Indymedia

“Don't hate the Media! Be the Media!” was the defining slogan for the Indymedia project, which came to prominence at the protests in Seattle that shut down the World Trade Organization summit in November 1999.

Tired of the misrepresentation of protestors as violent and dangerous, community media activists created http://Indymedia.org, a website using Active software (http://www.active.org.au) that enabled open publishing. This meant that for the first time it became possible for anyone connected to the Internet to freely upload reports, photos, and audio and video files to a website: Those concerned about the policies of the WTO had a tool to syndicate their stories directly from the streets, and issues and struggles could be shared across the globe. Radio and video reports produced by media activists [Page 750]and distributed through Indymedia made a stark contrast with the CNN coverage portraying the demonstrators violently attacking the police. “The whole world is watching!” became a chant of defiance as riot police shot pepper spray into the faces of sit-down protestors.

The Independent Media project has now grown into a global network of websites (around 160 at last count) and physical work areas, fertile spaces for grassroots media production that aims to counteract the hegemony and influence of the corporate media. Further developments from this network include print, video, and radio outputs, and peer-to-peer television webstreams, all running on free software.

The day-to-day running of Indymedia projects is an example of Do-It-Yourself culture (DIY) maintained by dedicated volunteers who contribute various skills and expertise, across various technical areas such as programming, code writing, and server maintenance, as well the more obvious skills required to create news stories such as reporting, interviewing, recording, and photographic skills. Such involvement reflects and develops collective commitment to principles of free and participatory media, and nonhierarchical organizing. Face-to-face meetings, open e-mail lists, and Internet relay chat rooms (IRC) are some of the organizational tools volunteers use to coordinate the project, with decision making operating on the principle of consensus. The Indymedia organization process aims to be open and transparent, but the complex and continually evolving structure of the project can make this process difficult to navigate and hard to engage with.

For large political mobilizations such as the mass protests called by the anti-capitalist movement against organizations such as the G8 and World Trade Organization (WTO), Indymedia collectives come together and build media centers. On such occasions governments often literally bring their truncheons down upon these projects. In the Genoa protests of 2001, for example, the Carabinieri (Italian Military Police) raided the Indymedia Centre (IMC) based in the Genoa Social Forum building, wrecking computers and hard drives where documentary evidence could be found of police brutality recorded throughout the resistance to the summit. This raid and the violent persecution of Indymedia journalists has been an ongoing legal battle ever since. Similarly, at the Evian G8 protests, once again the doors were battered down by riot police and the dedicated Indymedia center raided. In December 2004, prior to the European Social Forum taking place in London, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entered the London offices of the web-hosting company Rackspace, seizing the computer hard drives for the servers hosting 20 Indymedia websites, as well as a Linux free software distribution project. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (a U.S.-based electronic/Internet rights pressure group, http://EFF.org), took the case against a Texas court, which sent the FBI to act unlawfully on foreign soil, an action that lead to questions being raised in the House of Commons, where U.K. involvement was denied in an answer given to a parliamentary question posed by Richard Allan, Liberal Democrat MP.

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