On one side A/I was based on the assumption that new technologies were acquiring a dan- gerously invasive role in people’s life, and the first years were spent on a campaign for the use of digital tools which kept the user in control, like Linux. On the other, however, A/I also shared a literary intuition that communication, augmented by the same technologies, was starting to carry more weight at events and thus it was necessary to concern themselves with alternative media, and not just computing.
Bomboclat:It was during those years that the figure of the media activist emerged. Politics and technology merged, thanks to the glue of the digital possibilities. From the idea of pro- ducing alternative media we switched to the idea of being the media. Defining propaganda as everything that comes from television, we created our own concept of media.
A/I was a sort of happy meeting between skills and content, an experience that reflected the historic transition when technology and communication merged into the wider cognitive area known today as information technology. In the months in which the collective formed, almost every participant was found to be also involved with Indymedia,102 an information source meant to be both organized and shared.
Blicero:Indymedia had a first phase in which it was essentially managed from Bologna as part of a hoax, then it was a large network of people based in the hacklabs. This same network, that later that gave life to A/I, joined Indymedia on the understanding that communication managed in this way reduced the capacity for the hegemonic control by specific subjects, and Indymedia was a tool that could be used equally by everyone, in contrast to radio, TV, or newspapers. This was possible because of how the tool itself worked. It could be done – it was a goal that could be pursued. That is more or less what we did.
102 Indymedia: Although Indymedia.org debuted in December 1999 during the Seattle protests against the WTO, its software was developed in Australia the previous summer for use during the global 18 June protest against the G8. This system was called ‘Active’ and it enabled what was called ‘open publishing’ where users could write and upload their news directly onto a continuously updated web page. The events of 1999 took place against the background of increased international coordination between activists protesting the most visible institutions of the neoliberal consensus: EU, G8, WTO, etc. This new internationalism and attention to trade questions had been catalyzed by the Zapatistas in
Chiapas, Mexico. They brought their supporters together in a series of gatherings, or encuentros, held
from 1996 onwards, out of which emerged People’s Global Action (PGA), a key organizational node
for the anti-globalization movement. The Zapatista encuentros also facilitated a fresh round of coalition
building; their broad appeal brought together many groups without any history of collaboration. These new connections were visible in Seattle and described in the media as an alliance of Teamsters and Turtles. The Indymedia.org domain was registered and set up to provide live coverage of events on the streets in Seattle. It was such a success that the site was maintained and other regional sites began to spring up all over the world. Some time later it developed a process whereby prospective local operators had to apply and be approved by existing participants, as there was a fear that the brand had become so powerful that its use required some level of management.
For Indymedia, the testing ground was the anti-globalization demonstrations, the beating heart of internationalism103 in this period. But it built on the many local efforts from the people in Bologna, Sgamati, and those organized in Naples by the Rete Campana – the network of the anti-globalization movement in the region of Campania.104
Man0:In March of 2001, there was the No Global Forum here in Naples. The event opposed the eponymous summit held by the OECD in the city. For the first time, we started to contem- plate confusedly the use of different supporting technologies. For example, we registered a series of domains that could actually be from the OECD, like globalforum.it. Probably at the time there wasn’t yet a requirement on the part of these economic institutions to create a site for every event. We found this domain and guys from various social centers said to me, ‘Look, we got this domain, we can create the site and at the same time we want to organize
a media center’.
On the 17 March 2001, during the demonstration against the OECD’s Global Forum on E-government in Naples, there was heavy fighting between police and protesters. The violence against the protesters – who were beaten throughout the course of the march, and suffered reprisals in back alleys and torture in police stations – was splashed across the front page of the newspapers.
Man0:The No Global Forum didn’t go very well, but we did come up with the idea of a media center. At the time nobody in Naples talked about Indymedia; some were very distrustful whereas to others it just seemed like total crap… however it was the first attempt to do some- thing of that kind. Basically we put computers on a network with a set of free software tools and made them available to everybody. The media center was set up at the S.K.A. squatted laboratory and was the first time I participated in such a thing, where we tried to make this technology available for a ‘cause’. At the same time, I started to make contact with other Italian political groups on IRC.
The events of Naples showed that the level of the political conflict between police and anti-glo- balization protesters had notably increased. On the media front, they attracted the atten- tion of half the world’s press, above all due to the episodes of violence where people were indiscriminately beaten in the street. But on the digital front these events illustrated that the movement had a common need to publish and circulate photos, audio, and video produced by protesters, in a way that was less confusing, more efficient, shared, and at a national level. The tool to do it was already there, it was Indymedia Italy. The tech support was there too, it
was the hacker community.
103 Internationalism refers in general to the desire for coordination and cooperation on a basis of rejecting national chauvinism. In the case of social movements it generally refers more to the idea of working class internationalism; that capitalism is a global system and that workers must unite internationally if they are to defeat it. The most famous early manifestation of this thinking was the Zimmerwald Conference held by socialists in Switzerland in 1915, where participants from all over Europe came together to repudiate WW1 as an imperialist war with which the working class should have no truck. 104 Campania: Region surrounding Naples in the south of Italy.