Mafia Apps: Assembling Alternative Geographies of Protest

Recent scholarship on ICTs and Social Movements has prevalently focused on the relationship between the protesters and their technologies during protest events or in relation to active phases of movements (Melucci 1995). It has also examined how ICTs facilitate the spread of messages and emotions, how they help to topologically gather people for mass demonstrations, or even how social movements seek autonomy in and from the media they use (Castells 2012; Milan 2013). This paper addresses the question of protest in a non-eventful scenario, in a moment of latency; that of the everyday struggle against the mafia in Italy. It analyses two mafia mapping apps, which are here seen as ingredients that not only facilitate but are in themselves agentic in performing different practices. From the mapping of eco-mafia disasters in the “triangle of death” in central Italy, to the highlighting of the mafias in the north, this article empirically analyses how these two apps are actively fighting the mafia. The apps are therefore here taken as agents (Latour, Bennet, Marres) themselves that make different constellations possible together with their human, non-human and discursive counterparts.