This thesis conceptualises constructive algorithmic resistance as an emergent practice of responding to the social, political, and ethical crises of contemporary algorithmic governance. The thesis moves beyond normative understandings to conceptualise resistance as an ethical practice through which communities build alternative sociotechnical systems grounded in openness, participation, and agency.
The project employs an interpretivist, qualitative methodology that is guided by three research questions each concerning motivations for resistance, the forms such practices take, and the conceptual legacies that shape them. Through semi-structured interviews and document analysis across three interconnected subcases, the project explores how these actors - the ‘vanguards of the Old Internet’ - understand, enact, and negotiate constructive resistance within alternative digital cultures.
Findings demonstrate how participants’ motivations are rooted in moral and affective responses to perceived contemporary crises. Constructive resistance therefore emerges through practices of designing, maintaining, and governing alternative digital infrastructures which include decentralised platforms, privacy-preserving algorithms, and transparent decision-making systems, allowing participants to move beyond the confines of technological corporate control.
These practices reveal resistance to be relational, enacted through ongoing negotiation between human agencies and encounters with infrastructural and discursive limits. Yet, these practices also expose tensions, foregrounding how attempts to decentralise power and foster inclusivity reproduces residual logics of modernity and neoliberalism, underscoring the ambivalent nature of building alternatives from within dominant cultural logics.
Methodologically, the thesis contributes an integrative approach that emphasises reflexivity, situated knowledge, and positionality to illuminate absences and exclusions within resistance practices. Theoretically, the thesis reconfigures resistance as generative rather than oppositional, and reframes crisis as an affective and epistemic condition that can structure and inform resistance through critique. Overall, the thesis positions constructive algorithmic resistance as a vital yet ambivalent site of ethical and political experimentation, revealing how new digital worlds are built in the tensions between crisis and possibility.
