In @ Is for Activism, Joss Hands, a senior lecturer in communications and media studies at Anglia Ruskin University and director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture, tackles the complex issue of the potentials and pitfalls of current media tools for anticapitalist activists. The book starts off reviewing what some of the more critical theorists of technologies—in particular, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse—have argued regarding contemporary technology's close relation to capitalism. The book in turn claims that such theories foster a too essentialist rendition of technology as always aiding capitalist ends and instead proposes a way of understanding the possibility of activism by looking in more detail at the design of media networks. Hands then suggests that a certain possibility in the configuration particular to media networks' codes and protocols may aid in the maximization of the Habermasian ideal of collective communicative action through what he calls...

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