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After explaining these concepts more fully, I continue: 
The spectacle of dominant institutions often disturbed by these interventions is 
the performance of global capital as infrastructure, since the metamodern state 
of digital capitalism now organises the conditions under which images, payments, 
data and social relations circulate. Srnicek argues that “every area of the economy 
is increasingly integrated with a digital layer; therefore owning the infrastructure 
that is necessary to every other industry is an immensely powerful and profitable 
position to be in” (Srnicek 2017: 43), while also arguing that “advanced capitalism 
came to be centred upon extracting and using a particular kind of raw material: 
data” (Srnicek 2017: 28). Zuboff extends this when she claims that “Surveillance 
capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for  
translation into behavioral data” (Zuboff 2019: 14), so Anonymous’ demand that 
“Knowledge is free” (Anonymous 2008) enters a convoluted battlefield in which 
human experience has already been captured, processed and converted into  
prediction. 
Jordan and Taylor connect between infrastructure and overt dissent, arguing that 
“The apparently near-total dependence of contemporary national governments 
and global capitalism on complex communication networks has created room for 
a deliberately focused political agenda” (Jordan and Taylor 2004: 17-18). Networks 
that deepen commodification also create vulnerabilities, as communication sys-
tems depend on circulation and public confidence. They add that “Hacktivism 
comes from hacking to threaten commodification and state control of information” 
(Jordan and Taylor 2004: 17-18), which places hacktivist action where capital and 
the state meet: data, secrecy, payment systems, censorship and surveillance. 
Anonymous names this anxiety directly through the claim “We’re against  
corporations and government interfering on the internet…” (Coldblood, quoted 
in Halliday and Arthur 2010), identifying the enclosure of networked life by actors 
who perform protection while narrowing freedom, which returns to Zuboff’s central 
point that surveillance capitalism operates through the separation between what 
institutions publicly call “disclosure and agreement” and what they impose  
“backstage” (Zuboff 2019: 120). 
Furthermore, Brandalism shows that hacktivist aesthetics don’t necessarily  
operate through leaks or direct digital confrontation, instead through the  
reoccupation of visual infrastructures through which capital teaches the public 
to recognise legitimacy. Srnicek argues this point “digital technology is becoming 
systematically important, much in the same way as finance” (Srnicek 2017: 10), as 
advertising participates in the platform logic through which attention is captured. 
As Srnicek argues, “All of these characteristics make platforms a central model 
for extracting data as raw material to be used in various ways” (Srnicek 2017: 49), 
highlighting Brandalism’s occupation of advertising space interrupts extraction at 
the level of public appearance. 

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