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Evgeny Morozov is the new enfant terrible of the tech world. A fierce critique of cyber utopianism, the belarus-born argues that the Internet is not going to save the world and that Silicon Valley is getting a kind of power that used to be exclusive of politics. He claims that  'We are abandoning all the checks and balances' : ‘We did not elect them to help us solve our problems. Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google.’ (Morozov, 2013)

In his first book, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World, Morozov argued against the belief that the Internet is going to set us free, for two main reasons. The fisrt one is that social media are not just a democratizing tool, but also a powerful weapon for authoritarian regimes:

‘One gloomy day in 2009, the young Belarusian activist Pavel Lyashkovich learned the dangers of excessive social networking the hard way. A freshman at a public university in Minsk, he was unexpectedly called to the dean’s office, where he was met by two suspicious-looking men who told him they worked for the KGB, one public organization that the Belarusian authorities decided not to rename even after the fall of communism (they’re a brand-conscious bunch).

The KGB officers asked Pavel all sorts of detailed questions about his trips to Poland and Ukraine as well as his membership in various antigovernment movements.

Their extensive knowledge of the internal affairs of the Belarusian opposition – and particularly of Pavel’s own involvement in them, something he didn’t believe to be common knowledge – greatly surprised him. But then it all became clear, when the KGB duo loaded his page on vkontakte.ru, a popular Russian social networking site, pointing out that he was listed as a “friend” by a number of well-known oppositional activists. Shortly thereafter, the visitors offered Lyashkovich to sign an informal “cooperation agreement” with their organization. He declined – which may eventually cost him dearly, as many students sympathetic to the opposition and unwilling to cooperate with authorities have been expelled from universities in the past. We will never know how many other new suspects the KGB added to its list by browsing Lyashkovich’s profile. (Morozov, 2011:155)

The second is that, even if living in authoritarian regimes, most people with internet acess wont search for ‘how to do a revolution’ but most probably for the same as we do in the West:

‘In 2007, a group of wealthy geeks in the West volunteered to lend their computer bandwidth to people in countries with repressive regimes in the hope – the confident hope – they’d soon educate themselves about the horrors of their various regimes. Instead, they promptly went in search of pictures of Gwen Stefani in her underwear and Britney Spears out of it.’

In his second book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov’s target is mainly Silicon Valley and the way big corporations as Google are designing a future we didn't chose. The journalist turned academic criticizes what he calls ‘solutionism’, the idea that the world needs fixing and that technology will do it, mainly trough... apps: ‘Solutionists err by assuming, rather than investigating, the problems they set out to tackle. Given Silicon Valley’s digital hammers, all problems start looking like nails, and all solutions like apps.’

For Morozov, the main problem is that life is supposed to be made of right and wrong decisions: failure is important in progress, error in problem-solving:

‘Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who celebrated the anguish of decision as a hallmark of responsibility, has no place in Silicon Valley. Whatever their contribution to our maturity as human beings, decisions also bring out pain and, faced with a choice between maturity and pain-minimization, Silicon Valley has chosen the latter — perhaps as a result of yet another instant poll.’

Morozov is definitely not the typical academic: although a fierce critic of Silicon Valley is he’s invited to talks in Google. His books are bestsellers and his fights on Twitter with some of his cyber-enemies quite funny.

What is the nature of hacking? Some see it just as something illegal: a hacker is someone who breaks into other people’s computers or networks, usually not with the best purposes… Others defend that hackers are the new radicals of the 21st century, the new revolutionary class (Wark:2004).

Are we talking about the same people? What is a hack? According to Jordan in his paper Hacking and power: Social and technological determinism in the digital age, it is ‘a material practice that involves making a difference in computer, communication and network technologies, which may well be illicit and be subject to seemingly technical criteria of excellence through which community relations are negotiated’. For Wark, ‘Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old’.

Hacking is, then, an act of creativity, no matter why it is done for.

What about hacktivism?  Hacktivists ‘are political activists, most often associated with the alter–globalisation movement, who utilise hacking techniques to create grassroots activist political campaigns. Hacktivists produce both ephemeral electronic civil disobedience actions, such as blocking online sites with mass electronic action, and they try to create infrastructures of secure anonymous communication often to support human rights workers’ (Jordan and Taylor, 2004).

  One of their main battles is for online freedom, as explained here by Amir Taacky, a Brithis hacker: "The battle between pirates and the music or film industries is really nothing, it's a warm-up.  "When this technology matures, manufacturers, agriculture businesses, technology firms, any of this could be easily replicated by almost anyone, anywhere. That's when we'll see the real fight – and they don't even see it coming."

More here for an interesting feature: Hacktivism: Startup Mentality for the Non-Profit Sector

here for A History of Hacktivism 

First things first: what s craftivism? 

According to http://www.craftivism.com/

Craftivism is the practice of engaged creativity, especially regarding political or social causes. By using their creative energy to help make the world a better place, craftivists help bring about positive change via personalized activism. Craftivism allows practitioners to customize their particular skills to address particular causes.

Here are some examples:

Marianne Jorgensen is a Danish artist who, in 2006, covered an army tank with a gigantic pink blanket in protest against the Iraq war. “When it is covered in pink, it becomes completely unarmed and it loses its authority.”

Cat Mazza is a US artist who set up the ‘microRevolt’ project in 2003 to investigate the expansion of sweatshops in industrialised capitalist economies. With knitted squares supplied by participants from all over the world, Mazza stitched together a 14-foot wide blanket bearing the Nike logo.  Every square acted as a signature in a petition calling for fairer working conditions.

It's one of the first rules you are taught in journalism schools: ALWAYS verify your stories. But the school is very different from the real world.

In the five years I worked as a reporter, I must confess that I didn't verify my stories every single time. I mean: of course if there's a call about a fire I wouldn't publish the story without talking, for example, with the local fire department - without verifying it.

But imagine my editor asks me to go and report about it. If I ask someone if they witnessed the fire and they tell me they live in the building, I don't ask for their ID to verify this information. As a reporter, always working under pressure, the truth is that, sometimes, you just trust your instincts, specially in "small" stories like this.

The problem is that the borders between a "small" and a "big" story, or even a small story impact, is something very, very difficult to define and predict. In the last couple of months, there were to big cases in Portugal where things were not what they looked like... journalists didn't do their job - didn't verify the story - and basically shit happened.

#1 The boy in love with Diana

A 24 year boy created a Facebook page  looking for a girl he met at a demonstration in Lisbon. It was very romantic and got suddenly viral in  Portuguese Facebook. In one week he had lots of media attention, like this report on prime-time news.  

He told the same love story to all the reporters, talking about how much we wanted to find this girls called Diana. A few days later, on the same Facebook page, it has been revealed that there was no Diana and no love story: it was a marketing campaign for a perfume. Everyone was very upset: people felt deceived.

What about the journalists? How has this been possible? The truth is that no one verified the story: they just believed it. And it was not that difficult to realise something was wrong: the Facebook page has been created a day before this couple was supposed to have met!

More on not verifying.... Story #2 : my favourite one ;)

Suddenly in late December there was a new political star on the Portuguese media landscape: Artur Baptista da Silva, an ex-presidential consultant, a former adviser to the World Bank, a financial researcher for the United Nations and a professor in the US, was interviewed on TV, radio and prestigious newspapers. 

  His impressive CV, his fluent discourse about the European crisis and his critics of the Portuguese government cut politics gave him a place among Portuguese intellectual elite. For a couple of days he was in every newspaper and every TV studio. High level political people praised his knowledge and opinions. Until they found out he was a con man who has been in jailed til last year.

His jails colleagues were impressed to see him on TV saying he was a high profile United Nations economist and the cover story started to blow up.

He is since then missing. 

The story is laughable but it raised important questions: what kind of journalism is this that believes in visit cards and doesn't verify his sources? But, I think, even more interesting, is to think about what kind of opinions do media value: Baptista da Silva was great while he as a UN economist and a US professor but those same opinions are now rubbish because he is a con man who never went to university?

The story is so unbelievable that it reached international media attention. 

And Portuguese journalists were not the only ones to believe the con.

Just to finish with some humor: here it is, Mr Baptista da Silva in several of his quite impressive workplaces. 

When UN sent him as a Jedi to Star Wars

 While coaching Manchester CIty

  And at UN's Christmas Party

The idea sounded simple: imagine you need to create an hashtag for a campaign. What would it be? And how would you spread it? 

Ok, not that simple any more: I must confess I find it quite difficult to create from zero. Luckily for me, Hung just knows how to to it: five minutes before we had been talking about Facebook Graph Search and all the polemic concerning privacy issues. So why not create a campaign against it: not the tool, but the impossibility of not appearing on those results? Great!

Even better was to find out that there was already a huge buzz around it on Twitter, but not an unifying hashtag. Good news! Now we just (!) need to create one.

First choice: #stopfacebookgraph

Yes, we got it: it's ¦&%* huge! 

What about #stopfcbgraph?

Not funky enough

A better idea: #ungraph

Why not #ungraphme ?

Great, all happy. Now we just (!) needed a strategy to spread it. Here it is:

use #graph in all our twitts. It's a popular ashtag and can help to spread ours.

Retwitt the twitts with #graph, about Facebook Graph, using #ungraphme

Find influentials: people with lots of followers who are against Graph Search. Tell them about #ungraphme. Retwitt them with #ungraphme.

Create a Tumblr account with the #ungraphme Twitter feed.

Create a Facebook group to spread the word - it's where our audience is: if you're against Graph Search it's because you're on Facebook.

Here is Anette, explaining it brilliantly to the class;)

After the theory, the practice: our first Tweet:

Creating an hashtag sounds easy but practice shows is not that simple. There are many cases of huge fails. Look at this McDonald's campaign, for example. The idea behind #McDStories was to encourage customers to share their fun stories about having a Happy Meal. But that was not what happened:

  The campaign went terribly wrong and in just a couple of hours McDonald’s removed the hashtag. Anyway, the damage had been done — people quickly retweeted and shared the first posts. A lesson to learn: we should always think about the way an hashtag can be use for the opposite goal you create it.

#susanalbumparty has been considered of the the biggest hashtag fails ever. It was created by the PR team of Susan Boyle and the idea was to promote her new album “Standing Ovation”.  They certainly wish they had reread it before tweeting...

Another famous fail was Newsweek #MuslimRage. The goal was to start a ‘debate’ between Muslims and non-Muslims over the ‘Innocence of Islam’ movie. WHat happened was this:

@LibyaLiberty: “I’m having such a good hair day. No one even knows #MuslimRage"

@WelshinGaza: “On a plane and people mishear me when I say I’m a ‘tourist’.#MuslimRage”

@iron_emu: “Ramadan in Iceland when days are 23 hours long.#MuslimRage”

And finally one that sums it all up:

@RezaAslan: “Memo to those few violent MidEast protesters, this is how you fight Islamophobia. You make fun of it.#MuslimRage”

And the list continues. More examples here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/19/waitrose-twitter-hashtag

and here

http://www.news.com.au/business/qantas-is-top-dog-in-pr-gaffe-honours-gaining-pr-disaster-of-the-year-from-cyber-chatter/story-e6frfm1i-1226241363661

and here.

http://www.onqmarketing.com.au/twitter-hashtags-backfired-into-pr-disasters/ 

Sharing outrage in a productive way: here is a good way to kick an idea. This week we talked about agile campaigns in social media. Using the example of the News of the World advertising campaign, we realised that it's not enough to talk about something in the pub or on Twitter. It's not enough to say "Oh... those unethical advertisers . We should ask 

who are them?

how much are they spending?

These were the initial questions. This was the next step. And then, one after the other, advertisers just left...