Reflections on the inheritances of Indymedia in the age of surveillance and social media

While the World Social Forum convened in Montreal during early August 2016, a group of media activists, community and tech organizers, and academics converged at McGill University for the World Forum of Free Media. Although a diverse range of topics related to independent media was discussed during the 6-day conference, a series of panels investigated the inheritances of Indymedia in the age of surveillance and social media. The organizers noted how

our discussions hinged on how the need for a network of independent media in today’s digitized and interconnected landscape is intricately linked to the need for an explicit political stance regarding the foundations on which such a network will be built . . . (Indymedia Montreal, 2018)

Yet what exactly should constitute this political stance was never clearly decided.

Although a series of interesting efforts by Indymedia still persist in places like in Los Angeles and Urbana Champaign and have developed in others like in Sub-Saharan Africa, an ambiguity has always riddled Indymedia’s central purpose. Should it be a direct mouthpiece for movement struggles? Is it to foster citizen journalism that reports upon movement struggles but is not identical to them? Should it privilege anarchist practices in media making that champion non-hierarchical relations and consensus-based decision-making? Is it to foster an independent media-making model for marginalized voices that have historically been underrepresented by commercial media? Each local chapter of Indymedia manifested different priorities based upon its geographical locale, its organizers’ inclinations, and other immediate pressures of the moment. It is not surprising that these various perspectives would not be resolved during the McGill conference.

As has been widely documented, Indymedia held many limitations such as its reliance upon free labor that privileged those with more resources to consistently participate, a cultural milieu that at times made it difficult for outsiders and non-White community members to participate, and an unwieldy anarchist politics that could get mired in procedure and lead to reactive rather than proactive stances (Wolfson, 2014). With that said, Indymedia made three central contributions that take on an increased importance during a time where organizers and activists rely on social media even while scandals abound regarding its incessant data mining and surveillance by law enforcement, corporations, and other political operatives.

First, Indymedia asserted a non-commercial web infrastructure that both shielded its participants from surveillance by the government and championed innovative developments like open publishing that allowed more people to participate in distributing their ideas and images through a global network. Despite repeated efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Department of Justice to seize IP addresses from Indymedia servers, the organization’s reliance upon independent servers and the disabling of tracking software provided added protection for participants from the chilling effect of government surveillance (Tempelin, 2009). This takes on added resonance in light of the Department of Justice recent demand of the IP addresses of 1.3 million users who visited the DisruptJ20.org website, which served as an information hub for protests during Trump’s presidential inauguration (Gibbons, 2017). Although a judge limited the information the Department of Justice could seize from the site, the government’s efforts nonetheless starkly reveal the trail of vulnerable information organizers leave when mobilizing online and the extent of governmental efforts in procuring it.

Similarly, Indymedia’s open publishing allowed anyone with Internet access to post articles, pictures, and videos, signaling an advance in harnessing the interactive nature of web technology and prefiguring functions commonly found on social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter. Although IMC websites varied regarding how open their publishing would be with some sites having no editors at all, others employed gatekeepers to purge politically reactionary posts, IMC provided a forum for ideas and images that commercial news outlets typically ignored or marginalized.

Indymedia’s championing of its non-commercial web infrastructure, however, could at times lead to technological deterministic stances that suggested the Internet was inherently democratic and non-hierarchical and that technology itself provided the key to liberation. But even within these limitations, the structure of the IMC website differentiated itself in important ways from how open publishing manifested itself on commercial social media, which brings us to our second major contribution that Indymedia yielded: it provided an infrastructure where sympathetic reporting on local and global struggles converged and received wide coverage.

At the height of the Indymedia movement in 2006, there were 200 local chapters, largely in urban centers. These local chapters folded into national hubs such as Indymedia Brazil or Indymedia Germany, which all converged on the global Indymedia website and received support from activists and media makers across the transnational network. This network of independent media, at once local, national, and global, facilitated storytelling that allowed activists, audiences, and independent journalists to imagine the multifaceted and at times connected nature of struggle. A reader or writer could move effortlessly across the world following a particular day of resistance, such as the F15 protests against the Iraq War. Through Indymedia’s rendering of F15, this enmeshed audience was able to see the richness of a particular action in Cyprus or Mexico City, while connecting those actions to an overall picture of a world in revolt. In that movements today are overly reliant only on social media platforms that emphasize the particular and individualistic, and we are less able to comprehend the interrelationship of struggles across place and time, it is a significant step back for movement media. In particular, we lose our ability to imagine transnational movements and to foster their interlinkages. Consider how the struggles in North Africa and the Middle East that began in 2010 would have been captured and connected and how they would have been linked to the Indignados or OWS in 2011, if we had a global Indymedia network to tell the stories and build the connections. Or, consider the Global Climate Strike on September 20, 2019. Stories and reports abounded regarding it, but no media infrastructure knitted the local strikes together and connected them, in order to put the whole of the day in perspective for an engaged and committed audience. Indymedia facilitated our imagination of a wider world of struggle. This imagination is curtailed as movements are reliant on contemporary corporate social media platforms, which encourage the particular over the global, the individualistic over the collective.

While the Indymedia network cultivated our understanding of wider networks of struggle, it also held certain political and technological limitations. Those outside of the social movements, remained largely unaware of the Indymedia site. Social media clearly has a much vaster audience than Indymedia could ever imagine. Sites like Facebook and Twitter pilfered Indymedia’s innovations and improved upon them by producing a more engaging and easy to navigate interface. In addition, social media successfully masked its predatory reliance upon data mining for profit (at least until recently) by championing a sense of community and individual empowerment that proved alluring to a younger generation (Couldry, 2015).

Yet, a whole host of issues arises when community organizers become overly dependent upon commercial social media infrastructures. Other than the vulnerability to surveillance by law enforcement that organizers can face, social media can impute its commercial logic upon movement organizing. Thomas Poell and Van Dijck (2015), for example, notice how social media prioritizes short-term events over sustained coverage. As a result, long-term struggles that need to build infrastructure and community outreach have to rely on other, more traditional on-the-ground practices that are better suited for such goals. Furthermore, as Jeffrey S. Juris (2012) theorizes, social media prioritizes the logic of aggregation over that of networking. This makes it even more difficult to maintain communities who have never bonded face-to-face and shared more than arbitrary posts with one another. Many film and media studies scholars emphasize that more often than not, offline organizing accompanies online campaigns. The binary often posed by commentators between clicktivism and allegedly ‘real’ organizing, mostly arises from those commentators’ ignorance of what is occurring beyond the digital realm. However, with that said, a genuine tension exists between the imperatives of the commercial logic of social media with that of sustained movement building.

In addition, despite journalists and many academics writing about the most successful online activist campaigns, these examples are the outliers, not the norm. Moreover, even the successes often hold important caveats and warnings about using social media as an activist platform. Most scholars studying social movements’ use of online platforms – both commercial and not – confront a vast mediascape of failures and abandoned efforts. These failures arise from multiple causes. Organizers often lack the skills in playing algorithms to their favor or the understanding in employing web-based platforms in strategic ways that complement their other organizing efforts.

Some less experienced organizers also fall for the allure of the digital sublime. As Vincent Mosco (2004) observes, this myth assumes a frictionless online environment where most people are ‘‘jacked in’ to new communication and information technologies, to networks that link people in more than the traditional top-down vertical ways . . . [and] transform power as we know it’ (p. 99). However, to both have a skill set in successfully negotiating online mobilizing and dedicated resources in maintaining a vibrant web presence is a full-time job that many organizations lack as they struggle to develop their on-the-ground community-building infrastructure. Furthermore, the success of online activism is often dependent on aligning with a specific historical conjuncture that can make an organizing campaign resonate with wider audiences. The financial crash of 2007 and the Occupy Movement, for example, provided the momentum for various organizations addressing economic inequality to gain traction in their campaigns both online and off (Robé, 2020). But for every Indignados or Mosireen Collective, we have countless failures littering the web. We need to keep this in mind to temper discussions and analysis of social movement’s utilization of online platforms.

The final contribution Indymedia provided was in establishing momentum around independent media making and fostering behind-the-scenes connections that continue to influence much contemporary media activism. This is routinely overlooked since there is a dearth of longitudinal studies that track the ebb and flow of media activist organizations and their connections with each other over any sustained period. But as John D.H. Downing (2013) has observed, what might appear dormant during a movement’s time-span might actually be a fertile period ‘for reflection, critique, regrouping and redefinition’ (p. 25). One notices such a process at work as Indymedia lost momentum only to be supplanted by other media organizations.

Despite Indymedia’s decline due to numerous factors like the fracturing of the alter-globalization movement, growing state repression, and technological obsolescence with a website that failed to keep pace with technological advances that commercial social media rapidly incorporated, the critical momentum that Indymedia initiated carried over into other independent media efforts. Jay Sand of Philly Indymedia noted in 2011,

Indymedia was a laboratory of how to organize and what lessons people learned from it. Recent developments are them applying such lessons from their organizing and non-organizing lives. Whether it is another twenty years before there is a nonhierarchical organizing, its roots will have passed through Indymedia. (Sand, 2011, personal communication)

We can see these inheritances in groups like Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia, Mobile Voices in Los Angeles, the Canadian Media Co-op Movement, and more recently, Unicorn Riot in Minneapolis.

Unicorn Riot (2015), for example, might appear to be a relatively new independent media organization. But many of its members witnessed the importance of Twin Cities Indymedia during the 2008 Republican National Convention in covering the state repression wielded against organizers and independent journalists. ‘It was such an eye-opening experience’, Niko Georgiades, one of Unicorn Riot’s founders, observes,

They’re raiding journalists houses before it [the convention] happened; they’re raiding people’s apartments before it happened . . . There was a lot of shit that really from that more so radicalized me into a media maker, and half of Unicorn Riot was there. (Georgiades, 2019, personal communication)

The other half of Unicorn Riot developed their chops by livestreaming Occupy Wall Street through the group Global Revolution, which was led by Vlad Teichberg, a derivatives trader gone rogue who abandoned Wall Street to form an independent media group called the Glass Bead Collective in 2001 (Marantz, 2011; Teichberg, 2010, personal communication). The group provided video coverage of many counter-summit protests, most notably the 2004 RNC in New York City and 2008 RNC in Minneapolis-St. Paul. During the 2008 RNC, Glass Bead teamed up with Twin Cities Indymedia to produce the film Terrorizing Dissent (2008) that chronicled in detail the repression against organizers and independent media. Sections of the film were used in support rallies for the RNC 8, the name given to members of the RNC Welcoming Committee who had set-up a counter-summit organizing website against the convention. By providing footage of well-spoken, college-aged men and women caught in the maw of over-exuberant state prosecutors and police, the video challenged the state’s characterization of them as deranged anarchist set on overthrowing civilization (Robé, 2016). But the main point here is that future members of Unicorn Riot who were involved in Global Revolution nonetheless had indirect links to Indymedia through Teichberg’s work with the Glass Bead Collective.

Unicorn Riot provides an interesting example of a group that fuses elements of old Indymedia while harnessing the power of social media. They run an independent platform at https://unicornriot.ninja/ yet vigorously promote their coverage on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. The webpage is an inventive combination of print journalism, new media, and video documentation. It consolidates text to a relative minimum by hyperlinking to lengthier articles. Embedded videos run roughly around 5 minutes with longer footage often relegated to hyperlinks. They livestream events with footage that is then archived on their site for future reference. They became best known for their coverage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville since they gained access to alt-right organizers’ discussions planning the event on the Discord platform favored by gamers, Internet trolls, and the alt-right (Corbett, 2019).

Yet much like Indymedia in the past, Unicorn Riot struggles to diversify their membership beyond a mostly White constituency and to maintain sustained involvement since in part pay for contributors remains low. In addition, because half their membership is located in Minneapolis and the other half is scattered throughout the United States in Philadelphia, Boston, and the Bay Area, they rely on SMS and email to communicate, which is not necessarily ideal in building group solidarity if not regularly accompanied with face-to-face gatherings (Georgiades, 2019, personal communication). Nonetheless, they represent an innovative and vital new independent media organization that has been cited by The New York Times and The Intercept and holds great respect from the communities they cover. ¹

With this said, however, while there are some interesting and important experiments that have emerged in recent years, the loss of Indymedia represents a significant vacuum for reporting and storytelling. Indymedia offered a global tiered infrastructure for media making, and at its best, Indymedia offered consistent reporting of stories otherwise submerged from view. If we are in fact in a growing cycle of struggle, we have to ask ourselves, what do the movements of today need to grow and flourish as we fight the growing power of capital and White supremacy. Indymedia offers many lessons. Indymedia activists prioritized security and they cultivated individual and collective storytelling. And importantly, they engineered an infrastructure that helped us understand and build our local communities while at once imagining a world on fire. How do we recreate these practices today? How do we rebuild the infrastructure of a global media outlet embedded in our movements and struggles? What is the relationship of this infrastructure to our movements and movement organizations? Finally, how do we rebuild these practices and infrastructures, while not recreating the structural problems that plagued the Indymedia experiment of yesterday? Although some recent independent media organizations hint at ways forward, much work needs to continue in developing an independent media infrastructure that can better represent our transnational struggles for a better world.