[HacktionLab] Help with Indymedia talk

[Charlie Harvey]

On 17/07/2024 22:13, Mike Harris wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> I’m going to be giving a talk on Indymedia at this year’s Green Gathering.
> 
> My plan is to draw on my personal experience of 5 events of 5 years, from the Horizone Camp in Stirling for the G8 Summit in 2005 to the Climate Camp at Blackheath in 2009 as a view of the fall of Indymedia.  I’ll cover also where it came from, look at it’s heyday (again through personal experience), look at some of the factors behind its demise, and then look at “so what?” Or rather where are we at today? And what’s next?
> 
> I’d really like to gather your inputs on any of the following:
> 
> - what has replaced Indymedia in your opinion?  What platforms, services, approaches do we have to do filling the gap?

Indymedia was both a self publishing platform and an activist media
project.

Self publishing has pretty much been taken over by the surveillance
capitalist social media companies - the glimmer of hope is with the
federated tools, like Ben said.

Activist media seems still to exist, albeit that rather than a federated
collective of collectives like indymedia aspired to be it is more
disparate groups doing their own thing - Novara, counterpunch, etc.

> - what are we lacking? What have we lost?

For a while it felt like indymedia could be a counter-force to the
corporate media. Some time after that era (post Heathrow climate camp,
maybe?) it felt like a lot of activists started falling in love with
"being in the Guardian" as a proxy for effective direct action.

There is theory of change that imagines the number of people reading
your press release is a better way to measure the effectiveness of your
action than factors like econmomic damage to the target, conversations
with the workers, signatures on a petition, or the traditional outcomes
that organizers cared about.

In that sort of analysis, indymedia was pretty minor compared to being
in the papers or on telly. If you've been on telly, the bosses will take
you seriously. The government might even agree to have a meeting with
you. I believe this line of thinking led to the sort of actions that we
see extinction rebellion and just stop oil taking -- often publicity
stunts to get in the media rather than direct action against a target.

Either way indymedia lost its base.

The original idea of a sort of prefigurative politics of escaping
corporate controlled media and building our own proved less exciting
than trying to play the existing system. Around this time
surveillance-based social media saw mass market adoption and, of course,
self-publishing there seemed like it would garner more attention for
activist causes than self publishing on now-aging indy infrastructure.

I'm not going to say it was entirely that, because there was a lot of
internal stuff that sealed indymedia's fate. But I think a big enough
part of the audience just moved on from the idea of DIY media being an
important part of social change.

> - do you have any ideas for what we could do in the future? How do you see the future?

[*] We should start uncovering better ways of overthrowing corporate
controlled capitalist media by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this activism we would come to value:

* Self-hosting and federation over corporate cloud hosting and
centralization
* DIY citizen journalism over media gatekeeping
* Meaningful direct action over getting in the Guardian
* Total chaos over following a plan

Cheers,

[*] With (insincere) apologies to the agile manifesto

-- 
Charlie Harvey
IT Director
New Internationalist

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