Hacktivism is crucial for resisting authoritarianism and ensuring access to information in the digital age

Hacktivism merges the idea of hacking with political activism. The Cult of the Dead Cow, founded in 1984 as one of the first hacktivist organizations, coined the term. The organization’s founder Oxblood Ruffin defined hacktivism as the use of “technology to improve human rights across electronic media.” In the group’s statement “The Hacktivismo Declaration,” he wrote that hacktivism should be used to protect rights including but not limited to those listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. One specific freedom that Ruffin notes is “the liberty of fair and reasonable access to information,” particularly important to internet communities. He directly tied hacktivism to existing ideas of social justice and human rights advocacy, but at the time hacking was still perceived in a primarily negative light. The group’s quest to distinguish hacktivism from criminal definitions of hacking was not immediately successful.12 The Critical Art Ensemble, a performance art and activist collective, invented the term Electronic Civil Disobedience to refer to a specific type of hacktivist tactic. Founded in 1987, the group focuses on the interaction between art, technology, and activism.13 The group hoped to combat increasing authoritarianism throughout the world. Because finance and government were shifting online, CAE realized that the best venue for their protest would also be the internet and that it was a particularly important venue for them to resist the spread of authoritarianism. They used all the technology available to them, including fax machines, phones, and, increasingly, computers. CAE’s proposal of ECD did not merely combine technology and activism but also focused on a particular, wellestablished, and widely accepted strategy of protest.