Introduction
This week’s session started in much the same way as the last few sessions had. We (roughly) followed a scheme developed by Occupy U/Nomadic University: Introduction and Background, followed by names, pronouns and check-in, and then a bit of physical education before getting to the topic at hand. Because we had a few newcomers, I began with a short spiel about Radical Sunday School, trying to catch people up on what we have discussed in some previous meetings, what we’re trying to do as a political project, and a little bit of a teaser of what we’re looking to achieve in the fall with the start of our free skool. After the spiel, we went around giving our names, preferred pronouns, and a short check-in about how we were feeling emotionally that Sunday evening. As a last move before the “lecture” began, we stood up from our chairs to do a little light stretching and physical movement to remind ourselves that we do not, in fact, become perfectly rational brains in jars when we enter learning spaces.
I started the discussion by reflecting a little on all the different ways we learn outside of the traditional institutions of education we so often criticize here at RSS. Learning is such a widespread part of all of our lives, and when we begin to open our eyes to all the possible ways we could go about learning, the examples never stop. I encouraged the group to brainstorm different kinds of media that we learned through, and got all sorts of responses. We heard about the benefits of stories and other narratives that help us see the world in a new way, about documentaries that literally showed us parts of the world we’d never seen (and perhaps never will see) in person, I spoke of my love of podcasts and how well they fit into my daily life. YouTube came up time and again as an example of an alternative learning medium, and as people familiar with activist spaces, the humble zine was mentioned.
Anarchists, as I’ve been reading about, have always been experimenting with different forms of media, from the zines passed around at punk shows, to radical newspapers handed around at workers’ cafes, to pirate radio run out of old industrial buildings (or literal pirated ships), to posters and stickers wheatpasted around town to remind passersby that they aren’t alone in their struggles. My plan for this session was to tell two different stories, and then let our guest, Mohammed from City Rights Radio, lead a Q&A/discussion/chat about his experiences with podcasting and migrant mutual aid. Because there were no other events planned in our space that night, we discussed as a group whether to take breaks between each story, and the consensus seemed to be that breaks were an important part of learning as well.
Anarchist Media in History
The first story I had prepared to tell at Sunday’s session was a very historical one. I’d read the better part of a chapter from Kathy E. Ferguson’s new book Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, and there were some really fascinating parts of this history I wanted to talk with everyone about. First, I talked about the disconnect between our impression of how anarchist ideas were communicated, and how they actually spread around back in the “classical era” of anarchism (1850s-1950s). Quoting Kathy here:
The classical anarchist movement of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries is known today largely through the work of a handful of thinkers whose writings have remained in, or come back into, print: Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, Errico Malatesta, Rudolf Rocker, Leo Tolstoy, Élisée and Élie Reclus, Gustav Landauer, Benjamin Tucker, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, and a few others. Other anarchist writings often build on these classic works, commonly stating and restating shared principles of freedom, equality, and justice.Yet the daily textual labor of the anarchist movement was done far more in the pages of the many hundreds of journals written and published by small local groups around the world than it was in books. At a few cents an issue, journals were more readily available than books. Journals were carried in reading rooms, bars, and cafés; they were shared by subscribers around kitchen tables, neighborhoods, and worksites. In his autobiography Peter Kropotkin, the grand old man of anarchism, challenges researchers to take up these sources because the movement’s “small pamphlets and newspapers” reveal its world: “Socialistic literature has never been rich in books. It is written for workers for whom one penny is money, and its main force lies in its small pamphlets and its newspapers. . . .There remains nothing but to take collections of papers and read them all through—the news as well as the leading articles—the former, perhaps, even more than the latter.”
(Ferguson, Letterpress Revolution, pg. 130)
We opened up the discussion here a bit about the pressures we all often feel to read EVERY possible book or article on a given topic before we’re allowed to even CONSIDER speaking about it. This kind of pressure often puts us into situations, as one of us noted, where we have an ever-expanding reading list to get through, a situation made even worse by an internet that puts all of these sources practically at our fingertips. I gave myself as an example of this – Kathy Ferguson’s book about anarchist print culture is 330 pages long! The prose is pretty dense, so I’m not sure I’d want to read it all, I certainly didn’t have the time this week to read it all, and maybe most importantly, there are far more facts in this book than are relevant to the problems I’m facing in my life. I like to believe that “classical” anarchists felt the same way.
The next topic I brought up from Letterpress Revolution was the way that anarchist media in the 1800s broke down some of the barriers of professionalism that we’ve talked about so many times here at Radical Sunday School. Again quoting Ferguson:
Anarchists of letters participated in the break with the world of capitalist labor that Rancière explores in Nights of Labor and The Philosopher and His Poor, “a rupture in the traditional division [partage] assigning the privilege of thought to some and the tasks of production to others.” Rancière continues, “The French workers who, in the nineteenth century, created newspapers or associations, wrote poems, or joined utopian groups, were claiming the status of fully speaking and thinking beings.” Rancière finds in working-class archives not evidence of a separate class-based culture but “the transgressive will to appropriate the ‘night’ of poets and thinkers, to appropriate the language and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality were indeed real and effectual.”
(Ferguson, Letterpress Revolution, pp. 133-134)
This kind of knowledge-making really is a kind of direct action, taking the means of learning into our own hands. Instead of following the strict rules laid out by the systems we live under, which tell us that some people are allowed to learn and others have to keep their heads down, we take the initiative, come together as communities, and, to quote David Graeber, simply “live as though we’re already free”. As I explained at the time, I’m hoping this rebellious spirit can inspire us as we develop our free skool in the fall: each one of us should feel empowered to come to Radical Sunday School and find a place where they can build knowledge along with their friends, on whatever topics they themselves want to learn about!
The last lesson I wanted to share from Letterpress Revolution was about internationalism. Anarchists have always understood that all of our struggles are connected (even if it took them a century or so to realize that by “our” struggles, we mean more than just the struggles of able-bodied White men), so it shouldn’t be a surprise that anarchist media, even in the 1800s, involved journals from all over the world corresponding with each other:
All three of these journals regularly exchanged issues with dozens or hundreds of other publications, and they periodically published the names of the incoming journals and books. In Keell’s address book from the 1920s, over 350 exchanges were recorded. It is tempting for readers today to just skim such lists or skip them altogether, and to imagine that readers at the time did so as well. Yet I suspect that may not have been the case. Chronically short of funds, why would editors regularly waste paper, ink, and labor on these lists if they were mere formalities? I speculate that these lists, repeated week after week and month after month, in dozens or hundreds of journals in multiple languages, had some political significance.[…]I find myself drawn to these plain, repetitive lists. Their intellectual weight is palpable. I imagine readers encountering the lists: some would glance past the items, no doubt, but I imagine some readers looking to make sure the material they want to read has come in, maybe making plans to go and read the latest issues or purchase a recently arrived book. I imagine the impact of the weight and cadence of these lists, repeating over and over. The feel of that intellectual heft is part of the anarchist community of sense. These humble lists are an opening to understanding how assemblages work. Substantial time, energy, and resources went into these exchanges, which brought readers of one journal into the network of many journals.[…]The “bookish poor people” whom Christine Stansell characterizes as the rank and file of the anarchist movement, through lingering on the titles, the languages, the origins of each publication, could locate themselves as participants in a learned international community of sense.
(Ferguson, pp. 166-169)
Fitting in with the people one of us made earlier in the session about how stories let us live through the experiences of others, I asked everyone to reflect a little on the situation Ferguson is describing about these lists. We can try to put ourselves in the shoes of some industrial worker back in the 1800s. Maybe we’re in Lyon, or Buenos Aires, New York City, or Rotterdam. It’s been 20 hours of backbreaking labor in some abysmal factory, breathing in toxic fumes, dodging dangerous machinery, and being completely aware that you still can’t afford to pay your rent, because the boss likes wages low. This worker finally gets the chance to sit down and relax for a little time, and he or she chooses to read about making a better world in the pages of an anarchist newspaper one of their neighbors lent them. As awful as their life might seem, they can read this list of other newspapers from all over the world and see they aren’t alone. There are other “bookish poor people”, and would you look at that: they can think and read and write just as well as those cruel bosses and snobby academics! We’ve got a movement together, this worker might think to themselves, and we’re all around the world, fighting the good fight together. If that isn’t an educational thought, I don’t know what is.
After taking a break to drink some tea, use the toilet, stretch and chat, we came back to talk about a second story I wanted to tell, the story of media in our own time: social media. I read a number of interviews that various activists had had with Todd Wolfson, author of Digital Rebellion: The Rise of the Cyber Left, and their summaries of his work made it possible to learn quite a lot about the connection between social media and anti-authoritarian social movements.
I began by upturning the classic story we tell ourselves about the origins of social media. We’re all familiar with the image of a single, nerdy white guy (plus or minus a few of his friends) laboring alone in a garage in California, only to explode into the public eye with his invention of Facebook or Apple, Microsoft or Twitter. Instead, as it turns out, it might be more accurate to see social media as ultimately being initiated by a few thousand Mayan peasants throwing a revolution in the early 1990s. On the morning of January 1st, 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect across Canada, the United States, and Mexico, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation) quickly and effectively took control of large portions of Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. With the logistical support of other alter-globalization activists around the world, the Zapatistas were able to use the internet to coordinate attacks on government targets, communicate with the public of Chiapas, and publicize their struggle to the broader world, all while evading strict press censorship from the Mexican state.
After a few months of fighting, the Zapatistas reached a peace accord with the Mexican government which allowed them to keep autonomous control of a large portion of Chiapas, as well as remain armed to defend their communities. In an international press conference in 1996, a man named Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, acting as spokesman for the EZLN, explained the crucial role that communication networks had played in their revolution, and told activists the world over that the future of anti-authoritarian struggle was going to need a united front, online:
We will make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of alternative communication against neoliberalism… This intercontinental network of alternative communication will be the medium by which distinct resistance’s communicate with one another.
(Subcomandante Marcos, 1996; Quoted in “Another Network is Possible” by April Glaser)
Three years later, in protest of a major World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, Washington in the US, activists fighting in the “Battle for Seattle” took Marcos’s remarks seriously when they set up the first Independent Media Center (IMC) in an empty storefront. Working out of their office downtown, activists created an entire media network, with cameras, donated computers, a daily newspaper, and a radio station. Importantly, the horizontal nature of the IMC was focused on helping people participating in the protests to tell their own stories in their own words, letting them upload articles to the newly established indymedia.org.
Indymedia was an instant hit, racking up 1.5 million unique visitors in its first week online – more than CNN.com! By 2003, there were over 100 IMCs on 6 continents, producing news in 30 languages. Indymedia and its related networks prefigured many aspects of social media we know today. For example, Indymedia sites would feature a central column on their webpages that would act as a “newsfeed”, showing recently posted stories (something Facebook would use to arrange their website a number of years later). Internet relay chat servers were some of the first to use @ to signal direct mentions and # to reference ongoing discussions on the server (as we know, these symbols were adopted by Twitter years later). Most importantly, indymedia was committed to participatory journalism, training and empowering thousands to create the news in a radically different way to the one-sided media that ruled the world for centuries before.
Activists invented other media tools to help them in their struggles against capital and the state. In particular, I talked about TXTmob, an early cellphone app that let users send mass SMS texts to groups of protesters so they could communicate in real-time and coordinate demonstrations all over major cities. In 2004, activists swarmed both Denver and New York City, trying to make their voices heard during the Democratic and Republican National Committees meeting there. A TXTmob user could send a short message updating others about where cops were setting up barricades, which streets were safe to move along, and how the mainstream media were covering to protests, and they could organize different conversations using the @ and # symbols familiar from IRC servers on indymedia. TXTmob was a success, but pretty poorly coded, so when primary author of its code, Tad Hirsch, attended a hacktivist gathering later that year organized by the Ruckus Society in Oakland, California, he was happy for the constructive criticism and code review he got from Evan Henshaw-Plath and Blaine Cook, two developers at an early podcasting startup called Odeo. A few years later, Evan and Blaine, along with their Odeo co-worker Jack Dorsey, went on to start Twitter, a massive platform for sending short, real-time text updates to a general public.
In the following decade, we saw the fairly quick decline in indymedia’s regular users. By 2008, indymedia.org was marginal at best, even within activist circles. A few holdouts, like athens.indymedia.org, continued to play a serious role in some movements, but the site couldn’t maintain the momentum in had in the first decade of the millenium. Meanwhile, what’s been called “Web 2.0” took off like a rocket… or a pandemic. Major social media companies like Twitter, Facebook (and its bought-out competitors Instagram and WhatsApp), Reddit, and Tiktok (along with countless others) have rapidly bought up huge portions of the media market, edging out competitors and transforming how we communicate with each other, all while harvesting personal information for use by advertisers and intelligence services. Even despite all the problems these platforms have caused, the genie of participatory media couldn’t be put back in the bottle. Movements like Occupy Wall Street, the December Revolt of Greece, the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Umbrella movement, and the George Floyd Uprisings were all heavily dependent on the coordinated use of social media companies. Even the fact that these various companies subsequently sold protesters personal data to the repressive governments they were fighting doesn’t spoil these activists accomplishments.
As something of an epilogue to this discussion, I talked about some of the lessons that have been learned in the decades since Subcomandante Marcos called for an “intercontinental network of alternative communication”. First, the history we talked about, of communities coming together to build the networks they needed to fight for themselves and each other, it’s a history that harmonizes well with the kind of communal learning we try to emphasize at Radical Sunday School. It isn’t solitary geniuses in Silicon Valley garages that change the world, it’s groups of amateurs who choose to try things out together, well aware they don’t have all the answers. We don’t need to look to heroes and saviors; we have each other.
Second, the failure of indymedia to continue to lead the anti-authoritarian charge of the 2000s tells us a lot about the dynamics of social movements. Todd Wolfson, the author of the book that so much of this session draws on, sees this as a failure of in-person organizing. Real people live in the real world, in real communities; a movement that exists primarily online will quickly become an online discussion forum if it isn’t grounded in face-to-face connections or doesn’t help solve local problems communities face. This is also something we’ve talked about here at Radical Sunday School. No matter how interesting our conversations might get, we need to focus on how our actions can create the world we want to live in, and act accordingly. I’m certainly very much looking forward to people moving back to the city in the fall, and more active participation in our communities.
A final, related note to make about the role of alternative media is that we need to keep in mind why we’re engaging with media in the first place. As April Glaser writes in her Logic article “Another Network is Possible”:
Local corporate media at the time were either ignoring these issues or, if they were covering them, failed to consistently center the voices of the people and communities affected. Our thinking was that it would be awfully hard to change local policy if our neighbors didn’t know what was happening, and we couldn’t count on the mainstream media to make people understand enough to care. In this way, as grassroots journalists on Indymedia, our work was tactical. We were reporting with an agenda.Other Indymedia organizers and activists I spoke to felt similarly. “Self-publishing is great. I’m into it,” an early organizer of Indybay told me, who asked to remain anonymous. “But I feel like the main strength of Indymedia was this idea about tactical media. There’s like a purpose to what you’re doing that’s not just about publishing your story.” If you hung around Indymedia types during the early 2000s, there’s a good chance you heard the term “tactical media” batted around. What differentiates tactical media from some imaginary idea of pure journalism is that tactical media is made in support of a political project.
Moving forward with Radical Sunday School, I think it’s important that we keep this spirit in mind. Learning is a political project, and if we can focus on what ends we’re aiming at, we can cut past that problem one member mentioned of the ever-expanding reading list. I didn’t need to read an entire book on anarchist print culture to organize a session of Radical Sunday School about media, and no one organizing another session needs to be an expert in order to help everyone learn together.
After another short break, Mohamed from City Rights Radio took the time to speak with us about his experiences moving to Amsterdam, working with undocumented migrants, and setting up a podcast. I’ll not speak for him, but I can certainly say that I am incredibly grateful for him taking the time to share his story. Mo is an articulate, compassionate man, and his advice and perspective were wonderful additions to our session of Radical Sunday School. I hope that moving forward, this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of Mo or Here to Support.
Further reading: