Professor Ricardo Dominguez is principal investigator at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and an assistant professor for UCSD’s visual arts department. He has had extensive experience both participating in and investigating activism; he created a program that allows an activist group to slow any Web site to a halt by flooding it with requests, a form of protest known as a virtual sit-in. Through this, Dominguez got the attention of the National Security Agency. He is currently developing a performance project on nanotechnology called B.A.N.G. lab (Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes).
How do you view the current situation on campus, where physical activism is squelched by new policies that limit gatherings in Price Center? What can students do about it?
I think it’s important first to get a sense of the history of activism on campus. It is not very old compared to other universities. At its core, there was a deep history of student activism around the 1960s and ’70s, which is often what is romanticized. It was a very proactive space, and you even had a young man who immolated himself in Buddhist tradition. Even [Thurgood Marshall College] was created in the spirit of activism.
This culture is part of the history of the university, but it’s not often made obvious. You can find a narrative of the university in the Price Center ballroom starting in the 1960s, but it usually focuses on the sciences. All student activism is erased. It’s not unusual for institutions as a whole to have this sensibility, because students have always had a space of urgency over international issues.
The question now is: What happens to student critique of the institution when it is about the institution itself? If the issue is about something far away, then it seems to be all right. But since the ’90s, universities have become more like corporations. This removes the energy of people gathering for anything other than consumption and production.
You’re here to get a job, or a better job, or you’re at Price Center consuming something; and we can see the expansion now happening. This is happening at all levels of the university, not just the mall architecture, and has created a space in which the student body is segregated from meeting and encountering itself in any form other than consumption and production. The institution then creates rules that continue to negate the possibility of critique of the university as an entity, and of what students might see as problems.
To one degree it works, because I see a lot of students who are not particularly interested in anything other than production and consumption. For those students interested in taking part in a social space outside of what is expected, it becomes a real danger zone. That is, if you seek to gather and protest in an unregulated manner in this mall space, without having signed the correct papers, which then have to go through a series of administrative stamping, you can pretty much forget about it. The institution could say, ‘Well, you only signed for eight people, and you have 10. That’s it, go away.’ I think that tends to kill the speed of dreams, because you have the politics of the conservative mall. But the social space of students has always been to have a passion about what society is, beyond what’s already been established or expected.
That speed of dreams is just squashed completely. One of the elements of my work since the ’80s is what happens to the social space of critique and protest when the physical avenues have been shut down physically and emotionally. This leads to the question of electronic civil disobedience: to what degree can virtual landscapes of critique be used to amplify and route around the lockdown that’s happening at this university? In the best of all worlds, this would also allow a teleportation between data bodies in protest and real bodies in protest.
Electronic civil disobedience is a fearless space that allows one, nonviolently, to protest in ways that are no longer allowable in real space. This seems to me to become extremely important in our post-contemporary period. To a certain degree, I find that students, because we are in this kind of electro-scape, would be more willing to risk having a voice as a group if that voice is digitally represented (through, for example, MySpace or Facebook).
So there are these considerations that I think are available to students to think about tactically. How can we use media in a tactical way to route around institutional lockdown? Another process that I think is important is for students to realize is that a lot of resources are available online for them to tweak to their own needs. There is a very established system of tactics and gestures in virtual activism that have worked in the past.
About getting around the institutional lockdown with electronic civil disobedience, it seems as though there is no other way to protest anything because the physical lockdown is so complete. But there are committees of students on campus trying to do something about the free speech issue by drafting proposals, getting feedback and rewriting. Does that mean that the actions of these students are useless?
Not at all. In activism you need to have multiple movements with different trajectories. What you want to do is try to create a think tank working on three prongs. One group decides what can be done, another decides what needs to be done and yet another decides how to communicate information to all three elements. Then, there’s always sector four, a group that is prepared to go beyond interfacing with the institution, which is nonviolent direct action.
Most importantly, these tactics are part of a larger strategy. Think about it in a Gandhian way. You don’t want to destroy the institution, but instead to try to make it understand that what is good for the students is also good for the institution. Students have a right within this particular institution to protest in a nonviolent way over issues that affect the student body. But physical direct action also means you’re willing to face consequences, in which you break the law in the pursuit of a higher law.
Probably the most difficult challenge of all, though, is how to make it seem that activists are not villains disrupting the quality and harmony of Price Center. One of the elements of interest to post-contemporary activists is that incorporated universities offer this harmony, this temporary utopia.
For a very long time in the ’60s and ’70s, people were against this and were hardcore realists. They protested and said, ‘We need to give rights to students and change the paperwork.’ But today, 80 percent of students don’t want to be bothered by such problems. I suppose if it were to influence them getting an A or a B, you’d get the shutdown of the entire institution. Student protesters of today would say, ‘What do you mean I’m not going to get an A+?!’
In our institution, then, we begin to ask: Is there anything else besides production and consumption? If so, what is that? We have a lot of new technology that allows us to intervene in institutions in a new way and a new manner that hasn’t been available before. It creates spaces where we can indeed look at possibilities of social gathering that defy what the university considers proper. Often I find students either really hungering for an A+ or treating education as a service equivalent to McDonald’s.
They may say, ‘This class is like a Big Mac, and I ordered it with cheese.’ So there is a contention between the rights of students as customers, and a disregard of their rights as citizens. To what degree can you bring to the foreground that it is more important for a student to be a citizen than a consumer, and that our university is just as much about critique and contestation as it is about invention? The two are separated because of the specific underlying agendas of the university as a corporation.
About the risks of breaking a law for a higher law, it seems that, in critiquing the educational corporation itself, students risk losing their “futures,” the goodwill of their parents and the continuation of their lives the way they would want to live them. It’s not just jail for 24 hours for a university student.
These are conditions that you must be willing to face. You need to get people to risk their jobs and face their fears of the future. Through virtual activism, you can have an amplification of the voices of students who normally wouldn’t risk protesting in real life. They can let their data bodies do what they feel, despite that they’re unwilling to commit in a physical way.
Activism is not going to get you the high paying job you’re dreaming about. But I suppose in the end, there are other ways to participate in culture and community and education other than these very closed, monitored, and neutered spaces of student social space that are available to you nowadays (like Price Center). It would seem to me as a student that you’d not only want to seek a good job, but also to have a meaningful life. You’d want to secure a future that moves toward universal rights of knowledge, critique, self-assembly and that isn’t bound to the questions of consumption and production.
Speaking from somebody who didn’t really do well in the university system (because I was interested in another form of life, and was willing to risk living that kind of life, not getting that dream job nor being welcomed by arms of IBM), I was seeking another form of community and knowledge. Now, the university says, ‘Hmm, your work is interesting, why don’t you offer it to students?’ If you had asked me three years ago whether a university would find this interesting, I’d have said no. But now that I’m here, what do I do with it? I believe can communicate to students who are interested in activism, teach classes and try to give them a sense of critique and contestation.
Regardless of whether virtual activism ends up as the main form of protest in modern universities, it is obvious that UCSD students must become aware of what is at stake, of a history of activism and contestation that has become clouded by achievements in science. And, further, we should be aware of our rights as citizens to express ourselves freely, so that we can realize when they are threatened. They are being threatened now; there is a point where face-to-face talks with administrators fail. This is where more drastic steps must be taken to get our voices heard, the student voices that our university is now taking active measures to silence.
