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Getting serious about anarchy online
By Mitzi Waltz
It was probably an NSA man's worst nightmare: a roomful of
dedicated anarchists swapping e-mail addresses, planning new
online linkages and surreptitiously swapping PGP tips.
England, Scotland, Spain, the U.S., Germany, Italy, Holland,
Northern Ireland and a few other places we'd best not
mention were all represented. In a meeting hall papered with
outrageous images created by Homocult, a radical working-
class queer art group that specializes in shock-therapy
graphics, some hovered over ongoing Internet and BBS demos,
others scribbled down "how to get online" basics displayed
on wall charts and the rest plied the Internet old-timers
present with dozens of questions. Scottish brogues and
Midwest nasality combined with the insistent beat of a Nine
Inch Nails tape and the arrival of several cases of beer to
crank up the noise level. Who's got the cheapest connections
in the Netherlands? Any recommendations for Mac BBS
software? What do I need to check out WorldWideWeb sites?
Too many questions, but somehow they all got answered. Small
groups soon formed to discuss individual interests and
projects-in-progress, bring newbies up to speed on the
basics, or pass on sensitive information. Tallboys of
Strongbow's Super fueled the spirit of camaraderie for
several hours, and three more workshops were instantly
scheduled to handle the overflow and cover special concerns.
Carefully orchestrating for chaos. Pulled together by a
handful of above-ground activists, many of them meeting IRL
for the first time, "Anarchy Online 101" was part of a 10-
day anarchist convention held in London late last year.
Organization was handled online, primarily through the good
graces of the multinational Spunk Archive crew. The Archive
is a repository of anarchist writings maintained on the Net,
sort of the anti-authoritarian's Gutenberg Project. Matt
Fuller from London's Fast Breeder BBS, itself a hotbed of
digital thoughtcrime, led off with a critical look at
digital media for the "culturally engaged," with on emphasis
on DIY. For Fuller and the other anarchist sysops present,
getting beyond preaching to the converted is the key reason
for creating online meeting places. "Fast Breeder gets a lot
of kids from the suburbs, and people who have access to the
networks through work," Fuller said. "It's a way to link up
with people who aren't political activists or who at least
aren't involved overtly within political groups." It's also
a way to let would-be hackers know that there's more to
anarchism than a disk-full of half-baked anarchy files. "We
have to develop a new kind of politics to deal with
information economies," where companies ostensibly based in
the First World farm out work to data-laborers in Eastern
Europe, India or Ireland, Fuller said. If the goal of
business is total control over the workforce, these
arrangements seem ideal - workers don't live together, don't
know each other, may not even speak the same language. They
do, however, have the ability to communicate in new ways,
and to "strike" using methods that have nothing to do with
picket signs. "We want to create a space online where
hackers can meet up with people who are interested in
systems, in getting the tools to change them," he said. In
an era when one guy with a modem can do more to bring down
the infrastructure in a few minutes of love-bombing the
phone system than 10 commandos with well-aimed AKs, hackers
definitely have those tools. This crew was here to start the
process of redistributing that wealth of knowledge.
Bypassing media monopolies. Communication was also on the
agenda. There's been a lot of talk since the Net's earliest
days about its potential as an alternative news medium, and
it's certainly proven to be the fastest way to spread an
unfounded rumor worldwide. But hard news? Consider the case
of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico. When the mainstream media
was just getting out the word that some wacky peasant revolt
thing was going on in Southern Mexico, EZLN documents were
already appearing on the Internet in their entirety. The
data took a convoluted trip. At a school somewhere very
close to the uprising, a sympathizer sent electronic
versions of the communiques to several friendly addresses at
American universities. Within hours, Workers Solidarity
Movement, an Irish anarchist group based in Dublin, received
the texts in English via a mailing list originating in the
U.S. WSA shot them off to Glasgow Anarchist Group in
Scotland, which republished them widely online and also set
up an Italian translation that went out on the Net. "A
couple of days later we got e-mail from Moscow, where they
had read it in Italian and wanted to know if we could send
them a copy in English," said Iain MacSaorsa of GAG. And the
process continued - messy but highly effective, and
surprisingly fast. Within four days, complete sets of the
guerrillas' communiques were available worldwide, often
accompanied by historic commentary and in several languages.
A supporting picket action called by a US-based solidarity
group was able, via instant communication with counterparts
in Europe, to set off coordinated demonstrations at
embassies in the West. Twenty days after the first Zapatista
action, an international information network was in place
and humming along merrily. For anarchists, the Zapatista
rebellion held special significance, since its "army" relies
on a non-heirarchical structure and makes decisions by
consensus. It's been a long time - not since the Spanish
Civil War - that an openly anarchist-influenced group has
had a reasonable hope of holding and protecting territory.
Can using computer networks to get the word out offer them
the opportunity for protection via the court of world
opinion? It's a test case, but a deadly serious one for
those on the front lines. It made this meeting most timely.
Hands-on, heads up. Participants leave with pages of e-mail
addresses and visions of community in their heads. It's more
than visions, really. Just pulling the conference together
created one group that will keep on communicating. Spunk
pulled in more contributors to keep its archives growing,
and cemented plans for interactive communications as well.
The Spanish anarchists in attendance are already setting up
a network of anarchist BBSes and figured out the best way to
hook them up to the Internet from information received here.
The Germans have a similar system running. A whole lot of
people will be testing encryption programs over the next few
days. Looks like somebody finally took that cliche about
the "anarchistic structure of computer networks" seriously.
Look out aboveI
___Resources___ Many local BBSes and online services have an
anarchist discussion group hidden away somewhere -
PeaceNet's is particularly interesting. Here's just a few
more @ resources: Usenet newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy
(dominated by anarcho-capitalists, reader beware),
alt.politics.radical-left, misc.activism.progressive,
alt.zines AAA Web - news and announcements mailing list.
Send "subscribe" message to aaa-web@GNU.AI.MIT.edu The
Anarchy List - anarchist discussion mailing list, currently
flame-infested. Send "subscribe" message to anarchy-
list@CWI.NL El Lokal, books and music in Spanish,
ellokal@pangea.upc.es Extreme Books, books in English, send
any message to catalog@mailer.extremebooks.com for catalog
Freie ArbeiterInnen Union (German autonomist info via WWW) -
http://anarch.ping.de/FAU Glasgow Anarchist Group -
cllv13@ccsun.strath.ac.uk Practical Anarchy Online,
newsletter: international @ news and analysis - subscription
requests to cardell@lysator.liu.se Spunk Press Archive - e-
mail spunk-info-request@lysator.liu.se, go WWW at
http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Janson/spunk/Spunk_Home.html,
gopher to gopher etext.archive.umich.edu or FTP to
etext.archive.umich.edu (/pub/Politics/Spunk) The Seed
(alternative info via WWW) -
http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/homes/louise/seed2.html Workers
Solidarity Movement (N. Ireland) - an64739@anon.enet.fi