Abstract
Between November 21 and December 26, 2004, nearly one million people protested in Kyiv against election fraud, media censorship, mass government corruption, and oligarchic market reforms. These large-scale peaceful protests have become widely known as the Orange Revolution, named after the campaign colors of Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition candidate who ran against Viktor Yanukovych, a politician with a criminal record who was backed by Moscow and the sitting Ukrainian government. In analyzing the relationship between music, social movements, and technology, I draw on the paradigm proposed by Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison who argue that “social movements lead to a reconstruction of processes of social interaction and collective identity formation”. Though I will present some of the new popular music styles favored by anti-government organizers during the Orange Revolution, particularly one that I call TAK-techno, I am less concerned with the content on the Internet than with the Internet’s use as a vital communication tool within socio-political events and music’s function within that framework. In this analysis of the relationship between the Internet, music, and politics in post -socialist Ukraine, I argue that technology is not culturally or politically neutral. Rather, cybermusicality was undeniably vital to the Orange Revolution, drawing millions of Internet users into new online communities.