‘Free country, free internet’: the symbolic power of technology in the Hungarian internet tax protests

Abstract

In 2014, the Hungarian government announced the introduction of a tax on internet usage. The proposal generated large protests, which led to its eventual withdrawal. In this article, I investigate the puzzling success of the ‘internet tax’ protests: how could a small tax on internet consumption generate so much contestation? I argue that the internet tax was able to give way to a broader mobilization against the government, because of the symbolic power of the idea of ‘the internet’, to which different political meanings can be attached. Through interviews with Hungarian activists, I reconstruct how the internet was associated with a mobilizing discourse that I term ‘mundane modernity’, which reproduces tropes of Western modernity about the equalizing properties of technology, progress, and rationality, while grounding them in the everyday practices of internet use. I then discuss the types of freedom embedded in mundane modernity and assess its political limitations.

Internet Memes as Protest Media in Populist Hungary

“…In the end, social media–driven activism is volatile, as the closing of Budai Simicska’s Facebook page testifies. In Hungary, as media scholar Elisabetta Ferrari rightly points out, the internet is a powerful symbol associated with such political principles as freedom and equality the Fidesz‐KDNP government does not embrace and respect (2019). I suggest that it is the very belief in the capacity of social media to advance antigovernment activism that needs to be reassessed.…”

Visual focus groups: Stimulating reflexive conversations with collective drawing

“…When large protests broke out in Budapest, Hungary in October 2014, images of demonstrators lifting their illuminated cell phones to the sky appeared everywhere on international and Hungarian media (see Lyman, 2014). The demonstrations were organized to protest against the Hungarian government's proposed tax on internet consumption, which would have taxed users based on their internet traffic (Ferrari, 2019a). The use of cell phones as a symbol of the demonstrations, the slogans, the media interviews with the organizers: everything about these protests pointed to the existence of deep-seated political beliefs about digital technologies that the protests had made salient.…”

“…However, when I tried to instead ask these activists what they thought was wrong with the internet tax, they revealed glimpses of what the internet actually meant for them: for them as individuals, but also as leftist activists and Hungarians. The proposed tax was a moment of rupture, an extraordinary event through which activists were forced to reexamine the ordinary, to reconsider their assumptions about digital technologies: how they, for instance, associated the internet with freedom, rationality, and the future (Ferrari, 2019a). In proposing her ethnographic approach, Star (1999) famously argued that infrastructure only becomes visible, and thus understandable by people, when it breaks down.…”