Hacked Transmissions is a pioneering exploration of how social movements change across cycles of struggle and alongside technology. Weaving a rich fabric of local and international social movements and media practices, politicized hacking, and independent cultural production, it takes as its entry point a multiyear ethnography of Telestreet, a network of pirate television channels in Italy that combined emerging technologies with the medium of television to challenge the media monopoly of tycoon-turned-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Contents
Introduction: Co-researching Telestreet as a Form of Connective Activism 1
1. Making Sense of Telestreet: Three Compositions 19
2. Intimacy and Media Making: A Long History of Delirium, Care,
and Social Reproduction 41
3. Delirium at Work in Berlusconi’s Mediascape 65
4. Activist Energetics in the Information Milieu 85
5. Squatted Airwaves, Hacked Transmission 113
6. Subjectivity, Therapy, Compositionality in the Porous Spaces
of Naples 133
7. Insu^tv, Media Connective 153
8. De/Re/Compositions, in Process 173
Epilogue: Repurposing Is How Connective Activism Happens 193
Acknowledgments 203
Appendix: List of Interviews 205
Notes 207
Bibliography 225
Index 245