[iDC] Net autonomy

Thu Mar 23 02:03:08 EST 2006

hey Trebor, 
I'm usually more comfy lurking, but am inspired after
hearing Raqs MC talk tonight--

Yr comments on Indymedia touch on interesting things: 
why do  you believe Indymedia numbers are declining?  

and if they are surviving on donations of time and
money, then, what does it mean? love? real dependency?
need?

what is the relationship between the autonomy of an
online site and the motivation of participants, etc)
- in otherwords, is this mythical online 'autonomy' a
reason to habituate a site in itself? or is it about
novelty?   improved design/less clutter? 

And finally what IS the deal on size?  you are 
correct that anything big is seen as having $ making
potential, and thus susceptible to buy out-- therefore
perhaps a good model is somethign that looks tiny on
the face, and conceals its real size from the
investors...(like one of those 4 mile wide
mushrooms...)  if it really matters..

Recently I peeked at Portland indymedia, to learn
about the eco-activist cases- those folks who have
been accused of terrorism with the insane sentences of
300 years hanging over their heads.  

Judging from P-town and a few others I scanned,
Indymedia sites are explicitly local--even though they
are networked, share feeds, and are responsive to the
world outside their locale, they also seem to have
local particularities and a locally communicative
role. 
Do they then also perhaps work as performative
platforms for the particularity and identity of a
place? --  through the participation of the members,
contributors, readers, etc, a kind of participatory
identity-formation  that contributes to a sense of--
self-determination or autonomy?   

(well, it could equally be contributing to some
horribly egregious or dangerous ideologies too, but
the point is that it isn't a production of a local
which is  about isolationism per se, but rather a
production of the local that is organically related to
concerns of regionally based progressives and
activists.. ) Even the subtitle on the site --- "your
news.... from lower cascadia.........."   references
the 70s movement of bioregionally centered self
determining geographic territories.

Many of the news items on these sites are about the
local manifestations of (perhaps the same global)
problems and issues and are indexing a physical
regional aggregation of f2f events.

  Doesn't this perhaps produce another kind of
resistence to -- homogenization/consolidation, etc
etc.  that exceeds  the 'space' of the online network
-- 
and thus hopefully leading to formations of useful
political analysis and politicized bodies, etc that
can make local impacts/resistance on these same shitty
communication companies that hold us in thrall (okay
for when the moment is there- -for outside of privacy
stuff, which becomes now a legislative thing anyway, 
the places those companies really wreak havoc is not
online as much as in our towns/countries/hemispheres
etc ). od? I mean, del.icious is still pretty
functional...

I'm saying this because it seems that some really
materially and economically progressive  organizing is
going on-- using the currently available online spaces
in spite of the limitations of what servers we can
access...  and despite the  ads they drag around with
them..like so many dingleberries..
 in a perverse way, maybe that really local stuff is
the most resistant to corporate buy out... 

best cheers, 
Sarah 

--- Trebor  Scholz <trebor at thing.net> wrote:

> >Well, isn't this 'problem' simply a result of too
> many people using
> >the products of these large corporations -- we do,
> after all, have a 
> >choice.
> 
> Yes, but Del.icio.us, Writely, Odeo, or BubbleShare
> were unknown little
> web places when I started using them. The takeover
> came much later and
> you may not even notice until the ads start to show
> up.
> 
> <http://www.writely.com>
> <http://www.bubbleshare.com/upload>
> <http://del.icio.us>
> <http://odeo.com/tags/activism/>
> 
> >Somehow the call to "buy local" becomes a bit
> revolutionary -- and 
> >applies the same for the net (without the implied
> geographic 
> >limitation) -- what about using small ISP's,
> setting up private 
> >servers for mail, lists, irc?  Of course, one then
> has to deal with 
> >renting local network lines and such, but...
> 
> The next small (local) thing is often tomorrow¹s big
> business. 
> It¹ll be tempting for your neighbor who built a good
> web tool to not
> hand it over in exchange for life in the sun. Local
> does not mean
> alternative or autonomous. The blogosphere still has
> pockets that are
> not flooded with advertisement. But how much longer
> will how much of
> that prevail? Indymedia is a suitable example. 
> 
> Dorothy Kidd in her hopeful essay ³Indymedia.org- A
> Communication
> Commons² points out that the first IMC site was set
> up in Seattle in
> 1999 at the occasion of the meeting of the World
> Trade Organization with
> a massive presence of social movements. Groups had
> called for an
> "end-run around the information gatekeepers" to
> produce autonomous
> media. Very few papers had discussed the WTO meeting
> beforehand. In only
> three month and $30.000 from donations the IMC
> organizers in Seattle
> created a "multimedia people's newsroom." The IMC is
> non-hierarchical
> and based on networked distributed decision making.
> Journalists were
> able to use print, radio, video, and photos from the
> perspective of the
> perspective of the democratic globalization
> protesters. Ex-Microsoft
> employee Rob Glaser donated technical expertise and
> equipment to make
> this happen. IMC had the latest streaming technology
> to distribute
> video, audio, text, and images. [1]
> 
> However, some questions come up once reality sinks
> in. How does the IMC
> sustain its resources? Also beyond the IMC these
> questions resurface:
> 
> Who can afford to share their time? Dependence on
> volunteers is hard to
> sustain. How can you sustain long-term
> collaborations without secured
> financing? Maintaining participation requires
> enormous amounts of
> resources, energy, and time to motivate and
> encourage people. 
> 
> Also, I rarely go to Indymedia for alternative news.
> And I don¹t write
> there either. What holds many others and me back
> from participating
> regularly in such spaces?  By now, social web media
> have largely caught
> up with the open publishing technology that
> Indymedia offered in 2000, a
> few years before blogs started to blossom in 2004. I
> don¹t have
> statistics on Indymedia sites but my guess would be
> that the numbers of
> participators are on the decline. 
> 
> >'information'?  How many are net consumers of
> digital information? 
> >Somehow it seems contradictory for net consumers to
> be arguing for 
> >free consumption -- except from the position of
> consuming...
> 
> I agree with John. Learn to love a wide variety of
> possibly slower and
> less convenient, less immediate tools. Learn how to
> install and
> customize wikis yourself. Find alternatives to
> iTunes. Don¹t become too
> dependent on high bandwidth. 
> 
> But apart from these loosely related issues-- What
> kind of future do you
> all see for autonomous spaces online (and off)? What
> is left?
> 
> Also the vocabulary is critical: the terms
> ³alternative² and
> ³autonomous² are often played out against each
> other.  
> 
> Autonomous practices are self-governing practices.
> They ³bypass the
> mainstream media through experimentation with new
> forms of democratic
> communication that are relatively independent from
> corporate and
> government power.² and ³ Alternative media
> strategies are those that
> focus primarily on challenging the mainstream media
> to become more
> accountable to the publics they claim to serve...²
> writes Scott Uzelman
> in his essay ³Hard at Work in the Bamboo Garden.²  
> 
> But the concept of autonomy is hard to adhere to
> online. True
> independence is hardly possible. The cables of the
> Internet are owned
> privately. We pay an upstream service provider. The
> corporate enclosures
> online grow by the day. 
> 
> What are examples of alternative group formation
> online that lasted over
> long periods of time? I¹m not talking about
> initiatives like Adbusters
> or Paper Tiger TV that use the web in line with
> their goals. I¹m curious
> about social networking around those agendas. Just a
> few obvious
> examples:
> 
> Guerilla News Network
> <http://www.guerrillanews.com/>
> 
> Interactivist InfoExchange
> <http://slash.autonomedia.org/>
> 
> Community Activist Technology (this initiative led
> to the IMC)
> <http://www.cat.org.au/>
> 
> Which other spaces constitute online group
> formation? 
> What about weblogs? Collaborative blogs can
> certainly constitute
> community, foster online group formation. 
> 
> Mefeedia
> <http://mefeedia.com/tags/activism/>
> 
> Iraq Blog Count
> http://iraqblogcount.blogspot.com/
> 
> StreamTime
> <http://www.streamtime.org/>
> 
> Blogs by Indymedia Activists
> <http://indyblogs.protest.net/>
> 
> Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents  
> <http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542>
> 
> Many2Many
> <http://many.corante.com/>
> 
> We discussed independence here earlier in relation
> to institutional
> involvement. We are always already complicit. There
> is no spotless, pure
> white innocence.  
> 
> Scott Uzelman continues: ³Autonomous media
> strategies often involve
> establishing more democratic and participatory forms
> of television,
> radio, print, and internet-based media.² He argues
> that it is not enough
> to open the channels of mainstream media, we also
> need to radicalize the
> 
=== message truncated ===

Sarah Lewison
Visiting Artist
Conceptual and Information Arts
Art Department
San Francisco  State University

610-220-8634
www.carbonfarm.us

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