Changes

Tactical Media places these works in a broader historical context by drawing on a dizzying array of thinkers, from philosophers Michel de Certeau and Gilles Deleuze to historian Richard Hofstadter and cyberlibertarian guru Kevin Kelly. At times the succession of allusions to ideas and thinkers leaves the reader feeling that the study connects to everything and nothing, touching on a variety of works without intervening in them meaningfully or decisively. However, the conclusion ties together such diverse strands of thought as Marxist political economy and evolutionary biology in a surprisingly lucid fashion. Ultimately, Tactical Media provides an occasion to survey new media art and activism in the early twenty-first century and revisit Audre Lorde’s statement in Sister Outsider (1984) that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (p. 112). Can activists armed with websites and video games do anything more than tinker around the edges?