Todd Wolfson begins with the rise of the Zapatistas in the mid-1990s, and how aspects of the movement-network organizational structure, participatory democratic governance, and the use of communication tools as a binding agent-became essential parts of Indymedia and all Cyber Left organizations. Our research reveals that despite the national particularities of the contexts in which they arose, Occupy and the 15M were extremely similar in their interpretations and practices of livestreaming and democracy.ĭigital Rebellion examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements. Finally, while livestreaming was used to facilitate equal participation in the movement, participation through the livestream took the meaning of equal access to the experience of the squares, rather than equal power in the decision-making process. Yet their embodied and subjective first-person perspective was associated with tensions around their power to shape the broadcast. Thirdly, live streamers attempted to offer an unvarnished access to truth by providing unedited and raw video from the streets. Secondly, the information overload created through the practice of radical transparency was in tension with the movement's accountability processes. Firstly, the use of livestreaming was associated with a radical interpretation of transparency as near-total visibility, which gave rise to tensions around self-surveillance. Our findings identify four sources of tension in the relationship between livestreaming and democratic cultures. The article investigates how the technical affordances of livestreaming – immediacy, rawness, liveness and embedded/embodied perspective – connect with the movements’ understandings of how democracy should be practiced, specifically in terms of political equality, participation and transparency. Drawing on one hundred interviews with activists, this article examines the relationship between livestreaming and the democratic cultures of the 15M and Occupy movements.