Riots
From 2018-2019, the world market was swept by a wave of mass uprisings, from Paris to Hong Kong, Santiago, Beirut, Quito, Tehran and Baghdad. These were marked not only by their scale, duration and intensity of confrontations with police, but also by new uses of digital platforms to coordinate and connect wide-area mobile actions, and by fresh digital countermeasures from security forces. “Riot platforms” (following Clover 2016) thus open another phase of the experimentation in the digital circulation of struggles ongoing since the turn of the millennium. It seemed the pandemic might damp down these incendiary movements, but the 2020 outbreak of the Black Lives Matter revolt in the USA showed the contrary. Amongst its many other repercussions, the hash-tagged BLM uprising forced the corporations of Big Tech into retreats on issues of facial recognition surveillance and social media hate-speech and has highlighted the long-standing collaboration between Big Tech and the nation security state. Here, and elsewhere around the planet, echoes from rebellions in the street reach to the gleaming campuses of Silicon Valley: who knows what comes next, as networked proletarian insurgencies start to face off against digital super-capital?
“TREMOR: WILL, DIFFICULTY, AND ANTAGONISM”
October 2019 marked a historic moment in Ecuador. Nationwide, massive mobilizations took the streets in a reclamation of justice. The protestors were the marginalized: Indigenous and Black people, with the support of the urban-middle class. Red Kapari has generously allowed us to translate and use material from their recently published book Estallido: La Rebelión de Octubre en Ecuador / Explosion: The October Rebellion in Ecuador (Quito, 2020), which recounts and analyzes these events.
In this piece, we present passages from the second chapter, “Estremecimiento: Voluntad, dificultad y antagonismo” / “Tremor: Will, Difficulty, and Antagonism” (pp. 97-188), written by Leonidas Iza, Andrés Tapia and Andrés Madrid. We selected this chapter to highlight the conflict of big, mainstream media versus alternative and community-based media during the October Rebellion that shook Ecuador in 2019.
Riot Logistics
In 2018 and 2019 popular uprisings burst out around the planet in Paris, Hong Kong, Santiago, Quito, Beirut, Barcelona, Tehran, Baghdad and many other locations. The protests were characterized by their scale, paralyzing major cities and surrounding areas; their duration, often lasting for months; and their intensity. Confrontations with security forces resulted in protesters’ deaths (in Iran and Iraq numbered in the hundreds); many serious injuries, such as the hundreds of eye-wounds inflicted on demonstrators in Chile by rubber bullets and tear gas canisters or, in France, mutilations from police stun grenades; thousands of arrests; and, often, extensive property damage. The tumults have been called a “global rebellion against neoliberalism”—perhaps an overly smooth description, too quickly ironing out the complexities of the revolts’ political composition and the variety of the regimes they contested.