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As Giannachi notes, “whereas hackers work in disguise, hacktivists tend to act in 
character,” their primary action becomes “the propagation of an idea through a 
performative process” (2007: 13). An essential part of this performance process 
is staged through media exposure, which acts as the main site of appearance and 
dissemination. As Giannachi suggests, twenty-first-century protest operates as “a 
spectacle of and about information,” making visibility and distribution  
fundamental to political action (2007: 32). While the internet, in theory, enables 
the mass circulation of information at the touch of one’s fingertips, late-stage 
capitalism simultaneously commodifies that information. It determines who has 
access to it (Foster & McChesney: 2011). Thus, the struggle for visibility also  
becomes a power struggle. Digital platforms function as performance spaces in 
which hacktivist intentions can be shown (Stracey 2014). Within this  
dramaturgy, hacktivists cast themselves as performers, with big corporations and 
governments as the antagonists.   
Simultaneously, the public’s attention becomes commodified as a highly valued 
resource, with hacktivists competing with corporate and state actors who  
carefully stage their own legitimacy.  As such, media consumption can never be 
passive and is instead embedded in highly tangible realities. Within this context, 
political power functions by controlling and shaping both media and the dialogue 
surrounding it; consequently, hacktivism must disrupt dominant capital’s  
distribution and circulation of meaning (Giannachi 2007). To do this, hacktivists 
must construct disruptive situations that fracture passive consumption, forcing 
active engagement and encouraging the public to become co-performers by  
sharing and amplifying their actions. However, these disruptive interventions also 
expose capitalism’s recuperative tendency, that is, its ability to absorb ‘radical 
acts’ and creatively turn them into a consumable “novelty” (Crary 2004: 463). Thus, 
hacktivism reveals the contradictory nature of capitalism as a system reliant on 
technological innovation while containing its transformative capacity. Hacktivism, 
therefore, acts as a digital stage to produce performances that play out against the 
scripted normality of global capitalism and its illusion of stability.    
Hacktivism’s intervention into the performance of global capitalism is enacted 
through specific aesthetic strategies. Central to these strategies is the Situationist 
practice of détournement, that is, the reworking of existing images and media to 
subvert their meanings and “claim ownership” (Belic 2017). This process manifests 
in modern hacktivist practices through website defacements and the editing of 
contexts and captions to reprogram dominant images and turn corporate  
messaging against itself. These forms of “electronic détournements” (Stracey 
2014: 126)  become an essential activist weapon in our increasingly mediated 
reality, in which even the “empirical existence of facts themselves [are]... already a 
mediated existence” while being filtered and constructed for the benefit of  
dominant power structures (Viénet & McDonough 2004: 185).  The development of 
social media increasingly intensifies this dynamic, serving as automated  

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