Prioritizing care in the commons: Technological resistance and refusal in information activism

In the midst of reactionary attacks on public institutions, public goods, and public space, this dissertation examines the overarching question of how activist organizations consider information infrastructure within their social movement organizing efforts, with attention to how the framework of the commons aligns with their understandings of information infrastructure as core sites of struggle. This work looks toward leftist movements around disability and libraries and how their organizing efforts underscore the relevancy of the commons in contemporary organizing efforts around information infrastructure, particularly through the ways that the framework challenges capitalist forms of privatization and enclosure. This dissertation analyzes cases of particular organizations involved in organizing around disability (Death Panel Podcast) and libraries (Library Freedom Project and Libraries for the People), and compares the similarities, incongruities, and novel phenomena across the three case sites. As an iterative mode of analysis, case study methodology critiques, and expands upon the central theoretical model and conceptual guide in this work: a spectrum of resistance and refusal. The theoretical model developed and amended throughout the dissertation is a spectrum of technological resistance and refusal that places organizing practices alongside a horizontal axis that spans practices of resistance on the leftmost end and practices of refusal on the rightmost end. Practices such as opting out of harmful technologies, the communal exchange of information, as well as participating in grassroots and more formalized forms of governance are explored through and placed alongside the spectrum. The findings of this study highlight how organizers on the left create, leverage, and reconfigure existing infrastructures to reclaim the framework of the commons from technocratic corporate power, and how this is part of a much greater fight to create, support, and sustain commons-based infrastructures, and protect them from right-wing advocacy groups and austerity minded politicians across the political aisle who have gained traction in recent years in their efforts to weaken and diminish them. The findings of this study inform both research in information studies and adjacent fields as well as organizing and activist practices more broadly, and highlight the often-overlooked importance of small-scale, grassroots efforts for social change that look beyond the status quo and instead embrace impossibility.