Digital Petitions Against Corporate Rights: Slacktivist Democracy?

Abstract

The movement against corporate rights uses digital petitions as one of its core strategies. A common approach of critics such as Evengy Morozov, Mark Andrejevic, or Jodi Dean to media such as digital petitions is to write them off as low-effort “slacktivism.” While criticism is often justified, petitions also have the potential to demonstrate the appearance of a democratic collective subject. Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, and theorists of movement rhetoric argue that generating a sense of the appearance of a collective subject is crucial to democratic politics. Petitions against corporate rights demonstrate the range of possibilities for online petitions from slacktivist to democratic. Collective personae such as ‘the people’ generate a sense that democracy is happening in part because they enable petitions to establish the appearance of the demos as the we that that enunciates the petition. When petitions against corporate rights include the names of signatories, dates, and other techniques they generate the sense that the demos is the emergent and legitimate bearer of the rights that should be stripped from corporations.

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