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algorithmic systems that offer “a false sense of participation within its tightly 
controlled and closely surveilled borders” (Stracey 2014: 125). Through curated 
content and constructed narratives, social media creates a sense of false reality, 
which, through the illusion of choice and immediacy, obscures the mechanisms of 
mediation.  
 	
Hacktivism, therefore, seeks to “uncover” these invisible processes to show 
the mediation at work.  This is exemplified by groups such as Desktop Theatre, 
whose web-based “theatrical interventions” used digital platforms as a stage to 
explicitly reveal the hidden power dynamics of capitalism (Jenik 2001: 1). Their 
work positioned social media beyond neutral consumption and instead as a site 
of critique, encouraging those involved to consider how they “author” themselves 
through images and online interaction. As Poster suggests, digital communication 
transforms the relationship between body and subject, “opens identity to new  
degrees of flexible, unstable determination” through technological interfaces 
(Poster cited in Stracey 2014) .  
 	
Unlike the practices of its Situationist predecessors, which centred on  
embodied physical forms of disruption, hacktivism requires virality and extensive 
distribution. In this context, its aesthetics becomes “both a weapon and a trap”, 
leaving hacktivism susceptible to co-option by the same structures it seeks to 
critique (Cornel Drăgoiu 2026). The lack of embodied physicality risks hacktivist 
practices becoming highly aestheticised rather than lived interventions.   
Nevertheless, hacktivist aesthetics are essential to how performance functions as 
communication, providing strategies for intervening in the construction and  
perception of reality within a mediated, spectacle driven society (Debord 1967).  
  
  
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