“Cybernetic Guerillas”: Engagement of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional with “Culture Jamming”
Written by Julia Widing, McGill University
Edited by Marie Frangie
I. Introduction
“WARNING: This is a protest, it is not a game, it may have personal consequences as in any off-line political manifestation on the street,” read the message that glared across FloodNet participants’ screens between September 9th and 10th, 1998.[1] An intervention piece designed to concoct digital disturbances, “FloodNet” was a part of what the virtual art group “Electronic Disturbance Theatre” (EDT) titled the “SWARM” project (Stop the WAR in Mexico).[2] Though FloodNet was the only demonstration of the EDT’s SWARM project to be realized, its conception speaks to something greater: the development of a new activist era of the incoming twenty-first century.
The SWARM project was forged in support of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).[3] In this essay, I argue that the EZLN used unprecedented strategies for the mass dissemination of their far-left, anti-neoliberal, and alter-globalization ideologies, specifically through the resistance art of “culture jamming” in the mid-to-late 1990s.[4] “Culture jamming” refers to a protest method popularized by writer Mark Dery, and was first coined by the collage band “Negativland” in 1985.[5] To showcase what exactly the EZLN’s unprecedented strategies were and their place in the culture jamming paradigm, I will focus on two pieces: Conversations with Durito: Stories of the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism (Fig. 1), followed by a further analysis of the EDT’s “FloodNet” demonstration (Fig. 2). The former is authored by EZLN insurgent Subcomandante Marcos and will be interpreted through the culture jamming strategy of zine production. The latter will be construed as exemplary of the “glitch” as culture jamming.
II. Context for Culture Jamming
Mark Dery attributes culture jamming as a protest method to what Umberto Eco theorized as a need for “a semiological guerilla warfare” in his 1986 essay of the same title.[6] According to Eco, it is only “the most backwards countries” that in “carrying out a coup d’etat, still use tanks” because a “country belongs to the person who controls communications.”[7] However, mass control over communications can double as a tool for social revolution. For a “Milanese bank clerk,” he says, “a TV ad for a refrigerator represents a stimulus to buy, but for an unemployed peasant in Calabria the same image means the confirmation of a world of prosperity that doesn’t belong to him and that he must conquer.” This variability in media interpretation opens a window for “a guerilla solution,” because “the battle for the survival of man…is not to be won where the communication originates, but where it arrives.” Eco ends his essay with musings on the future, wondering if “nonindustrial forms of communication,” from the, “love-in to the rally of students…on the grass of the campus,” have the capability to transform into a, “future communications guerilla warfare,” where, “the universe of Technological Communication would…be patrolled by groups of communications guerillas, who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception.”[8]
In other words, Eco observes how both state and privately-owned media have more power than militant authorities. However, the potential for variability in interpretation of this media leaves room for the influence of “communications guerillas” who exploit this potential to inspire social revolution. Eco’s wonderments of the evolution of disruptive protest methods are what lead Mark Dery to attribute Eco’s theory of “communication guerillas” to “culture jammers.”[9]
Culture jammers have been historically referred to using different titles and associated with different movements before Dery sandwiched them under the “jammer umbrella.” Dery speaks to jammers as “part of a historical continuum,” whose art centered around the perversion of a state-fueled status quo. When writing his piece on culture jamming in 1993, Dery and seasoned jammers believed media would transform with the “accessibility” and “egalitarianism” of the Internet. However, there were also fears – now proven correct – of the commerciality of the Internet. Such tendencies include but are not limited to the falsities the Internet could easily spread, its impact on the brain, and the overconsumption it encourages.[10] Thus, there existed an opportunity for the web to be controlled through the methods theorized by Eco and for culture jammers to expand their influence through the methods described by Dery. This chain of events triggered the EZLN’s influence on a universal audience.
III. EZLN Overview
The EZLN launched its first militant offensive on January 1st, 1994, in reaction to building political tensions. Conflict began to stew two years earlier in 1992, when Mexican President Carlos Salinas modified Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which ceased the government’s commitment to offers of communal land holdings. These holdings, referred to as the ejido system, once granted property to landless farmers and were passed down generationally and immune to threats of land sales. The system guaranteed that Mexican farmers could make a substantial living. Thus, it became a critical issue when the government claimed there was no more land to be distributed. As a result, small subsistence farmers and Indigenous Mexican communities began to suffer, which sparked the rapid growth of the EZLN.[11]
As the EZLN experienced this rapid growth, the Mexican government, in allegiance with the United States and Canada, ratified NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994. Although NAFTA was ratified with the intention of promoting free trade across North America, it opened the Mexican market to subsidized, genetically modified corn produced by the United States’ farming industry. Here stood a large trade imbalance between the two nations, marked by the US’s ability to generate billions of dollars of subsidies per year for corn. Mexican farmers could not compete hence their quality of life and received income was drastically reduced. It was predicted that these severe reductions would drive farmers into metropolitan areas in search of work, enabling mass urban impoverishment.[12]
The EZLN responded to this potential catastrophe with a call to violent action, explaining their January 1st offensive, followed by a declaration of war on the “supreme government” of Mexico and its federal army. This offensive was launched in the state of Chiapas, where the EZLN succeeded in occupying several municipal buildings. The balconies of these buildings displayed the “First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle”: a list of political demands which included fair work, land, housing, food, education, etc. for the Mexican people. The declaration concludes with the EZLN vowing to “not stop fighting until the basic demands of [their] people have been met by forming a government of [their] country that is free and democratic.” The EZLN began their retreat into the Lacandón Jungle, but not before occupying seven townships, and engaging in numerous battles with government troops. After twelve days, a ceasefire was called by the Mexican government – but the EZLN’s struggle had only just begun.[13]
Amid the ceasefire, the EZLN had garnered an impressive amount of international support for their cause. In Ottawa, the Canada Action Network held a vigil at the Mexican Embassy. Amnesty International’s London headquarters condemned the federal army’s use of bombs on Indigenous communities. Several political groups in Spain listed demands and formed solidarity committees, and the Manhattan-based Center for Constitutional Rights denounced the Mexican government’s actions. To increase global outreach, the EZLN allowed journalists, reporters, and other curious individuals from “civil” society to visit their aguascalientes: political and cultural meeting places erected throughout Chiapas.[14]
Aguascalientes were a place for international solidarity, namely through the Encuentros they accomodated Anthropologist Mariana Mora recalls her time at an aguascalientes at Caracol IV to attend the Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo (Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism). At the Encuentro, more than “six thousand people from over forty countries” united to discuss “social struggles against the impacts of neoliberal economic policies.”[15] Art historian Julian Stallabrass recollects an Encuentro at Oventic, made memorable by the participants’ eager anticipation of the prolific Subcomandate Marcos – who did not appear, but whose spirit was monumental.[16]
IV. Conversations with Durito, Zines as Culture Jamming
The monumentality of Marcos, coupled with the EZLN’s steadfast rise in support from the international community, indicates an ease at which the group could spread its ideology past the aguascalientes’ Encuentros and the shared firsthand accounts of foreign advocates. Ergo, with a reputation as an exceptional writer, Marcos composed comedic, simply written short stories in the form of Conversations with Durito, an anthology rife with allegorical messages about the evils of neoliberalism, and fantastical musings of a freely democratic Mexico. To directly quote Stallabrass, the EZLN “wear pens alongside bullets,” which is wholly exemplified through Marcos’ literary works.[17].
Marcos penned down his first story in the Conversations with Durito series in response to a letter and drawing sent to him by Mariana Moguel, a 10-year-old EZLN supporter. In his written response, Marcos refers to Mariana as “Subcomandanta,” congratulating her for the “new rank” that she “acquired” with her drawing, accompanied by a story that perhaps she “will understand someday.”[18] The introduction alone speaks to the EZLN goal of disseminating their ideologies and building solidarity with a wide audience – including easily influenced groups like children.
The story’s content reinforces the EZLN’s motive. Titled “The Story of Durito and Neoliberalism,” the story follows an encounter between a characterized version of Marcos and Durito: a wry little beetle who steals Marcos’ tobacco (Marcos 2005, 42). Durito’s persona, paired with the dialogue between the two characters, functions as an educational resource for the reader. For instance:
“After having finished, he looked me in the eye and said, “You are going to win.” “I already knew that,” I told him. I added, “But how long will it take?” “A long time,” he said, sighing with resignation. “I already knew that, too…Don’t you know exactly how long?” I asked. “It cannot be known exactly. Many things have to be taken into account: the objective conditions, the ripeness of the subjective conditions, the correlation of forces, the crisis of imperialism, the crisis of socialism, etcetera, etcetera.” [19]
In this brief passage alone, Marcos has re-enforced confidence in the EZLN, firmly stating that he knows victory is in sight, whilst plainly sharing what must happen in order for success to be achievable. These types of works are what win over supporters and recruit new ones, as identified in the hopeful, determined qualities of Marcos’ writing.
The qualities of Marcos’ Conversations with Durito and its contents present themselves in a similar manner to printed materials attributed to the popularization of “‘zines” in the late 20th century. Short for “fanzine,” zines stem from a writing genre historically associated with science fiction.[20] Mark Dery perceives zines as a “new media paradigm” that are “interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist.” Quoting Gareth Branwyn, he defends zines’ significance affirming that, “the current saturation of relatively inexpensive multimedia communication tools hold tremendous potential for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have lived with for so long.”[21] “Zines articulate a final cry for the era of alternative print communication, and print in general, amidst the dawning of an age that wants to stifle such voices.”[22]
In other words, at the end of the 20th century, zines functioned as a method of disseminating topical information that strayed from the status quo – doing so in a way that was perceived as rebellious, alternative, and creative. Additionally, zines behaved as a culture jamming method due to how their publication and availability disrupted the information spewed by established media sources. Thus, I contend that Marcos’ Conversations with Durito aligns with the standards and intentions of ‘zines as a culture jamming strategy. To reference Liming once again, zines can be defined by their “methods of production” with “emphasis on a homemade final product. Zines can also be interpreted as forms of distribution, and lastly, its “print run (less than 1,000 is considered standard, though most circulate in batches of less than 100).” Liming also explains how, according to author Stephen Duncombe, zines “reflect a kind of anger and anxiety that are deeply class specific, and in turn constitute a similarly situated response to that anger and anxiety.” Liming and Duncombe’s sentiments are applicable to Conversations with Durito by way of how it fits their ‘zine production schema. The anthology itself was not published until well after Marcos began penning down his short stories, which started as mail deliverables and handouts. Furthermore, in dialogue with Duncombe, Marcos’ anthology consists of fantastical works bursting with expressions of class anger through wry playfulness, yet they maintain an objective of educating readers on political lessons through allegorical means. Thus, I contend that the series can be interpreted as a zine.
As a culture jamming strategy, Conversations with Durito as a ‘zine works to disrupt the mainstream by offering politically oriented education and information outside the scope of regularly circulating media. Doing so generated the possibility to build solidarity and community with a working class impacted by the Mexican government’s obstructive decisions.[23] Dery attributes ‘zines-as-culture-jamming to a universal desire for community (Dery 1993, 56). In the midst of watching “game shows, sitcoms,” and “the evening news,” there lies a “yearning for meaning and cohesion” which is a gap that zine publications fill.[24] (Dery 1993, 58). To once again reference Marcos’ choice to address Mariana as “Subcomandanta” in the story’s introduction, his immediate goal presents itself as building solidarity with his audience. The story itself centers on Marcos, an unofficial EZLN leader, devoting time to considering the words of a beetle, a creature who is smaller than him in every sense of his being. In this interpretation, Durito can therefore be read as Marcos’ followers with whom he wishes to build a network of solidarity and community with, even if they may be perceived as “smaller” in comparison to his influence and monumentality. However, efforts by the EZLN and their supporters to build solidarity and community presented themselves not only in print, but also digitally.
V. FloodNet, the “Glitch” as Culture Jamming, Continued Influence
As a result of the spread of EZLN politics across a very new Internet in the 1990s, the media tended to exaggerate the EZLN’s cyber abilities due to a lack of true technological understanding. Twenty years after the original 1994 uprising, in his essay To look and communicate, Marcos scoffed at the idea of the EZLN being referred to as “cyber guerillas” and having “Zapatista cyber power,” saying “you think we had Internet? In February of 1995, when the federal government was pursuing us…the portable PC was thrown into the first stream that we crossed. After that we wrote our communiqués on a mechanical typewriter lent to us…That was the powerful and advanced technology that we had, the ‘cyber guerillas of the 21st century.’”[25] Although the claims of the EZLN being commanders of the Internet whose ideologies crept into every crevice of cyberspace may be inflated, this is not to say any and all attempts at technological communication should be invalidated. One must factor in the acts of protest performed by EZLN supporters with far more mobility than insurgents like Marcos, who was bound to hiding in the Lacandón Jungle. Moreover, I turn to the EDT’s “FloodNet” performance to exemplify this notion.
The EDT, founded by artist and activist Ricardo Dominguez, launched its initiative as a method of transforming the Internet into a site of “performative dissent.” Through the utilization of “electronic civil disobedience,” the EDT created a virtual alternative to physical “sit-ins” where participants sought to “disturb data flow” or the “information exchange between servers and Internet users.” This occurred thanks to a now-obsolete hacking technique titled “a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).”[26] By initiating a DDoS in support of the EZLN, the EDT acted as culture jammers of transnational capitalism and neoliberal ideals, disrupting mass-circulated media and mainstream politics.
An earlier instance of DDoS as resistance initiated by the Italy-based Anonymous Digital Coalition (ADC) laid the groundwork for the EDT’s “Zapatista Tactical FloodNet” or simply, “FloodNet,” developed by EDT members Carmin Karasic and Brett Stalbaum in 1998 (Fuentes 2019, 31). The ADC’s Netstrike for Zapata – also developed in 1998 – called participants to action by directing them “to enter in their browsers the listed web addresses” of five financial institutions said to be “symbols of Mexican neoliberalism.” Then, they were invited to manually hit the “return” or “enter” keys multiple times,” causing the sites to “glitch” for online users by its consistent reloading. By perfecting the ADC’s technique, Karasic and Stalbaum developed FloodNet as a “web-based program that automated protesters’ page reloads. Embedded in the EDT’s HTML pages, once triggered by participants, FloodNet sent repetitive file requests to the targeted servers.”[27]
FloodNet was first utilized by the EDT for a virtual sit-in “on the website of Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo. Eighteen thousand people from all over the world participated.” Although DDoS attacks can be efficiently conducted by just one person, virtual sit-ins performed by the EDT required “many people to intensify its effects.” Thus, although eighteen thousand may seem like a large number, it was still not enough to make an impact in digital spaces – a sign of “poor technological performance.” However, to cite theorist Marcela A. Fuentes, despite how the protest may have been technologically ineffective, “the core of the EDT’s actions lies not in showing technological skill, but in facilitating collective dissent through digital means.”[28]
In line with the words of Fuentes, I assert that not only is what the EDT did a method of culture jamming, but it is also exemplary of the power of the “glitch” in online resistance methods. Through FloodNet, the EDT culture jammed by disrupting and counteracting the “hegemonic uses of digital information networks” for the purpose of defying transnational capitalism and neoliberalism in support of EZLN ideologies.[29] The “glitch,” however, is where the jamming makes itself known as a disruption in a typically seamless line of communication. Author Mark Nunes views glitches as “part of the art form in the same way that brushstrokes are part of oil painting.”[30] In other words, glitches are a typical part of computers and software, yet they are an unrealized component until the user is directly confronted with it. Culture jammers like the EDT exploit this concept as an integral piece of their virtual sit-in. The non-FloodNet associated website user will attempt at opening the webpage to receive information on Zedillo’s political agenda, only to be met with a site that will not stop “glitching” by means of its constant reloading. This makes the webpage inaccessible, and Zedillo’s agenda unreadable.
Furthermore, FloodNet speaks to the future of hacking techniques and the capability of the Internet as a protest medium, especially with the immediacy that the Internet and social media grants us in a current context. For a brief example, I turn to architect Nezar AlSayyad and historian Muna Guvenc’s analysis of the influence of social media on the rapid spread of the First Arab Spring in the early 2010s. Represented by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, social media allowed for the immediate dissemination of communication and coverage of protests, uprisings, and instances of injustice across countries in Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. This was significantly exhibited by the prompt online circulation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia in January 2011, which was shortly followed by at least eleven identical acts in Egypt, Algeria, Mauritania and Morocco. In Egypt, protesters carried Tunisian flags, and in Yemen and Bahrain, protesters carried banners reading “The people want the fall of the regime,” which were identical to banners held by protesters in Egypt.[31] Thus, the immediacy of the First Arab Spring, exacerbated by the utilization of social media to circulate information, has roots in the virtual dissemination of ideology perpetuated by the EZLN and its supporters. Though the ADC is based in Italy, and the EDT in the United States, both still performed nearly identical protests with the same purpose of causing immediate disruptions and drawing attention to the demands of the EZLN. Similarly, although protesters in the First Arab Spring spanned across different continents, they were united – if not physically, then virtually – under the same desire for political change fueled by the wide-reaching influence of social media and the Internet.
VI. Conclusion
It is safe to say that the EZLN, despite the humoristic sentiments of Subcomandante Marcos, were “cyber guerillas” not only through their utilization of various strategies to initiate the culture jamming of popular media, but also through their later influence of how social media can be weaponized to initiate social change, as seen in the First Arab Spring. From
Conversations with Durito to FloodNet the EZLN utilized tools that encouraged their supporters to disseminate far-left, anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist, alter-globalist ideologies which go against the grain of the hegemonic mainstream. As social media and the Internet expand, so does room for research development. For future expansion, I will investigate how culture jamming can translate to online activism on new platforms like TikTok and Instagram, specifically the fast moving pace and heightened levels of immediacy granted by the platforms’ content, like the Instagram “Reels” feature. However, the impact of this content is yet to be wholly realized, therefore my research must cease here for the time being.
Endnotes
[1] Fidèle A. Vlavo, “Introduction: Digital Performance” and “Not Found on this Server: The Performance of Protest,” Performing Digital Activism: New Aesthetics and Discourses of Resistance (Routledge, 2019), 1-14, 86-107.
[2] Vlavo, “Not Found on this Server: The Performance of Protest,” 87.
[3] Vlavo, “Not Found on this Server: The Performance of Protest,” 88.
[4] Marcela A. Fuentes, “Updating Protest and Activism: Hemispheric Performance Constellations” and “Assembling Convergence Online: NAFTA, the Zapatistas, and the Electronic Disturbance Theater,” in Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (University of Michigan Press, 2019), 1–22, 23–42.
[5] Mark Dery, “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs,” in Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Culture Resistance, ed. Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink (New York University Press, 2017), 39–59.
[6] Dery, 46.
[7] Umberto Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerilla Warfare,” in Travels in Hyperreality (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 135–44.
[8] Eco, 135–44.
[9] Dery, 46.
[10] Dery, 47-56.
[11] Todd Wolfson, “The EZLN and Indymedia: ‘One No, Many Yeses,’” in Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (University of Illinois Press, 2014), 25–47.
[12] Wolfson, 30.
[13] Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement (City Lights Books, 2008).
[14] Ramírez, The Fire and the Word.
[15] Mariana Mora, “A Brief Overview of the First Years of the Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (1996–2003),” in Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities (University of Texas Press, 2017), 27–38.
[16] Julian Stallabrass, “The Dead, Our Dead,” Third Text 11, no. 38 (Spring 2008): 55–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829708576658.
[17] Stallabrass, 57-58.
[18] Subcomandante Marcos, “The Story of Durito and Neoliberalism,” in Conversations with Durito: Stories of the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism (Autonomedia, 2005), 41–43, https://schoolsforchiapas.org/library/conversations-don-durito/.
[19] Marcos, 42.
[20] Sheila Liming, “Of Anarchy and Amateurism: Zine Publication and Print Dissent,” The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association 43, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 121–45, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41960530.
[21] Dery, 57.
[22] Liming, 129.
[23] Liming, 131-136.
[24] Dery, 56-58.
[25] Vlavo, “Introduction: Digital Performance,” 2.
[26] Fuentes, 28.
[27] Fuentes, 30.
[28] Fuentes, 32.
[29] Fuentes, 32.
[30] Nunes, 127.
[31] Nezar AlSayyad and Muna Guvenc, “Virtual Uprisings: On the Interaction of New Social Media, Traditional Media Coverage and Urban Space during the ‘Arab Spring,’” Urban Studies 52, no. 11 (Fall 2013): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013505881.