Blackout

The week before last, Wikipedia went dark, along with a great many other sites to protest against SOPA, and the threats to internet freedom. During various events of the Arab Spring (I wondered who coined that term), various states turned off the internet, and / or mobile networks. In China internet censorship is routine via the Great Firewall, and undoubtedly things will get worse. The internet will soon be anything but free.

Internally there is a strong rationale for using Facebook as the building block of our activist network. It is the tool people use, where people are at, better funded than our open source equivalence, and yet we hesitate to trust them. Meetup is a more palatable choice, and a more powerful organising tool, but it’s not where people at are – so it’s problematic.

We don’t want to trust our organising structure to a private company with differing interests to ours. The Guardian by-line ‘if you're not paying for an online service, you're not the customer; you're the product’, didn’t help and relying on any tool you don’t control to effect change, makes you vulnerable to the forces that can control that tool – or turn it off.

So in the debate between online and offline activism, if offline activism more robust against such interferences. Traditional freedoms, which may again change, protect the right to assembly, to meet others, to campaign etc. Public opinion is generally against bugging such meetings, police infiltration, and the paranoia of the security state, and instinctively these activities are more protected than my right to say setup a Facebook group to denounce Volkswagens lobbying against climate change laws.

However the near impossible challenges we face, preclude the safe options of robust organising offline, and dictate the risks involved in using commercial social media structures to reach more people, to mobilise more people to bring down the institutions that are herding civilisation to destruction. Risks I’m bound to deliver on, but unhappy about.

Not the workshop you are looking for

Slowly growing is this idea that for offline activism we have a fairly developed menu of opportunities from signing a petition to organising others, and / or high risk NVDA depending where ones path leads you. In the digital world this menu is far less thought out, clearly includes sending lots of emails, occasional acts of brilliance, but less robust thinking about what’s in between.

On my journey to figure out what is possible in between, I was at least intrigued by the idea of a Reclaiming the Media workshop at this year’s Anarchist bookfair.

Now whatever anarchist media looks like, and one could debate, there is a real strength in the Indymedia network, and in this world of increasingly corporate media, I’d like to at least sound them out as to where the common ground might lie. Equally there’s been some sort of schism between a very anarchic grassroots Indymedia (now Maydaymedia or Indymedia UK - not UK Indymedia?), and a mainly anarchic grassroots Indymedia (now Be the media?), so if only for the lack of clarity I dragged myself out of bed to get down to Queen Mary.

From the side-lines, Indymedia has always done a good job of engaging people at citizen jouralists, photographers, videographers and small bundles of internet activism. As activists struggle to get into the mainstream media, taking control of our own stories seems simply to be a survival trait, so if I could bottle the essence of what’s involved and distribute it, then perhaps we could build another stepping stone, or network, on the paths of digital activism.

As a workshop this wasn’t it. Well not that is was even a workshop, more of a lecture with some interesting speakers from the NUJ (Donnacha DeLong), an investigative Guardian? journalist (Heather Brooke), and someone intelligent but more academic (Becky Hogge). But even though this wasn’t the workshop I was looking for, it sparked an idea, and a note to oneself to go buy some books.

So the idea of net neutrality is new to me (to be explored on a differemt day), as is this digital field, and the idea that one’s access to the internet may change is both scary and empowering. We live in the now, where we have unlimited freedom to browse what we want, without ones service provider choosing our preferences for us. Corporate and government control may be leading us towards Chinese style censorship, but for now we have the most powerful digital tools and freedoms imaginable to achieve change. Time to get on with it.