Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 7 (2): 98 - 119 (November 2015)Renzi, Info-capitalism and resistance 98 Info-capitalism and resistance: how information shapes social movements Alessandra Renzi Abstract This article uses the lenses of information theory and critical software studies to examine how socio-technical forces like digital encoding and information circulation affect social movement struggles. Focusing on certain information designs and coding features of social media networks, the article analyzes how activist communication practices and modes of collective action evolve alongside available information infrastructure. In particular, I look at the technical features of social media networks— their nodalities and protocols—and at three key elements of social media platforms—the platform itself, the interface, and the algorithms determining interface functionality—in order to reveal their impact on organizing practices. Emerging from this analysis are insights into how the mutual entanglements of code, network structures, and social struggles in information capitalism are literally “encoding,” and in some cases limiting, different modes of collective action. Understanding the role that information architectures play in communication, I argue, opens up new potential for resistance and subversion by “recoding” activist practices. Keywords: Social movements; social media communication; platform politics; information theory; information capitalism; platform activism; software studies. Control “matters” through information—and information is never immaterial. Galloway & Thacker Introduction: moving away from information as semiotic content The sounds of a modem connecting to the internet through a dial-up system is a reminder that information, in its technical definition beyond semiotics, does not refer to the meaning of a transmitted message but to a series of signals unintelligible to the human hear in their basic forms. In fact, the message transmitted by a modem is abstracted from content and mathematically encoded by applying a value to it of 0 or 1. Information theory pioneer Claude Shannonwho was concerned with making bits of data travel effectively through phone communication channelsdefined information mathematically as the ratio of signal to noise (1948). This means that information can be thought of as a statistical pattern of redundancy and frequencya modulation of signal to noise. It describes bits of data that are abstracted from content but