Prefiguration of counterpublics in Brad – One more night in the barricades

Abstract

Inspired by hacker culture, cyberactivism emerged as a political movement whose main issue is freedom of communication and information. For this reason, it has become the main vantage point of the movements against domination by diffused forms of control. Notwithstanding the harsh circumstances brought about by the “war on terror”, cyberactivism has managed to produce an expression in documentary cinema that bends the tendency of subjective documentary rhetoric towards collective practices of counterpublic autopoiesis. To demonstrate some of the key features of this new strategy of resistance, this paper scrutinizes the cyberdocumentary Brad – One more night in the barricades in terms of its interpretability and conditions of ethical validity: intentional sincerity, propositional veracity and relational correctness.