DIGITAL DISSIDENCE: A Cartography of the Gezi Movement and its Legal Aftermath
General Material Designation
[Thesis]
First Statement of Responsibility
Ustun, Zeyno
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Arato, Andrew
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
The New School
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2019
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
148 p.
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
The New School
Text preceding or following the note
2019
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
The Gezi Resistance, a networked movement which erupted in Istanbul, Turkey in June 2013, quickly spread to the rest of the country via the tactical and strategic utilization of the internet. The movement eventually withered away in the face of high-securitization of the city and cyber-space. Draconian amendments to laws and regulations governing the internet were immediately introduced, and using a sophisticated technological arsenal targeting online dissidents, the security forces were able to swiftly enact an extensive number of strategic arrests in retaliation, ultimately strengthening the regime's central control over the internet. This dissertation asks how the local political authorities in Turkey exerted hierarchical and central control over the internet, which has been globally celebrated as an untamable democratic architecture of information governed by universally standardized protocols. Investigating the history of the internet in Turkey that provided the shared digital geography to the Gezi Resistance, and how the AKP government, which has been in power since 2002, claimed this online territory incrementally, sheds light on how power operates over decentralized networks. A digital archive was created for this study that navigates the infrastructural making and the legal and political aftermath of Gezi. Organized on a visual canvas on Graph Commons - a collaborative network-mapping platform - the archive introduces a thick and intelligible topology of the critical infrastructures of digital dissidence in Turkey as the country began to emerge as yet another state of total surveillance.