AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS FOR THE 21st CENTURY
Sometimes to know where we’re going, it helps to look back to where we’ve come from, and how we got to be here. This is the spirit in which I have developed “Algorithm & the Web”, which is a course, but also a play.
Algorithm & the Web explores the relationship of culture and technology since 2000. The course studies how activists have used the Internet over time, and analyzes how we shift between the algorithm vs. network as mental models. We see how thinking with geometry creates real world effects, influencing social movement debates around class vs. identity, spectrums and binaries, intersectionality, and technology itself.
Algorithm & the Web teaches an anthropology of social movements in the twilight of the 20th century, inviting intergenerational exchange during an era when technology changes faster than most can adapt. Long live the library!
1) From Indymedia to Instagram: On Dialectics of Culture and Technology
We begin with a story—an ethnography of Mexican activism in Montreal, Canada during the heyday of the digital commons, when activists used email list-serves, the Zapatistas claimed identity was about to dissolve, and for a moment everything on the Internet was free. A decade later, the left was “cancelling” itself and renting music: What happened? This narrative moves around North America and through the #hashtag revolutions to today, to offer an apology, a challenge, and a novel take on growing divisions in identities everywhere. In the process we consider how cancelling events became “cancelling” a person.
2) Intersectionality & the Rhizome: Math, Metaphor and Modeling the Social
Between 2000 and 2015, the “web” and networking were positioned as ends and means. Activists also identified with the “rhizome”, complexity theory and fractals, but their anti-oppression workshops involved linear statistics. Black feminists had called for listening as coalition, yet intersectionality was often rendered a tool for guesswork. Here we explore the mental maps shared by activists in relation to collective everyday practices. We begin to see how even anarchists against the state are influenced by the state’s forms of measurement, the logic of property relations, and the technology that orders our lives.
3) Cryptophilia, Semiotics, Politics (and an Anthropology of Class and Identity)
Today a new techno-utopian right imagines social justice will occur through acts of “code”—whether Bitcoin or “biohacking”. Yet while the right seeks to create effects sight unseen, activists on the left continue to seek recognition. We are ready (and motivated) to approach the class vs. identity problem in a novel way. We explore a proposal for an escape room, method and museum called The Waiting Room: A 20th Century Experience. Includes installation if conditions permit.
Optional reading (two academic articles, approximately 10, 000 words each): Gossip as Direct Action (Lagalisse 2013; via Academia.edu), and On Authenticity: Intersections of Race and Class in Consensus Process and Beyond (Lagalisse 2024; via Scrappy Capy).
Booking for 2027.
Premiere in Berlin @ Offline, Nov. 16-22, 2026.
Doors open early for book table, installation.
Mix of Lecture & Discussion (2h)
Break & Open Discussion (≈ 1h)
No photography, audio or video recording allowed.
This is a course developed to be attended in order. Drop in attendance is welcome, yet participants are asked to honour the cumulative discussion and experience of repeat attendees.
Requires use of overhead acetate projector, screen/wall, and two tables.
For inquiries and booking write to: erica.lagalisse@mail.mcgill.ca
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