Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 179

technologically informed means. In the Netherlands the 'Founda-
tion for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge' disseminated ideas
garnered from squatting, free radio and media activism, as did the
online journal Crash Media , and the print magazine Adbusters in
the United States.
The most famous and perhaps most romanticized example of
hacking as a form of resistance is probably that of the Zapatistas. On
1 , the day the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA) came into being, guaranteeing free trade between the
United States and other countries in America, the 'Ejercito Zapatista
de Liberacion Nacional', a guerrilla group consisting of some

January 1994

000
women and men, took over most of the southern Mexican state of
Chiapas. Most of the Zapatistas, as the group is more popularly
known, are Indians from the Chiapas area, though many of their
leaders, including their spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos,
are middle-class intellectuals. The Zapatistas' aim is to resist the
encroachment of neoliberalism on the peasant communities of
Chiapas and elsewhere, and on Mexico as a whole. The crucial aspect
of their strategy has been inspired use of media, in particular the
Internet. They are thus what Manuel Castells describes as the 'first
informational guerrilla movement'. 88 Whether the Zapatistas can,
in the end, prevail is doubtful. But they do point to possible forms
of resistance to the otherwise overwhelming dominance of neo-
liberalism, using the very tools by which the latter seeks hegemony.
The Zapatistas have brilliantly adopted a number of hacking tech-
niques as well as other forms of electronic disturbance to spread
their message.
For many digital networks seem to offer the means to realize
Walter Benjamin's demand, described in his essay 'Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction', for an aestheticized politics to combat
the fascist politicization of aesthetics. Benjamin proposed that
mechanical reproducibility liberated works of art from their unique
and authentic existence in time and place, and, thereby, their

3 ,