Platform capitalism and place relations in social movements: Environmentalism and Extinction Rebellion in Western Australia

Abstract

This article investigates spatial aspects of contemporary protest as a form of performative spectacle for platform capitalism. Discussing literature on and around platform capitalism and social movements it seeks to examine the Extinction Rebellion protest movement in its relationship to platform capitalism. Drawing on observations of the Western Australian Extinction Rebellion group from September 2019 to March 2022 as well as interviews with participants in the movement in November 2021 and previous experience in environmental movements, the article argues that a problematic relationship has developed between the movement and platform capitalism. Critically comparing Extinction Rebellion with the Occupy! Movement, one of the first to utilise platforms, this article reflects on the movements’ different modes of engagement with platforms and the resulting geographical shifts in activism. In doing so, it asks how platform capitalism has influenced place relations in contemporary Western Australian environmentalism and how activists may navigate this changing reality.

Introduction

Having spent the best part of two decades as a participant in environmental activism in Western Australia I have witnessed dramatic changes in the ways in which activists relate to one another, place and space – space as in social and political realities and place as a specific locale or location (Agnew, 1987; Endres and Senda-Cook, 2011). In this time, social and environmental movements have experienced unprecedented changes in communication and organisation as activists embrace corporate social media platforms as tools of social organising (Earl et al., 2010; Degen, 2018; Nielsen, 2013; Sancho, 2014). The adoption of platforms as tools for organising within social movements has created a range of concerns and potential problems for activists seeking radical change. This includes structural issues around security, autonomy, anonymity and control of content; as well as more existential threats. Significantly, there are growing concerns around the impact platforms are having on the ability of social movements to create and embody radical alternatives to capitalism through a prefigurative politics. This article focuses on social movement's changing relationships to media, place and space as a result of emergent platforms; highlighting, in particular, the Extinction Rebellion movement and making a comparison between this movement and other historical and contemporary social movements, including Occupy! Wall St In doing so, this research aims to contribute to both academic study into new digital media and platform capitalism, as well as contributing to local, national and international activist knowledge bases and networks.

Political movements once found meaning and power in physical public places, such as town squares that were occupied in order to establish permanent protest camps (Fuchs, 2014) or community forest blockades in which activists attempted to stop the destruction of natural environments (McIntyre, 2021). The focus of environmentalism has transformed in the last fifteen years towards performative actions recorded digitally and shared as content for social media platforms (Nielsen, 2009). This kind of political activism, as amplified by corporate social media platforms, has come to represent much of contemporary political organising (Degen, 2018; Sancho, 2014).

Srnicek (2016) generally defines a platform as a digital infrastructure that operates as an intermediary enabling interaction between groups of customers, advertisers, producers, etc. Platform capitalism, moreover, can be considered the networked economic and social fabric of platforms (Dijick, 2013: 165). Arguably, the fundamentals of platform capitalism – automation, the ‘sharing economy’ or ‘gig economy’ or the ‘internet of things’, can be considered capitalism's latest attempt to adapt and survive economic crisis (Srnicek, 2016); we could think of these as attempts to create new spaces for capital accumulation (Harvey, 2000).

In recent years we have seen a steep decline in civic spaces and places – space in the sense of Endres and Senda-Cook's (2011) social and political realities and place as a specific locale or location (Agnew, 1987) but also as a social construction (Harvey, 2000). For social movements, this absence of traditional sites and means of political organising in public places such as town squares or civic spaces such as trade unions has often resulted in platform capitalism filling the void of this sociality and political organising.

This article explores contemporary political activism in its relationship to place and protest as spectacle, that is activism as a form of spectacular commodity (Debord, 1992; Law, 2009). It focuses on how an increasing dominance of platform capitalism has furthered the production of spectacle, at times substituting physical social organising with a relationship of online phenomena. In discussing Extinction Rebellion this article attempts to understand and unpack the developing contradictions of this new movement, as well as consider the impact platform capitalism is having on such contemporary social movements. Furthermore, it examines a geographical shift in activism perhaps most keenly felt in places of arrest – that is, the sites where people are arrested by police – from where particular environments are under threat to where most people commute in urban centres. Therefore, asking how has platform capitalism influenced place relations in contemporary Western Australian environmentalism?

Background and literature review

Protest as performative spectacle

Studies of political protest provide a rich history of performative action: from performative violence and property damage (DeLuca and Peeples, 2002) to the spectacle of protest marches or political street theatre (Beyer-Arnesen, 2021; Graeber, 2009: 208–209). Schmidt (2017) argues that protest itself is a manifestation of performative democracy, and that what is considered politics is defined by its performative representation in public. Arguably, protest has a performative orientation; whereas direct action is orientated towards individuals acting to directly change their social and political realities, intervening in their own everyday lives (Graeber, 2009).

As protest becomes performative it so too becomes a part of what Debord (1992) refers to as a spectacle of commodities. That is, protest is reduced from an action of demands and measurable aims to a series of captured images, thus our relationship to protest shifts from being in a protest to having a protest (Debord, 1992). Baudrillard (1991) refers to this process as simulacra, the replacing of cultural and social events that make up reality with representation: that is, a protest being reduced to images and replicated so that the initial meaning is discarded. Like a poor photocopy, the more it is reproduced, the further the event is from reality and so all that remains is the reproduction of images. Despite this, or possibly because of this, contemporary social movements seek traditional corporate and state news media coverage of their protests as a primary objective: media representation in and of itself is imagined to be an effective tool to bring about the aims of the movement (Castells, 2015; DeLuca, 2021). A brief experience in any political protest will demonstrate that the main concerns for organisers are often: how many people were there and did the protest attract media attention? It is assumed that greater media representation translates to a larger and more effective movement. Besides getting media attention, activists try to influence the narrative of media representation, which is challenging when a movement's aims conflict with the dominant corporate hegemony (Sanger, 2007).

From digital democracy to platform capitalism

In the 1990s, recognition of corporate dominance over broadcast and print media coincided with the development of new digital media technologies as well as the emergence of the alter-globalisation movement, resulting in an upsurge of online digital activism (Sullivan et al., 2011; Graeber, 2009; Halleck, 2002; Pickerill, 2007; Platon and Deuze, 2003). The increasing monopolisation of corporate media, as well as the perceived lack of independence of journalism lead to a deep distrust of mass media's ability to fairly and justly report on radical social movements (Hickman and Watson, 2013). This resulted in an emergence of online citizen journalism or activist media movements. Projects such as the global Indymedia network shifted the ways in which social movements engaged with media. Many, especially anarchists, autonomists and other more radical elements of the movements, chose to create their own media platforms and content rather than rely on corporate media (Sullivan et al., 2011; Graeber, 2009; Grenfell, 2020; Halleck, 2002; Pickerill, 2007; Platon and Deuze, 2003).

The development of Web 2.0 and the advent of social media and platform capitalism in the early 2000s fundamentally shifted cultural and social connectivity (Dijick, 2013; Srnicek, 2016), transforming relationships between social movements and media (Grenfell, 2021). While early advocates of Web 2.0 promised greater democracy, freedom and connectivity through a more participatory internet, the massive corporate domination of platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Amazon for example (Strom, 2020), has meant that the traditional stratified media model has been reproduced. Moreover, as our lives are increasingly mediated by platforms, economic and social power has become more concentrated in the hands of tech giants (Grenfell, 2021; Strom, 2020; Zuboff, 2015). For example, Facebook increased its net revenue from US$7.87 billion per annum in 2013 to 86 billion in 2020 (Statista, 2022), the company now has a 124 billion net worth, making it one of the most valuable media companies in the world (Dennison, 2022).

Social movements in the Web of Platforms

Studies indicate that social movements have been quick to adopt platforms as tools for organising and movement building, with some arguing that they are now necessary tools for any contemporary social movement (Degen, 2018; Sancho, 2014; Tye et al., 2018; Uldam 2017). The 2009 Iranian social revolution for example is often referred to by many – especially commentators in the west – as the ‘Twitter revolution’ (Morozov, 2009). More recently, demonstrations against the controversial Omnibus Law in Indonesia have used social media tools such as WhatsApp to coordinate actions and, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the protest has shifted from the streets to online platforms (Grenfell and Wardana, 2021).

However, an almost ubiquitous use of corporate social media by activists has also led to considerable problems for social movements, including issues of anonymity, surveillance, control of content and state repression (Diani, 2000; Fuchs, 2014; Fuchs and Trottier, 2017; Juris, 2012; Juris, 2005; Lim, 2014; Morozov, 2009; Zuboff, 2015). In the case of the Iranian revolution, Morozov (2009) and Lim (2014) argue that the role of platforms was not only overplayed by western commentators but also had serious consequences for activists.

Platform capitalism has also been employed by states as a machine of political propaganda (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). In 2018, members of the Myanmar military regime were found to have orchestrated a decade long, systemic campaign on Facebook that targeted the country's Muslim Rohingya minority. Using hundreds of Facebook profiles members of the military elite spread anti-Rohingya propaganda. Human rights groups argue that this resulted in inciting murders, rapes and the largest forced human migration in recent history (Mozur, 2018; Stevenson, 2018).

While the social uprisings of the 2010s such as the Arab Spring, Occupy! Wall St and the Spanish Indignatos movement incorporated platforms in their organising, it can be argued that they found their power within physical public places such as town squares (Gregory, 2013; Lim, 2014). Rather than just using public places for acts of political theatre, the occupations of the places grounded and connected the movements to a physical reality. Therefore, although platform capitalism has created new layers of space in which activists can connect and organise, these activists at least were still very much rooted in the physical world. However, Lim (2014) argues that neoliberalism and the subsequent privatisation of space/place has meant a steep decline in civic places, such as those that traditionally, in times of crisis, would be used as hubs of social organising and change. This decline is leading to platform capitalism filling the void of maintaining everyday sociality (Lim, 2014).

Occupy! Wall St, on and off platforms

Occupy! Wall St has been described as one of the first social movements to truly utilise platform capitalism as a tool for social organising (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Fuchs, 2014). The movement, which started in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district, aimed to confront social economic inequality, calling for the mobilisation of ‘ninety nine percent’ of the world's population to challenge the remaining elite one percent who they argued controlled all of the wealth. Employing an organic, anarchic structure, Occupy activists attempted to manifest a decentralised direct democracy in the form of ‘people's assemblies’, ‘human microphones’ and ‘spokes councils’ in the parks and streets of New York (Fuchs, 2014). Soon the one protest camp spread to hundreds around the USA and then hundreds more around the world.

The Occupy movement was able to use platforms to extend the reach of the movement and ultimately expand the movement globally (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Fuchs, 2014; Theocharis et al., 2015). Fuchs (2014) argues that Occupy was able to maintain some degree of autonomy and, therefore, not succumb to some of the issues of platform capitalism by using their own independent infrastructure such as e-mail list servers for internal organisation. Additionally, platforms such as Twitter were largely used by Occupy activists to discuss ideas around the movement rather than direct coordination of the movement itself (Theocharis et al., 2015). There was often a distinction between the political realities lived in the physical occupation and the online political realities of those unable or unwilling to live at the protest camp (Fuchs, 2014). Therefore, it can be argued that the camp was simultaneously both a place and a mediated spectacle. For those living at the camp, there may have been times in which they were very much embodied in that direct action, the occupation of the place and the lived reality of the camp. Meanwhile, their engagement with platforms as well as the ongoing media representation may have disembodied them from the physical reality of the protest camp.

Environmental movements in Australia

The history of environmental protest in Australia has often found meaning and strength in protest camps and direct action blockades (Grenfell, 2021; McIntyre, 2021). In a study of environmental blockades from the 1970s to 1990s, McIntyre (2021) argues that protest camps set up by environmentalists as a form of obstructive direct action (ODA) ¹ served to disrupt the destruction of native habitats and also to create prefigurative, anarchic models of an organisation (pp. 43–44). These movements, similar to the more recent town square occupations (Fuchs, 2014; Lim, 2014), found their power within physical places (Brady, 2019). While protest movements, such as the old growth campaign in Western Australia, incorporated a diversity of protest tactics, it can be argued that the embodiment within blockade camps, some lasting years, significantly contributed to the longevity and even successes of the movements (Brady, 2019; McIntyre, 2021). McIntyre (2021) points to the formation of the Green Alliance at the Terania Creek blockade in New South Wales as one example of this:

In this case, the camp's ability to generate outcomes beyond the facilitation of ODA was demonstrated in a variety of ways. One of these was its instigation of the Green Alliance, an electoral and organising body aimed at more effectively coordinating environmental and social justice groups. This later fed into the formation of Greens parties in NSW. (McIntyre, 2021: 43)

A more contemporary example is the successful campaign to save the Beeliar Wetlands from a proposed highway extension in Fremantle, Western Australia. The campaign, one of the largest in Western Australia's political history, was a movement to protect an area of wetlands and native bushland east of Fremantle that was threatened by the Roe Highway extension. While the campaign lasted decades and involved a diversity of protest actions, community concerts, political lobbying and other tactics it culminated in 2017 with a non-violent direct action campaign, including a permanent protest camp, in which activists attempted to stop the destruction of the bushland as bulldozers moved in (Brady, 2019; Wolf, 2019). Brady (2019) argues that the direct actions that took place as a part of the campaign served as a means by which activists re-imagined an alternative social space. Rather than the proposed road, through their physical interaction, activists re-imagined a space that incorporated their own sociality, an indigenous understanding of the land and an enjoyment of the ecological biodiversity of the area (Brady, 2019). This physical embodiment within space and place, while not unique to environmental movements, has historically been integral to Australian environmentalism and reflected in the political and social structures that have been adopted by the movements (McIntyre, 2021).

A new environmentalism: Extinction Rebellion

In October 2018, Extinction Rebellion descended upon the streets of London, blocking five bridges and creating traffic chaos as scores of people were arrested as a part of their protest action (Taylor and Gayle, 2018). The group declared that they were engaging in civil disobedience to force the British government to act on the climate emergency. Only a month prior, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had declared that humanity had only 12 years to act to the limit ecological crisis (IPCC, 2018). Simultaneously the School Strike for Climate movement was spreading across the world, with Greta Thunberg inspiring hundreds of thousands of school students to take political action (Watts, 2019).

With the absence of movements such as the Occupy! Wall St and the alter-globalisation mass demonstrations that popularised the late 1990s and 2000s (Atton, 2002), as well as the perceived inaction of traditional social democratic institutions on climate change, Extinction Rebellion came at a time when many were eager for a ‘new’ movement to effect radical change (Slaven and Heydon, 2020).

Since that initial action in the UK, Extinction Rebellion groups have sprung up around the world, including in Australia where there have been mass actions that adopt the same tactics of non-violent civil disobedience and disruption as the original UK group. While there are differences from group to group, Extinction Rebellion groups adopt a similar set of ideological principles. Like Occupy! Wall St's slogans of the ‘ninety nine percent’ Extinction Rebellion declare themselves ‘beyond politics’ (Extinction Rebellion UK, 2021), indicating a rejection of not just the electioneering that is typical of many contemporary social movements but also more broadly rejecting all traditional political organisation. Instead, Extinction Rebellion declares the need for ‘citizens’ assemblies’ to combat the climate crisis, again this is not dissimilar to the people’s assemblies of Occupy! Wall St or the Spanish anti-austerity Indignatos movement of a decade ago. Significantly though, unlike those movements, Extinction Rebellion have demonstrated a desire to work with power, in particular the state, rather than circumvent it entirely (Slaven and Heydon, 2020).

Extinction Rebellion's devotion to non-violence and civil-disobedience, as well as their rejection of party politics and focus on decentralisation can be, at least in part, linked to the autonomist or ‘post-left’ movements of the latter part of the 20th century (Bookchin, 1986; Laclau, 1977; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). The dramatic social upheaval of the 1960s – the events of May ‘68 in France, the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, the Warsaw Pact's occupation of Czechoslovakia, etc., resulted in much socialist theory being criticised and rejected, with many theorists arguing for a reimagining of marxism and anarchism, culminating in what is commonly referred to today as a rise in autonomist politics (Bookchin, 1986; Laclau, 1977; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Laclau and Mouffe (2001), in developing the work of Gramsci (2011), argued that rather than waiting for a revolutionary moment to transform society, movements should adopt prefigurations of a liberated social order, counter-hegemonies that are radically democratic. Furthermore, in contrast to classical Marxist and anarchist movements focusing on class, there was a general recognition of a multitude of social struggles within capitalism (Hardt and Negri, 2001). Additionally, some theorists stressed a need for a radical pluralistic democracy of agonisms, rather than aiming for shared political consensus, by acknowledging that conflict and disagreement are endemic to political life (Deveaux, 1999; Mouffe, 1995).

Through this lens, there are significant political similarities between Extinction Rebellion and Occupy! Wall St Both emphasise and attempt to prefigure a direct democracy through public assemblies and both avoid concrete political platforms in favour of general slogans (Laclau, 2005) that attempt to appeal to the masses – the ‘ninety nine percent’ or ‘beyond politics’. Also, the protest repertoires of both movements are similar in terms of the physical occupation of public spaces. However, Occupy! Wall St, like the town square movements previously mentioned, aimed to create a permanent occupation, an occupation premised on not ending until the movement’s demands were met (or they were forcefully removed). This contrasts to Extinction Rebellion who have, so far, only ever occupied space temporarily as a form of public disruption and protest. Furthermore, the ways in which these movements relate to platforms demonstrates notable difference and raises concerns around the potential for social movements to be reduced to spectacle or simulacra (Baudrillard, 1991; Debord, 1992) and made impotent in the process.

Methodology: Participant observation and interviews with Extinction Rebellion

This article draws upon participant observations with the Perth Extinction Rebellion group from September 2019 until March 2022, using this personal experience as primary data (Chang, 2011: 108). I had almost immediate access to the internal workings of the Perth Extinction Rebellion group due to decades of involvement in the Perth activist community as well as through my roles as coordinator, presenter and producer of the Indymedia radio show since 2004, an activist-orientated community radio program on local community radio station RTRFM (RTRFM, 2022) – connected to the international Indymedia network. This consistent involvement in organising and community media meant that I was afforded a level of trust that is rare for many researchers given the understandable suspicion of ‘outsiders’ and researchers that exists within many social movements (Graeber, 2016).

The observation included attending two Extinction Rebellion Perth mass actions (27 November 2020 and 22 March 2021), events publicly advertised on Facebook, as well as attending four meetings leading up to and following these actions. At these actions I witnessed approximately 18 arrests, Furthermore, I attended two larger rallies in which Extinction Rebellion were represented. This kind of observation as a method can be considered a participatory form of research (Cox, 2019). By incorporating the author's positioning (the author as a participant), reading of the space (the social relations and spatial configuration of Extinction Rebellion) and cross-referencing (a review of relevant literature), such observation can elicit significant findings (Cox, 2019).

These observations were then discussed in interviews with three members of the Perth chapter of Extinction Rebellion in November 2021. The semi-structured interviews were recorded by video, and transcripts of the interviews were made and then analysed to select relevant discussions on the topic. The three participants interviewed were key organisers and participants within the Perth chapter of Extinction Rebellion. However, the scope of this research paper is limited due to a low response to requests for interviews. In September 2019, an Extinction Rebellion organiser invited me to an organising meeting for mass action. However, finding willing participants to be interviewed following the mass actions was more difficult than I had expected. This could indicate that while many in Extinction Rebellion welcomed my material involvement in the movement they did not necessarily value the contribution of the research, with many apparently seeing no benefit in participating in the interviews. In the end, three people agreed to be interviewed for this study on camera. These interviews were further utilised as a part of a broader collaborative screen arts project that I was involved in at Curtin University (Bender and Robertson, 2022; Kerr et al., 2023). This art project further explored media representations of Extinction Rebellion through a holographic installation in the John Curtin Gallery as a part of the Energaia Exhibition, installed from 28 March 2022 to 8 May 2022 (Bender and Robertson, 2022; Kerr et al., 2023).

Findings and discussion

Protest for platforms

Unlike Occupy which maintained much of its own internal structures for organising and even developed its own independent social media platform (Fuchs, 2014), Extinction Rebellion primarily relies on platforms as organisational tools. Significantly, the birth of Extinction Rebellion was facilitated by platforms with the very first actions being live-streamed on Facebook (Facebook, 2018). Furthermore, Extinction Rebellion was first engineered by a group of academics and activists who still attempt to lead the movement via social media platforms on which they provide practical and theoretical direction (Facebook, 2020). This is a significant difference between Extinction Rebellion and Occupy! Wall St While Extinction Rebellion activists appear to have embraced platforms such as Facebook as organisational tools, Fuchs (2014) argues that within Occupy! Wall St the use of platforms was constantly contested. The reasons for this notable difference could be temporal, given that Extinction Rebellion game to be nearly ten years after the Occupy movement, it may simply be that activists are now more familiar with the use of platforms. In regards to the Perth chapter of Extinction Rebellion, Les from the group argues that the lack of favourable coverage from mainstream media has encouraged the group to embrace platforms:

Unfortunately it's crucial, we've had decades of trying to get the issues onto the mainstream media without success. The problem there is the corporate ownership of media and the lack of diversity in the media … And one avenue that we have had to pick up on is the use of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, they are used quite extensively. (Extinction Rebellion member Les, 2021)

Rather than targeting individual businesses or sites of government, Extinction Rebellion attempt to create as much disruption as possible, focusing on blocking urban roads to cause traffic chaos for as long as they can in order to generate media attention. Given the ubiquitous nature of the climate crisis, it could be argued that there is no appropriate ‘site’ or place of protest for Extinction Rebellion. This speaks to a politics prevalent within Extinction Rebellion that declares that no one is to blame for the climate crisis (Twitter, 2019). However, in contrast, many historical and contemporary climate justice movements do target those companies and governments that they deem responsible for the crisis. For example, one of the largest climate movements in Europe Ende Gelände has repeatedly targeted coal and gas sites, mobilising thousands of people to often shut down the sites of pollution through direct action (Ende Gelände, 2022). Again this can be reflected on as a critical difference between performative protest and direct action. As previously discussed, direct action is orientated towards individuals acting to directly change their social and political realities. The actions that I observed had no substantial effect in changing social or political realities, but instead – while adopting the theatre and symbolism of civil-disobedience and ‘non-violent direct action’ – the functionality of the actions appeared to be performative in nature. This was most apparent in the tactics of arrest: temporally and materially, actions leading to arrests appeared to be aimed at the purpose of being arrested for the sake of media attention (both traditional and social media platforms).

While the performative protest of Extinction Rebellion is not new, it is the creation of spectacle for the sake of broadcasting on platforms that may be problematic. Occupy used social media to advertise events, the events themselves were grounded in the physical occupation, that is, a workshop or practical task (Fuchs, 2014). Since Extinction Rebellion only occupies space to create a spectacle that can be shared via platforms, the primary reason for using the platform, arguably, shifts from one of aiding a ‘real world’ action to being the totality of the action. The centrality of platform capitalism is confirmed by Tahlia from Extinction Rebellion who argues that platforms act as important tools in expanding their audience and developing the movement as a brand:

They are obviously positive in many ways and they provide an amazing resource to be able to get a message out to a large audience and be really targetted and specific. A movement like Extinction Rebellion is decentralised completely and so you do end up with a lot of different voices and as much as you try and consolidate that messaging, social media is such a personal thing that it can get lost and end up looking a bit chaotic and in-cohesive as a brand. (Extinction Rebellion member Tahlia, 2021)

However, not all members of Extinction Rebellion are content with the movement's reliance on platforms and there is a growing awareness of the associated problems. Emily from Extinction Rebellion was particularly concerned by the ethical issues of utilising platforms:

The major concern is the ethical concern about using a platform (Facebook) that has such a monopoly and that hasn't done much to address some of the concerns about misinformation and hate speech … It's like the epitome of capitalism and that's the opposite of what Extinction Rebellion stands for. (Extinction Rebellion member Emily, 2021)

Nevertheless, the movement still largely embraces platform capitalism, indicating a range of potential issues, especially issues of anonymity and state repression (Diani, 2000; Fuchs, 2014; Fuchs and Trottier, 2017; Juris, 2012, 2005; Lim, 2014; Morozov, 2009; Zuboff, 2015). Some Extinction Rebellion groups have attempted to overcome these problems through using encrypted messaging applications to coordinate actions (Extinction Rebellion Bristol 2021). Emily shared concerns that using platforms for organising can prove problematic for the activists:

It's always a really big ethical dilemma using a really big platform like Facebook … Security culture is really bad on there and there are some things that people prefer to keep private and under-wraps when they are brainstorming actions. (Extinction Rebellion member Emily, 2021)

In mid-2020, I participated in several organising meetings of the Perth Extinction Rebellion, and on 27 November 2020, I attended an Extinction Rebellion rally in Perth CBD. This event was billed as a ‘Love and Rage’ festival, the purpose was to create a disruption in the city, having musicians and artists perform on the streets while the crowd blocked the roads. Roughly 500 people attended on the weekday afternoon, marching into the city, and stopping occasionally in the road to watch artists perform. The entire event was live-streamed on platforms Facebook and Instagram. Later in the day a number of people were arrested by police for refusing to move off of the road, this was the most disconcerting part of the event as it was very difficult to establish why people had, apparently, acted to deliberately get arrested. It is possible that they had planned something else that they were unable to achieve but the end result was that approximately seven people sat on the road for thirty seconds before being carried away by the police. Later I watched as a woman who, having missed out on being arrested on the road with the group, decided to suddenly lay down on a pedestrian crossing. I was standing nearby as she did this and I went to inform one of the marshals of the event, believing she should at least have someone come and support her or act as a legal observer, his response: ‘is anyone filming it?’ By the time I walked back, the woman had been arrested and loaded into the police van.

In another example, on 22 March 2021, I attended an Extinction Rebellion action in the heart of the Perth CBD, as participant and observer to document this experience (Chang, 2016; Cox, 2019). At the event a few hundred protesters encircled the intersection of Barrack St and St Georges Terrace, carrying placards and banners, many using their phones to live-stream the action. Approximately 10 activists occupied the road and were quickly carried off by the police to chants from the crowd of ‘thank you for your sacrifice’. The purpose of the ‘sacrifice’ was never articulated at the site beyond an obvious provision of content for social media.

As previously discussed, the Extinction Rebellion actions and arrests that I observed differed from my prior experience of other environmental actions and social movements in which arrests often served a more clear material purpose or were the result of state repression. This can be seen as a shifting understanding of places of arrest – that is, the sites where people are arrested – as well as a shift in the purpose of arrest in protest. As previously discussed, the campaign to protect the Beeliar Wetlands in Western Australia resulted in hundreds of people being arrested. However, these arrests mostly took the form of Obstructive Direct Action with activists being arrested in the process of hindering the destruction of the natural environment (Brady, 2019; Wolf, 2019). In the case of Occupy! Wall St activists were arrested in the defence of their protest camps (Fuchs, 2014), therefore, arrests were the result of state interference and were not necessarily sought out for media attention or spectacle. There was a similar dynamic at the Matagarup Aboriginal tent embassy on Heirisson Island in Perth in 2012, when activists were arrested while defending their embassy. The embassy was established in response to the then state government's controversial deal with the native title body, the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC). The deal meant that SWALSC abandoned a federal court action for native title to land and waters in return for a reported $1 billion compensation package (Wynne, 2012). The proposed deal angered many Noongar families and other Indigenous activists, and motivated them to assemble on the island and establish an embassy camp.

While corporate and state media portrayed the embassy participants as protestors who were illegally camping, Kerr and Cox (2013) argue that the arrests were due to aggressive and unwarranted police actions in a legitimate place for Nyoongar people to assemble. Unlike the Extinction Rebellion case, these arrests in Perth occurred in the defence and protection of indigenous space rather than for the perpetuation of spectacle, in fact, media coverage of the arrests on Matagarup, arguably, proved detrimental to the embassy (Kerr and Cox, 2013).

Place and space still matters

For urban sociologists, cultural geographers and others space typically refers to definitions of broad social and political realities (e.g. the capitalist mode of production) while place conveys more specific locales or locations such as a city (Agnew, 1987; Endres and Senda-Cook, 2011). A protest can be considered both the manufacturing of space (the political realities i.e. alternate forms of social organisation) and the reconstruction of a place through engagement with the physical locale or location such as the reclamation of a town square as a protest camp (Harvey, 2000).

While platform capitalism has challenged social and political realities, transforming even the nature of protest itself, for many activists place and space still matter. Whether that is in the protection of natural places or the establishment of political places such as protest camps or street protests, many activists still find power and meaning in physical places (Brady, 2019; Fuchs, 2014; Harvey, 2000; Lim, 2014). Additionally, protest in of itself can be considered a production of space, fundamentally contributing to the agency of protestors through the creation of alternative social organisation and relationships (Bookchin, 1986; Brady, 2019; Laclau, 1977; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Collective physical interaction in protest can be considered integral for producing new meanings for activists as well as directly contributing to the movement's material objectives (McIntyre, 2021). This stands in contrast to the physicality of online interaction, that is, an individual engaging with a device such as a smartphone or laptop to capture footage of a demonstration and then share it via a platform.

While projects such as Indymedia attempted to create new online and offline spaces through decentralisation and radical democracy (Sullivan et al., 2011; Graeber, 2009; Grenfell, 2020; Halleck, 2002; Pickerill, 2007; Platon and Deuze, 2003), web 2.0 platforms inevitably reproduce the spatial, social and economic logic of capitalism (Dijick, 2013; Srnicek, 20167; Zuboff, 2015). Therefore, in regards to Extinction Rebellion, it appears that the use of these platforms may limit the possibilities for the production of space (i.e. creating new political organisation) and the re-constructing of place (i.e. ongoing reclamation of places such as town squares). In this sense, through the mediation of platforms activists may reduce space and place to spectacle (content) for platform capitalism and in doing so potentially diminish the effectiveness or meaning of their movement.

At the core of this issue may lie a difference in understanding of power and political action. For many young activists the idea of ‘raising awareness’ is not only a part of political organising but often the totality of it. Through this lens, activists, spectators and even academics may see nothing wrong with social movements being reduced to performative theatre for platforms. As an argument can be made that this is the most effective means of ‘raising awareness’, especially given how much of our lives are now mediated by platforms and therefore this is where the audience is. However, if we critically reflect on successful environmental struggles such as the Save Beeliar Wetlands campaign (Brady, 2019; Wolf, 2019), the history of forest blockades in Australia (McIntyre, 2021) and on movements such as Occupy! Wall St It can be argued that any success was achieved, at least in part, through an embodiment within physical places and spaces (Brady, 2019; Graeber, 2009; McIntyre, 2021; Wolf, 2019). And that such an embodiment can result in material aims (and ultimately achievements) as well as the creation of long-lasting social institutions (McIntyre, 2021), and therefore significant changes to our social and political realities (Graeber, 2009). Conversely, it is, so far, difficult to see such material outcomes from Extinction Rebellion, at least here in Western Australia.

Beyond the spectacle of platform capitalism

The ubiquity of platform capitalism in our everyday lives may mean that there is little alternative for contemporary social movements beyond dependency on platforms (Grenfell, 2020) except when movements such as Occupy avoid being reduced entirely to spectacle because of their embodiment within a physical place and their spatial self-determination (Fuchs, 2014; Lim, 2014). Like occupying public squares in the Arab Spring protests, the physicality of the occupation of Occupy allowed for the creation of a consistent being in the movement. That being in a movement may provide at least a temporary space besides the platform space of compulsively having to record and reproduce activism as a performative spectacle. This value of being is recognised by some in Extinction Rebellion: Emily argues that online activism and platforms cannot be a true substitute for physical, offline activism:

Going out there, meeting people, being able to chat with them face to face has so much of an impact, compared to being hidden behind a computer screen where people feel like there are no consequences to what they say … And it is very hard to get through to a corporation through online means … But nothing says there are people who are really upset with your decisions and would like you to reconsider than by going and drumming loudly outside their headquarters. I feel that physical activism just has so much more of an impact. (Extinction Rebellion member Emily, 2021)

Extinction Rebellion's citizen's assemblies may also demonstrate a critical understanding of the need for physical space. Such assemblies, in their manifestation of pluralistic democracies of solidarity, could also provide an opportunity to create a prefigurative politics reminiscent of the radical participatory democracy projects of the early 2000s and past Australian environmental movements (Sullivan et al., 2011; Graeber, 2009; Pickerill, 2007; Platon and Deuze, 2003; McIntyre, 2021).

Furthermore, consideration must be given to the platformed subject, when our lives are increasingly mediated by the structuring fabric of platform capitalism. The centrality of platforms in social movements is not at all unique to Extinction Rebellion. The desire of Extinction Rebellion activists in Perth to gather in person to protest, regardless of the centrality of platforms, indicates a willingness towards being in the space of a movement despite the spectacle of platform capitalism.

Conclusion

The findings in this study indicate that the relationship between social movements and platform capitalism is integral to understanding current geographical shifts in political activism. As discussed, the Extinction Rebellion movement has a significantly different relationship to platforms compared to the Occupy! Wall St Movement. Participant observation and interviews with activists in the Perth chapter of Extinction Rebellion indicated a growing reliance on social media platforms, as well as a changing relationship to the mechanics of protest, particularly around the purpose of arrests. While such observations and interviews confirmed that many activists are enthusiastic to adopt platforms as tools of political organisation there is also a growing awareness of the complications and problems associated with a reliance on platforms within movements such as Extinction Rebellion. This has given rise to questions around the effectiveness of platforms as a tool for social change and what impact these platforms are having on our spatial and social realities. Furthermore, platform capitalism is changing our collective relationship with space and place, potentially disembodying us from our physical geographies and limiting the construction of alternate meanings. This is evident in changes to how activists approach sites of protest and public space, from sites of material disruption (obstructive direct action at forest blockades, tent embassies and town square occupations) to sites of spectacular performance for social media platforms (performative arrests on roads filmed on social media platforms).

While this study can be considered somewhat representative of the relatively small Extinction Rebellion chapter in Perth it must be noted that these findings are limited. A small number of interviews, while complimented by significant participant observation, may not be entirely conclusive of all participants’ perspectives. This indicates the need for further study, especially comparative study with Extinction Rebellion chapters elsewhere in Australia and the world. Additionally, it should be noted that since this research was conducted some of the participants have left Extinction Rebellion and the group is, now, mostly inactive.

Considering the, arguably, dire need for action to avert a global climate catastrophe, researchers have a responsibility to investigate and understand the effectiveness of contemporary social movements and the use of platforms. If the IPCC is correct and we have less than a decade to limit the effects of climate change, now more than ever there is a need to ensure that our collective actions have real-world impacts and are not just reduced to spectacle for platform capitalism.