Contesting the Government, Performing Modernity: The Sociotechnical Imaginary of the Hungarian Internet Tax Protests

• In Event: Performing Socio-Technical Imaginaries - II

Abstract

In 2014, the Hungarian government announced the introduction of a tax on internet usage. The proposal generated large protests in the city of Budapest, which led to its eventual withdrawal. In this paper, I investigate the puzzling success of the ‘internet tax’ protests: how could a small tax on internet consumption generate so much contestation? I argue that the internet tax was able to give way to a broader mobilization against the government, because of the power of the sociotechnical imaginary that was performed by the protesters. Through in-depth interviews with the Hungarian activists that organized the protests, I reconstruct how the protesters articulated a sociotechnical imaginary that I term ‘mundane modernity’, which reproduces tropes of Western modernity about the equalizing properties of technology, progress, and rationality, while grounding them in the everyday practices of internet use. This imaginary was performed visually by protesters through the raising of illuminated smartphones to the sky – a gesture that embodied the symbolic power exerted by the association between the internet, political freedom and Western modernity. This protest gesture subsequently transcended the internet tax protests to become an important symbol for all sorts of political protests in Hungary and in other Central-Eastern European countries between 2014 and 2018. In the conclusion, I argue for the need to explore how the performance of specific sociotechnical imaginaries can play a decisive role in the mobilization of social movements and their interaction with governments.

Author

• Elisabetta Ferrari, University of Pennsylvania