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[[File:Tactical_Media.jpeg|thumbnail|left|300px|[http://%5Bhttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816651515/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0816651515&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=9576ad57c8a4d1e639a6f264ad2011f8%20Tactical%20Media%5D Tactical Media] by Rita Raley]]In this original and wide-ranging book, Rita Raley examines how technologies of data visualization and gaming can serve as tools for new kinds of political resistance. A literary scholar, Raley approaches websites, installations, and other forms of new media art from an aesthetic perspective, studying these objects more as texts than technologies. When Raley looks at a video game, she examines it not primarily as digital entertainment or a political act, but as an artwork whose political message is embedded in its technological form. [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816651515/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0816651515&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=9576ad57c8a4d1e639a6f264ad2011f8 Tactical Media ] is, in short, a contribution to the growing literature on new media art, exploring how contemporary artists have used information technology to challenge capitalism in an age of globalization.
The book unfolds in three chapters that center on immigration, antiwar activism, and finance capital. As these subjects suggest, Raley is not telling the story of a unified or coherent political movement. The targets of her activists range from McDonald’s and George W. Bush to intellectual property interests, which the art collective Ubermorgen skewered by hacking Amazon.com and making thousands of books available for free online. A key example is decidedly low-tech: the group DoEAT simply pasted new messages on signs along the U.S.-Mexican border meant to warn of immigrants crossing the highway. Activists replaced the warning beneath the silhouette of a mother, father, and child with “Free Market” and “Now Hiring,” reminding drivers of why families might be dashing in front of their cars (p. 31). This “border hack,” as Raley calls it, is one of many acts that seek to defamiliarize the signs of everyday life, pursuing a series of provocative events or spectacles rather than a program of systematic change. For Raley, groups like Critical Art Ensemble and the Yes Men substitute a “micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” for an older leftist paradigm of revolution (p. 1).
