52 Disruption and détournement Hacktivist aesthetics and global capital. Georgina Peters This essay was a response to the question “What are the dramaturgical and aesthetic dimensions of hacktivism, and how have hacktivists intervened in the wider ‘performance’ of global capital?” (DRA2087). “Hacktivism” refers to a form of digital activism that manifests itself through electronic civil disobedience and other internet-based practices (Giannachi 2007: 13). Unlike conventional hacking, it is overtly political and performative, designed to be perceived. Global capitalism, meanwhile, can be understood as not merely an economic system or a socio-political framework but as a performance of legitimacy and stability, sustained through mediatisation, extreme commodification, and information control (Evans 2015). In acknowledging the highly performative nature of capitalism, hacktivism can be situated within the legacy of groups such as the Situationist International, particularly their techniques of culture jamming and the use of “media manipulation to critique consumer culture” in an attempt to deconstruct the carefully managed “performance” of global capitalism (Cornel Drăgoiu 2026). As Debord (1967) argues, society has shifted from merely producing consumer goods to producing images, becoming a spectacle-driven society in which capitalism turns lived experience into a passive representation. Society is therefore increasingly mediated by these images, operating within realms of power to control knowledge and representation. In this context, I will argue that “information, like land or capital, has become a form of property” (Giannachi 2007: 33), making its reappropriation central to hacktivist objectives. This essay argues that hacktivism functions through dramaturgical strategies and aesthetic practices, such as media manipulation, to deconstruct and reveal the spectacle of global capitalism as constructed and fragile. The problem with hacktivism’s attempt to undermine the spectacle through these strategies is that they rely heavily on visibility, which is then absorbed back into the spectacle itself. To develop this, I will first outline how hacktivism functions as a form of performance before investigating its aesthetic strategies and intervention in the wider performance of global capitalism. As McKenzie argues, “performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth: an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge” (2001:176). Within this framing, hacktivism can be understood as a form of contemporary performance, structured through roles, staging, and audience engagement. Unlike traditional hacking, which tends to operate invisibly, hacktivism is specifically oriented to be perceivable.
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