Abstract
In a time when interactive technologies and participatory usage are equated with DIY citizenship, how do we account for the return of sovereign power in the form of police interventions into usage? How are decentralized social media deployed as instruments by traditional social actors and political institutions? This article addresses these questions by analyzing the structuring context that links convergence and warfare. It focuses on the Alliance of Youth Movements, the State Department co-sponsored group that produced a web-hub of materials that distributed technical knowledge and social media skills for youth protestors around the world. Its effects were felt in Egypt's Arab Spring. At the same time, similar deployments of social media technologies by US domestic protestors have been considered a criminal use of a communication facility (e.g. Anonymous and the Tin Can Communications Collective's use of Twitter during 2009 G20 protests). Convergence produces hybrids, some of which are encouraged, mobilized and 'friended' while others are pre-empted, dissuaded and targeted as unspecified enemies by sovereign/network powers. We are witnessing a convergence of sovereign and network powers, one that expresses new modes of control while setting the conditions for new forms of evaluation and antagonism.