Digital organizing outside organizations, WikiLeaks’ whistle and Snowden’s flute

Abstract

Research on information and organization is used to highlight how organizations and their practices are digitalized. In this contribution, the opposite angle is taken: the focus is on how values and organizing practices originated on the internet avoid, encounter, and clash – not without controversies – with existing organizations. WikiLeaks and Snowden’s revelations regarding governments’ secret activities marked a breakdown in journalist organizations, just as they have been having largely unimaginable consequences including the widely spreading adoption of cryptography and the European Union GDPR. The peculiar ways in which WikiLeaks and Snowden pulled together people and information technologies exemplify two distinct modes of digital organizing: one more closely derived from the original culture of the internet based on radical openness, the other more sensitive to broadly established Western institutions such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The contrast between these distinct modes of organizing suggests that recognizable narratives fill the gaps left open by the diverse social orders spanned by digital infrastructures. Overall, these case studies illustrate some peculiarities of digital transformation in contemporary organizations and societies.