Cyber Terrorism as Ethical Resistance: A Critical Study of Purity and Dear Cyborgs

Abstract

My research investigates the ethicality of cyberterrorism in the form of hacktivism and questions its projection as an anarchic civil disobedience by postulating that cyberterrorism is a politically triggered act of resistance which can be morally justified by considering the ethically motivating factors underlining this act. Through a critical analysis of Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, it contests the arguments of Julie Mehan, C.P. Cumming, Keiran Hardy and George Williams that present cyber-terrorism as a criminal act and a threat. My research focuses on contextualising cyberterrorism as a radical but ethical act of online resistance that rises in response to unjust surveillance capitalism and the internet's militarisation. My research is timely because technological domination, online surveillance and the corresponding elimination of privacy are accelerating. My paper integrates the notions of Julian Assange, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Majid Yar because their theoretical ideas collectively allow me to engage in a rethinking of cyberterrorism’s ethicality and to question the phenomenon of mass surveillance that perpetuates a web-based tyranny and its role in making cyberterrorists/hacktivists ethical subjects. While subverting the negative connotations of cyberterrorism, as my research primarily concludes that the unjust neoliberal power structures and their manifestations justify cyberterrorism as a form of ethical resistance, I highlight the poisonous repercussions of cyberspatial surveillance and the internet's militarisation.