abuses of China and their censorship of the Internet.

But will the new Rudd Government reconsider the Cyber Crimes Act and its blunt definitions?  Only time will tell but it seems highly unlikely.