ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the Indignados and the 15M anti-austerity movement emerged in Spain in 2011. In particular, scholars have analysed how this movement has prompted a radical change of political culture within contemporary Spain (Sampedro and Lobera 2014), paving the way for the electoral ‘revolution’ of Podemos and the creation of other political manifestations in various Spanish municipalities in relevant cities, such as Madrid and Barcelona (Gerbaudo 2017). But for many researchers like me and for several activists and commentators the Indignados will always represent one of the most innovative and revolutionary movements in the use of digital communication technologies for protest, mobilisation, and social change. A powerful synonym of digital protest and online activism, this movement has not only been able to develop extremely sophisticated forms of digital political action (Candón Mena 2013; Gerbaudo 2012), appropriating digital communication technologies for effective organisation, mobilisation, and content diffusion but also represented an unprecedented pole of technological experimentation, embodying a powerful laboratory for innovation in practices of political communication that is reconfiguring democracy itself and leading to sociocultural transformation (Feenstra et al. 2017). Perfecting and refining the repertoires of contention and communication of previous Spanish mobilisations, the Indignados developed complex practices of hybrid synchronisation between online and offline activism, and appropriated a wide ecology of digital media platforms to create and spread content, organise, mobilise, and document protest. The digital activism of the 15M has been described by some scholars and activists themselves as technopolitics, a multifaceted form of communicative action that is a complex blend of technological knowledge and digital expertise used for radical political purposes with the technology itself envisaged as a site of struggle (Alcazan et al. 2012; Monterde 2015; Toret et al. 2015; Treré et al. 2017). The origins of technopolitics are deeply rooted in the non-hierarchical, collaborative, and open spirit of the Free Culture Movement (Fuster Morell 2012; Postill 2018) and in the principles of positive meritocracy and the remix ethos of hacker ethics (Himanen 2001).
