|
|
 |
|
Indymedia's Independence: From Activist Media to Free Software
Biella Coleman
The global, decentralized, grassroots network applies open source principles to reporting the news.
I. INDYMEDIA AND FREE SPEECH[1]
The Debut and Growth of The IMCs
 Indymedia[2] is an aggregate of loosely affiliated activist media centers scattered across the planet. Its ascension captures the confounding contradictions of modern globalization. While forces backed by the FCC centripetally consolidate media outlets into a few corporate behemoths, a countervailing current pulls some news media in the opposite direction; Independent Media Centers ("IMCs") are a prime example. A confluence of opportune events led to the creation of the first IMC in Seattle. These colliding rivulets included the success of the Seattle 1999 anti-WTO protests, accessible web and Free Software technologies, a growing public reliance on online news, and the insight and labor of activists. Internet technologies have been the basis of Indymedia's operations and growth, and in many ways the political objectives of the IMCs are reflected by their use and production of Free Software. The deployment of Free Software web publishing systems has also become integral to the IMCs' mission. This fascinating interconnection between political values and the technological context of the IMC emerges from an analysis of Indymedia's development over its first five years.
Indymedia centers are run as local collectives that manage and coordinate a news website; some also operate an affiliated media resource center for local activists. These websites give any user of the site (regardless of whether or not they are part of the collective) the ability to create, publish, and access news reports of various forms – text, photo, video, and audio. The result is a free online source for unfiltered, direct journalism by activists, sometimes uploaded in the heat of the moment during a demonstration or political action. Although individual centers are autonomous, each is connected to the others through a global infrastructure of technology and workers who share a commitment to open publishing. Where traditional journalism holds editorial policies that are hidden in the hands of a few trained experts, Indymedia provides the alternative of "open publishing," a democratic process of creating news that is transparent and accessible to all, challenging the separation between consumers and producers of news.
The emergence of the first IMC marked the beginning of a different kind of globalization, one deliberately constructed by activists as an alternative to the system of global media privateers and the neoliberal logic of free market idealism; they imagined a "globalization from below" challenging the assertions made by politicians that free markets naturally lead to economic development and democracy.
At the time of formulation, the initial organizers did not architect Indymedia as a model for export. Yet, this ingenious idea- to become the media instead of relying on or reforming the established media- has taken hold worldwide. In the first 10 months, 33 IMCs appeared in over 10 countries on four continents. In the last year Indymedia has been setting up popular media labs and training events in the West Bank, in Andean indigenous and campesino communities, in MST landless peasant camps in Brazil, in squatted banks and piquetero community centers in Argentina. Today there are more than 110 IMCs around the world, on 6 continents, in over 35 countries, and using over 22 languages. Now, just as we can point to what has been aptly coined as the "digital Wal-martization" of the "mainstream" media, we can also web-click into hundreds of distinctly textured autonomous nodes of media.[3]
Along with the multi-voiced content, the symbolic presence of these collectives speaks volumes against the One Man Media Show. Instead of the flat world of unexamined patriotism, free-market idealism, rational choice theory, and bland party politics doled out nightly on the major network channels, Indymedia provides a stream of localized voices that rarely find their way into the mass media. The IMCs manage to do this by cultivating a degree of cohesiveness within an otherwise culturally, linguistically and politically diverse arena, the culture of progressive activism. The assumption is that current economic globalization systems can only be successfully confronted by a unity that transcends the boundaries of nations, political affiliations, identities, and narrow interests.
IMC activists use both editorial and technological innovations to create avenues for expression as a means to achieve the political ends directed by local collectives.
|
Indymedia also draws from a long history of Internet collaborative sociality and technological production, notably the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. This movement is a complex aggregate of social practices, licensing schemes, technical methodologies, and philosophies through which hackers around the world collaborate in Internet-based volunteer associations to produce "free" software. In distinction to proprietary software, Free Software legally provides its users the right to use, copy, distribute, and modify the underlying directions of software, source code.[4] Although companies and Free Software developers can charge for the medium of software distribution and support services, the underlying source code always has to remain freely accessible. As such, FOSS technologies are also a much cheaper and robust alternative to proprietary software.
Low-cost FOSS technologies, like servers and email clients, have been indispensable to the technical operations of the volunteer-run IMCs.[5] Concurrently, FOSS free speech philosophy resonated with the emergent IMC commitment to open publishing. Out of these interconnections, Indymedia has embraced a rather unique political position, recalibrating the typical understanding of free speech as an inherent value guaranteed primarily through legal protection. Mindful of the economic and political conditions that constrain speech, IMC activists use both editorial and technological innovations to create avenues for expression as a means to achieve the political ends directed by local collectives.
In this section I provide an overview of the unique political culture of DIY media and unity-in-diversity by evaluating its development over time. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus claimed the only constant was change, the flow of a river iconic of the inherent flux of life. Alongside the natural world of streams and mountains, social entities are also subject to growth and turbulence yet they are beholden to a different "law" than that of natural law. Human deliberation, action, debate, and struggle are the stewards of change. Approaching this networked media movement through the vantage point of directed temporal transformation reveals a wealth of insight about the unique political culture built by Indymedia as well as these "times of globalization." It is as much a social precipitate of a peculiar historical moment as it is a political vehicle whose purpose is to usher in historical transformation.
A Nascent Response
The initial explosion and spread of Indymedia are unforeseen products of the liberatory possibilities of networked technologies during an era of aggressive neoliberal economics.[6] The idea that an unbridled market can resolve the minutest social problem is a long standing "religious belief." As Karl Polyani convincingly explained over fifty years ago, economic liberalism "evolved into a veritable faith in man's secular salvation through a self-regulating market" (1944:135). Whether we now refer to it as economic globalization, neoliberalism, or the Washington Consensus, its foundational principle remains starkly simple: let the economy rein loose and everything will fall into place.
This simple theoretical formula belies a more complicated and laborious history. Multinational corporations, transnational legal bodies and corollary trade treaties, and massive media christenings, all with tremendous geo-political power, have been indispensable to sustaining a reality that ideologically occludes American protectionism and unchecked military aggression enabled by these structures.
Despite its ability to coerce nation-states into development restructuring programs (often in the name of democracy), neoliberal policies and ideology are met with strong forms of dissent. Indymedia first emerged out of historic struggles against neoliberal logic. In the mid- to late-1990s, opposition among various groups took place across the globe. Ya Basta!, The Direct Action Network, and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) were notable players, while the first WTO protests in the streets of Seattle registered a potent, distilled version of this dissent in an area of the world where spectacular street protest had been in extended hibernation.
Aware that the mainstream media would rarely report on these passionate denunciations by diverse constituents, a decision was made to self-disseminate the news. The idea was to resolve "the necessity for communities to be controlling their own message, to really be saying for themselves their concerns" (Perlstein, 2000 WTO History Project interview)[7] and to amplify the previously dampened alternative voices by bringing people together who had before been doing similar media projects "independent" of one another. The IMC gave birth to a new type of collaborative independence.
During the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, while traditional journalists parroted statements from the Chief of Police press conference that no rubber bullets or tear gas were being used, Indymedia reporters on the street captured chilling videos and photos to the contrary. Although scooped by the on-the-street, "embedded" IMC journalists, the impact of the IMC during the WTO received praise even from mainstream media. ABC News said, "The very people who were in Seattle to fight what they believe are the ill effects of global trade have found new power in the global trade of information."[8]
The significant element was that protest organizers not only chose to enact a DIY media operation with spectacular footage, but that they could do so. Activists exploited existing Free Software technologies, such as content management systems and servers, to enact web-based technologies of news dissemination that eventually would become a template for others to follow. The cheap and accessible nature of Free Software and digital media, and a growing trend to read news online, facilitated the adoption of the IMC as a news model for other activists. It was a prime example of the politics of localization through the technologies of globalization. Right from the start, principles of local autonomy guided what would reticulate into a global network of far reaching proportions.
In Its Technological Times
Some critical theorists of capitalism claim the Internet era of cheap hardware, fast broadband connections, and global networks of communications is no cause for celebration, but rather a dire expression of virulent economic forces and ideology.[9] They challenge the idea that political and economic empowerment necessarily inhere in the assemblage of technologies (web pages, file transfer protocols, content management systems, web communities, server infrastructures, Internet Relay Chat, etc.) we tend to think of as a unitary whole, typically designated as "the Internet" or "cyberspace."
I agree that an unexamined, Utopian rhetoric of "computer revolution" may conceal more than it reveals. Information technologies are indeed made possible by massive economic inputs that contribute to the growing disparities in wealth between the rich and poor. The Internet's commercial turn in the mid 1990s opened it to the vast workings of finance capital, the service industry, and consumer capitalism. However, these critiques offer only a diluted, partial perspective of the realities of technological use. Given the ways that hackers, activists, technologists, youth groups, housewives, and patient advocates also make and deploy communication technologies to create alternative worlds of intense sociality, meaning, production, and politics within the midst of commercialization, we should be reluctant to animate the constellation of technologies that compose the Internet with a hardened, always determined nature, such as the spirit of capital. In other words, while many technologies are developed and deployed for a specific set of purposes, the use of technology in other unique contexts shapes its political valence and social possibilities as well. The IMCs give voice to the polysemic and protean quality of technological artifacts: the contextualized social manipulation of technology often far exceeds either its initially prescribed and/or currently hegemonic roles.
In 1999 the time was technologically ripe for a decentralized network of independent media nodes. In some respects, virtual and decentralized alternative media had been underway for two decades. The "lower-tech" era of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) offered thousands of virtual ponds of community-based news for users that dialed into their favorite forum. In the mid to late 1990s, this form of tele-communications was replaced by a roaring sea of many leagues: the Internet. USENET allowed mailing list style communities to mix interest-driven news with critical commentary, often ensuing in lively internal debates. Newspapers began to publish web-versions of their print publications while different web communities, such as the geek website Slashdot,[10] "recycled news." Slashdot did not generate its own news articles but linked to already existing articles on technology, science, and the law, so that the community of readers could unpack and further dissect their meaning. News in this case was as much collective, cross-cutting commentary as it was the viewpoint provided by a journalist or a newspaper. In the 1990s, news was already detaching from the formal channels of journalistic circulation in the new freedom provided by virtual spaces.
Politically minded geeks bred during the era of cheaper PC's, home-schooled programming, and virtual interactions chose to use Free Software for the implementation of the early proliferation of Indymedia centers. Mailing lists and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) – both widely available in free software versions at the time – were the main communication tools that facilitated conversation between dispersed tech-activists first establishing centers in different locations like Washington DC, Boston, London, and Seattle. The continuing vigorous expression of counter-globalization street dissent around the world boosted the desire and need to establish more of these centers. Ad hoc collaboration and charismatic energy tactically guided a transformation of what was first conceived of as an event-based ephemeral phenomenon to cover protests into permanent websites with locally affiliated collectives.
The first IMCs were established primarily by a handful of dedicated technology volunteers who collaborated with individuals interested in creating a local node. Some technology workers acted as "detectives," procuring free or low-cost server space. Others were implementers, installing and customizing platforms. A few of the IMC technology workers performed all of these tasks. Within a year, a larger, slightly more formal technology "working group" coalesced to coordinate the hefty technical tasks needed to provide, install, and maintain open publishing web-platforms, as well as the communications infrastructure, for this emerging network. This working group dedicated itself to complete various self-adopted tasks in a relatively autonomous fashion. As one long-term member of the IMC-tech working group put it, "We run according to a principle I personally like to think of as 'inverse consensus.' We do whatever needs to be done and inform the group of what was done. If no one has a problem we forge ahead, otherwise it enters a more formal process of deliberation."[11]
When activists first used technology for open publishing, they also turned to already existing Internet infrastructures and the tools provided by another relatively new social movement – that of "liberated," Free and Open Source software. For example, the first web-publishing tool, Active, was an open source project for media dissemination coded by Australian hackers. System administrators ran and installed back-end Free Software tools such as the Apache web server, the GNU mailing list manager, and the Linux operating system.
Without a doubt, Free Software has been a primary enabler and an important presence in the Indymedia movement. Use of proprietary software would have incurred prohibitive costs for a 100% volunteer association. Today all IMC network software is, by charter, Free Software, affirming the philosophical affinities for access and openness between these two domains.[12] Collaboration and coordination ensue in a similar fashion to the volunteer associations of FOSS projects, and a number of geeks move fluidly between these two dominions.
Politically minded geeks bred during the era of cheaper PC's, home-schooled programming, and virtual interactions chose to use Free Software for the early Indymedia centers.
|
Despite these interconnections and affinities, the political, philosophical, and technical purpose of these movements diverge. As noted pointedly by Mako Hill, an activist and developer intimate with both worlds, "Every piece of IMC software serves the same fundamental function – empower Internet users to be their own media – and does so by following extremely similar models."[13] Technical means are directed toward political ends. One IMC coder and technology worker feels that this well-defined technical goal leads to less contentious debates among IMC software programmers. He explained that since the IMC software "market is very small and well-defined" in comparison to that of FOSS, technical debate is less charged among IMC coders. As he stated bluntly, "if it works, it gets used."[14]
However, there are different opinions about which technologies are appropriate for achieving these political ends. This debate is reflected in the existence of multiple back-end IMC publishing tools. Programmers forked Active into SF-Active in order to use a different database. Eventually Indymedia coders programmed other similar tools from scratch, like Mir and Dada, to satisfy different legal needs and personal ambitions for open publishing. For example, Mir was originally spearheaded by German IMC tech workers to comply with the more restrictive German free speech laws, as well as for the experience of designing an entirely new platform while applying the lessons learned from a couple of years of Indymedia online publishing. While these projects are not competitors, different tech groups have clustered around the various platforms, reflecting a range of approaches to open publishing, which also allows programmers the opportunity to work with a variety of technologies and programming languages.[15]
In distinction to IMC software projects, the goal of Free Software is to craft a diverse range of quality software applications for the sake of better technology, its means closely knit with its ends. To facilitate the ongoing creation of Free Software, an underlying and legal commitment is made to guarantee that the blueprint of this software – the source code – is free for others to access and improve. Free Software developers often view expressive rights as essential to ensure the growth, quality, and progress of knowledge. FOSS developers also place a high premium on open technical production as an avenue for creative, expressive activity. They often think of coding as a type of "diligent craftsmanship" in which they imbue objects with an element of their creative self. One Debian[16] developer captured this spirit when he said: "It is hard to teach the everyman the value of free. [We] need to teach [that] free is a product of the creativity of the programmer. They sat down and they put creativity into it and they put thought into it."[17] At the core of Free Software philosophy and practice is a deep faith in the necessity and power of expressive activity that springs deep from within the individual self.
Indymedia displays a different version of openness and free speech rights than that of FOSS. Its edifice is an expression of the opinion that free speech does not only flow from legal protection, nor is free speech a right that should necessarily be valued over all other ideals. Political expression and participation is fundamentally seen as a by-product of structural conditions and the invisible workings of ideology. One IMC activist asserted that though local centers and individual activists "have different beliefs in the sanctity of free speech," many IMCs have undergone a "maturation of the free speech ideal."[18] In one respect, this maturation could be seen as a realization that provides a partial solution to Marcuse's influential, trenchant critique of free speech in Repressive Tolerance. Marcuse notes that free speech is as much about access to economic resources as it is about legal protection: "The change of influencing, in any effective way, this majority is at a price, in dollars totally out of the reach of the radical opposition. Here too, free competition and exchange of ideas have become a fare. The left has no equal voice, no equal access to mass media and their public facilities" (1965: 199).
Indymedia's current position is a less-than-uncompromising commitment to free speech. Instead it seeks to level the playing field of expression by providing a platform for that "equal voice." IMCs are altering structural conditions through the founding of "public facilities" in the form of technologies necessary for "the change of influencing."
[Continued on next page...]
Footnotes
[1] I would like to thank the Indymedia activists who spent time teaching me about the intricate workings of the IMC. In this articles their identities are kept undisclosed to protect and respect their privacy. I would also like to extend a thanks to those in #techfed for keeping me sane. In particular DMH and Hacim Tortuga keep my wandering mind and thoughts more focused and contained, also accomplished by the thoughtful advice and editing of Ken Jordan.
[2] http://indymedia.org/en/index.shtml
[3] McChesney and Nichols, 2003.
[4] These are the "four freedoms" at the base of all Free and Open Source Software. See "The Free Software Definition," at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
[5] For example, if the IMC had to rely on proprietary software to run all of their servers, costs would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[6] To be clear, the idea behind IMC did not originate with the Seattle IMC but was influenced by a long history of media activist projects within the context of political dissent such as the June the 18th anti-capitalism protests earlier.
[7] http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/Interviews/Perlstein.htm
[8] Quoted from http://www.presscampaign.org/articles_7.html
[9] For classical thinking on this position see Terranova 2000 and Webster and Frank 1999.
[10] http://slashdot.org
[11] Interview April 12, 2004.
[12] This is stated in their Principles of Unity # 9: "All IMC's shall be committed to the use of free source code, whenever possible, in order to develop the digital infrastructure, and to increase the independence of the network by not relying on proprietary software." It is worth mentioning though that many local centers still run proprietary software on desktop machines although many centers have also moved to replace desktop software with Free Software.
[13] See http://yukidoke.org/~mako/writing/mute-indymedia_software.html. This piece provides an extensive and excellent examination of the different web platforms used and coded by the IMC-Tech Collective and the different political objectives encoded in different pieces of IMC software.
[14] Internet Relay Chat Interview April 16, 2004.
[15] See http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/WebHome for a list of the different "code bases" and what they offer. Each prospective IMC looks over these code bases to learn the features provided by each (usability, presentation, portability, ease of administration, larger support network) and whether they match with their local requirements.
[16] Debian is a technically robust distribution of Linux. In existence since the early 1990s, it currently boasts over 1000 developers from around the world. See http://www.debian.org.
[17] Interview February 22, 2002.
[18] Interview April 24, 2004.
|
|
