The Cyber Left: Indymedia and the making of 21st century struggle

Provoked by transformations in global capitalism and the information age, in the past decade we have witnessed the emergence of a new form of social movement, which has taken the shape of a globalized, digitized, radically democratic network formation. In preparation for the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle, activists launched the first independent media center (IMC), a physical and virtual space for the creation and distribution of grassroots journalism. The cornerstone of Seattle\u27s IMC was an open publishing Web platform that offered new ways to speak and be heard, and new channels to coordinate a global movement. Seattle\u27s IMC model captured the imagination of activists, journalists and citizens leading to the development of IMCs worldwide and the birth of the indymedia movement. Today, indymedia claims over 200 locally based collectives publishing news (Internet, radio, print and TV) in 30 languages on six continents—making it the largest alternative communications infrastructure in the world. This transnational, networked social formation brings into focus a complex age where the local and global are increasingly entwined in novel ways and the informational tools of global capitalism are reappropriated to connect an emergent globalization from below. Based on these spatial, strategic and organizational shifts, I argue that indymedia is exemplar of a new stage in social movements, which I call the Cyber Left. Through this study, I analyze the way communication tools have shifted spatial and temporal configurations within movements, creating new possibilities for organizational structure, democratic governance and a post-identity politics strategy. The study also sheds light on the way technology and the increasingly trans-bordered flow of people, capital, and resistance transforms seemingly stable notions of the state, citizenship, and social class. In my research I look at the Philadelphia node of Indymedia (one of the first and most successful) as it intersects with local, national and global expressions of the network. My fieldwork involved both traditional and virtual ethnographic methods to grapple with the fluid nature of political structures and cultural forms which, tied to new technologies, are at once situated locally while traveling globally