| This dissertation tracks political ruptures within the "network society" of the kind I loosely call "netwars"---temporary radical democratic convergences in protest against Empire, the inequities of global capital and globalized governance regimes, or in resistance to being tracked and recorded on the network. I examine where these ruptures arise along the contours of technology/politics/economics. I am particularly interested in emergent spaces that are hybrids of the virtual and the material, taking place across disembedded networks of the internet and wireless waves. As an interzone between globalization and the internet, netwar embodies the debated surrounding global governance, materiality and virtuality, and the disappearances or concentrations of space brought about by an increasingly "networked society." Through conceptual work and case studies, I critique the dominant literatures of internet and globalization, opening critique beyond a binary of neo-Luddism or technological euphoria and instead conceptualizing a new politics, a technopolitics---contestational, rearticulating and reappropriating, stealing time and finding a hiding place. To study the spaces of contestational politics in the "network society" I focus on three sites that are reconfiguring according to the forces of globalization and informatization: cityspace, workspace, and the idea of bounded territory usually associated with the nation-state. |
