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1. OccupyMLA’s Hidden Archive

   Part protest novel, part guerilla theater, @OccupyMLA played out on the crowded virtual street corners of Twitter hashtags #mla and #omla for fifteen months before being revealed a as "fiction" at the 2013 MLA e-literature reading. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century protest fiction changed attitudes about slavery and industrial excess; @OccupyMLA charged #MLA members (and hashtag lurkers) to feel angry about dehumanizing adjunct working conditions built upon the "innocent dream" that Ph.D.s in literature could get paid to teach literature.

   In a climate of "DH niceness," to dwell on adjuncting as a broken promise was agit-prop. Real life participants added their own anecdotes and Tweeted sympathy to Hazel, comingling "fiction" and "nonfiction" in an eerie, Barthesian "Reality Effect." The Netprov's melodrama and anger were deliberately out of sync with the positivistic #MLA discourse community. "Here's where #omla is correct," opined George Williams in a retweeted pair of Tweets, "conditions for contingent labor in higher ed are abomidable. But making the MLA the target of your ire and your movement is not going to get you very far. + #omla #imho."

   Alvaro Seica - 19.06.2014 - 16:16

2. Protest Bots

   With half a century’s worth of profound social and technological change, the 1960s protest movement is far removed from today’s world. Networks, databases, video games, social media, and the rise of algorithmic culture and the sharing economy have irrevocably altered our landscape. What, in this world, is the 21st century equivalent of that key feature of the sixties protest movement: the protest song? This paper argues that one possible answer is the protest bot, a computer program that algorithmically generates social and political critiques on social media.

   Using Habermas’s imperfect account of the public sphere as my starting point, I suggest that five characteristics define protest bots—or bots of conviction, as I also call them. Bots of conviction are topical, data-based, cumulative, oppositional, and uncanny. After explaining these five characteristics, I explore several well-known and lesser-known bots on Twitter, showing how they are or are not protest bots. Throughout this paper I adopt a critical code studies approach, diving into the procedural DNA of several bots of conviction of my own creation.

   Hannah Ackermans - 10.11.2015 - 10:07