Please submit your own comments on the last year, remedy the gaping holes in the review of events, other signioficant deaths, favourite article, books etc. whatever, alcoholic existential ramblings....
"Instead of an Almanac..."
Hydrarchist
Okay so this is addressed to you, and that means:
sho, lunacharsky, malatesta, pde, olly abbot, A cheeba, Daaaaih Looong, mobiustrip, pvh, tiliting, NMPW, antiproperty mxyzptlk, sark han T, nolympics, ducasse, praxcologer, MRGIMP, worldrevolt, shoplift, billydub, dureevital, mr oblivion, albamuth, mobiustrip44, grumpy, who have made comments when logged in as well AWM, Phuq Hedd and Chuck0 who never log-in but always sign their contributions. Also for La Citta Invisibile and Rekombinant who run RSS boxes to our headlines.
Here's the stats: there were 845 stories and 545 comments. So the difficulty in being participatory, rather than modelled on a traditional broadcast model, is plain. The following panoramic view of the site's activity makes no claim to cover all of the salient events of the year; many things are missing, notably commentary on the US's financial scandals, news from the social and economic earthquakes of Uruguay and Brazil, and commentary that would do justice to the fight in Israel-Palestine, just to name a few. In fact, the value of this summary lies in the lacunae revealed. Nonetheless it reflects the interests of the site's administrators and users, mirrored in the subject matter of the popular stories posted, those which generated discussion (still all too few) and those that decisively more readers than the rest.
January
Toni Negri continued to make waves and his essay Ruptures Within Empire, Power of Exodus, interview about the World Social Forum and address at La Sapienza University drew much attention and some comment. Later that month, partially due to a supposed generosity and perhaps due to fictitious fears, the World Economic Forum took place in New York instead of Davos, and we were there. The demos were noteworthy for the absence of NGO and liberal elements such as Global Exchange and the Ruckus Society, who made themselves scarce, preferring instead to go to Porto Allegre. Ten thousand or so people demonstrated under heavy police surveillance, would-be black blockers were attacked and the 19 year old webmaster of "Raise The Fist" was arrested. nonetheless, the public display of dissent cracked the curtain of self-censorship that engulfed the city after September 11th, and the Stars and Stripes was to be seen once more burning in the street.
We published an expose of the Stalinist front ANSWER/IAC that set not a little blood boiling, few disputed the facts although many disliked Kevin Coogan's style or parroted empty calls for unity. Argentina, meanwhile, continued to change governments like underwear and comrade Polo provided an interview with Eduardo Galleano on the subject.
February
Alongside Argentina as a recurrent theme all year was the Black Block. These brothers and sisters came in for a lot of stick, with critics arguing that in the post September 11th US their militancy could be easily misunderstood (?!). Others said that they were too easily manipulated by cops or provocateurs. Even where these attacks rang terribly true however, no alternative model of direct action was proffered, and the weakest aspect of this criticism was that it tended to capitulate to liberal forms of political action in the name of 'tactics' or 'unity.'
Indymedia had a difficult month, what with a lawsuit against the Swiss affiliatedue to anti-semitic postings on the open newswire and the raids against different sections of the Italian movement, in the search for evidential goodies that could help lock people up for Genoa. In the torrid land of discourse however Wage Slave X's "Marxist Critique of anti-globalization activism"raided many a hackle.
March
Louis Proyect took a swipe at our holiness Bakunin to get the month off to a bad start. The debate over Empire rolled on with contributions from the platformist Andrew Flood, Rob Los Ricos, etc. Michael Hardt declared himself for Barbarism (who isn't these days?) and and did an interview in Germany, whilst Jim Davis released a broadside against the theory and practice of Non Governmental Organizations, this last piece being extracted from the fine volume "The Battle of Seattle and the New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization", published the month before.
The despondent received another injection of justification at the end of March in the form of the Israeli invasion of the West Bank and the surrounding of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. We published New Yorker Kristen Schurr's first hand report on events and a predictable flame war ensued, some reasoned exchanges were also present, but Israel/Palestine, anti-semitism/anti-zionism continued to be concepts that gave readers trouble. Not that Autonomedia was alone in this, as readers of Indymedia were to be reminded daily.
April
... was the month where the Middle East kept all minds honed on the reality of Apocalypse. Sharon came to Washington, and was duly protested by Palestinian partisans. Fighting escalated, conflict between the PLO and Hamas sharpened. Israeli troops entered Jenin and were fought street by street by fighters from Islamic Jihad. The numbers killed remain massively disputed, but as usual palestinian casualties far outnumbered Israeli, many of the former being civilians. US aid was refused by the camp's residents in protest against connivance with the Israeli regime. Jenin was to provide another story in December, when a film outlining the case that human rights violations had taken place there was censored by the Israeli government.
Elsewhere, the coup everyone expected was finally attempted: against Chavez in Venezuela, but after a few hours on the ropes his supporters retook the streets and the arrested the leaders of his opponents. Media coverage of Venezuela came in for some critical scrutiny as it was remarked that there was coverage only of anti-Chavez movements and no indication that in fact there was a significant counter-movement. thus, mainstream news hawks got something of a surprise when the situation produced an abrupt u-turn Indymedia on this occasion proved itself a very useful tool, alas the persistent manipulation of the open newswire throughout the year sorrowed these moments of unarguable success.
May
To mark workers' day, or the Festival of No-Work as we call it in Italy, we republished Peter Linebaugh's cracking "The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day" and everybody loved it, although one or two wanted more anarchist detail. A week later appeared the first detailed english account of the Berber rebellion in Algeria that had started almost a year previously. During a period defined by the demonization of the peoples of the Arab World and Middle east as fundamentalist psychos, it was revealing how little interest there was in discussing this secular rebellion. Michael Hardt did another interview, this time on 'new forms of power'.
June
The start of summer marked a slowdown on the forum and a decline in the number of visitors. There was however the useful and powerful project 'They Rule", highlighting the incestuous relations of corporate america and rendering monopoly capitalism visible in glorious pixelation.
July
Deadly quiet, except for the anniversary of Genoa and the murder of Carlo Giuliani, which brought out 150,000 people to mark passing of time. Wu Ming felt it was a Little Secular Miracle but some of the Genovese anarchists were disgusted by the spectacle.
August
At last squatters in New York's Lower East Side got a deal after nearly fifteen years. All the downtown houses except one accepted the deal, but this did not stop a bit of a spat breaking out over the deal, with allegations of sell-out etc bandied about. Toni Negri returned to our pages with his interview about Paolo Persichetti an Italian exile in Paris arrested and extradited back to jail in what had looked like a free gift of friendship between the newly installed French right-wing government and the Berlusconi regime. Argentina continued to burn with many actions by the Piqueteros and the first national meeting of the occupied and self-managed factories.
September
The judge Garzon banned Batasuna in the Basque Country and sent out the booted ones to forcibly shut down their bars, halls and offices, but we didn't cover it.
Negri once again soaked up attention with his essay on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'Thousand Plateaus" and his 'The Imperialist Backlash on Empire. In the meantime I dug out essay by George Caffentzis from Midnight Notes that expressed skepticism on the predictions of the disappearance of work and the emancipation of humanity by capitalist technology, called "The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery". Still on technology, Danish police raided the owners of servers on the E-Donkey peer to peer sharing network. Those raided were later presented with bills for their downloads, pricing each movie at $60 with the promise of criminal prosecution if payment wasn't forthcoming. Copyright owners displayed more innovation in this repressive strategy than in the entire life-time of the file sharing networks.
'Discussion' exploded in September around the now notorious Amiri Baraka's 'Somebody Blew Up America'. Suffice it to say that it established a new record of 53 comments, but the quality was not exactly consistent.
October
Autumn brought discussion on sharing around an essay by Richard Barbrook ("Giving is Receiving") and a biographical piece by David Graeber on Marcel Mauss, author of the classic 'The Gift'. The Arab Surrealist Manifesto Against the War & the State was issued. October 16th saw some novel worker militancy in MacDonald's franchises worldwide where for a day insubordination took an open face, money was stolen from tills, walk-outs staged and shirking systematized - in short, MacDonald's Workers Resistance Day. European militants and thinkers warmed themselves up for the founding meeting of the European Social Forum in Florence and we published an insightful piece by Jamie King on the matter (written originally for the excellent Mute) that turned out a rather accurate prediction of how things were to unfold. The parting shot of October was Richard Stallman worrying 'Can You Trust Your Computer' and readers flocked to the site to pick it up.
November
Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider got the month off to a sharp start with their critical discussion of tactical media and digital multitudes.. Meanwhile Florian was rigging up his mobile satellite dish down at the Euraction Hub parallel space to the European Social Forum. Attendance at the latter far outstripped expectation's with over 55,000 people registering for the discussion and lectures and somewhere around a million present for the closing demonstration against the war in Iraq. Despite being on their best behavior for Florence however, the Italian movement was not to be spared the predations of the state, as twenty activists from the souther No Global Network were arrested and charged with subversive association with the end of impeding government and sabotaging the global economy(!). Large mobilizations followed and the accused were released pending trial by early december.
Theory-wise the Toni Negri maintained his iron grip over the discussion, and his "Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitudes" drew the punters. In order to correct this rather star-obsessed take on italian theory, I dug up some Paul Virno and particularly his "Virtuosity and Revolution, The Politics of Exodus" but it hardly raised a whisper in comparison. Hakim Bey, meanwhile, pondered ontology of another hue in his considerations on "The Ontological Status of Conspiracy Theory". On a technical note we reviewed the very useful site KNOW-DUMP - providing proprietary database cracks - that exists purely in FreeNet-Space where it cannot be censored. The virtue of such a quality was to become apparent shortly thereafter.
December
Autonomedia, Interactivist & Friends felt the sharp edge of the copyright regime in December when our host The Thing was shut down for fifteen hours by their upstream provider Verio. Events unfolded as follows. The comrades from RTMark released a press release in Dow's name stating that they could not admit liability for Bhopal because of their commitment to maximizing shareholder value (Dow had taken over Union Carbide whose plant poisoned and murdered twenty thousand people). They also did a parody site. Dow contacted Verio with a warning under the DMCA, and Verio subsequently shut down the Thing altogether. Verio then said that they were going to break the contract and gave The Thing sixty days to make alternative arrangements. This is a problem for us. We already went through one collocation move in January surfing the wave of dotcom gratuity ceased to be an option. We must support the thing and revenge ourselves.
But more seriously, no sooner and Francesco Caruso and the Rete No Global Activists been released than the prosecuting magistrate in Genoa ordered the arrest of twenty three individuals for offenses allegedly carried out during the riots that surrounded the meeting of the G8 there in 2001. Many of them languish in jail, victims of wars past. Students at the New School in New York got in touch about them confronting their boss Kerrey about the war to come.
Thomas Seay continued to bang out quality translations, this time from Toni Negri's new book of interviews in French, 'B as in Red Brigades' and "E as is Empire". Michael Hardt flummoxed us in the Guardian where he appeared to be advising international against atavistic capital, and then we all were reminded about the story of competing and conflicting capitalist factions, and that made it alright. Anyway, the argument was elsewhere as a piece was fraudulently (mistakenly) attributed to Subcommandante Marcos where he lambasted Anarchism. Nonetheless the controversy generated one of the better discussion of the year and could have gone on much longer, in many directions, but for the interruption of Christmas.
As the month closes we're still wondering if René Riesel will go to jail for his sabotage GMOs with Jose Bove, still celebrating Elcomsoft's acquittal in the first criminal prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and wondering how to get even with Dow .
Our Own
The wider Autonomedia circle had another busy year. Hakim Bey wrote on Conspiracy Theory and reviewed a book on Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory. Peter Lamborn Wilson was interviewed by Sakhra-l'Assal. The Critical Art Ensemble mainitained their absurd levels of productivity with their fifth volume published with us Molecular Invasion (see McKenzie Wark's review).
Active as ever, Midnight Notes co-authored their address to the putative anti-war movement "Respect Your Enemies", whilst George Caffentzis penned "9/11 and the Reichstag Fire" and "The Political Economy of the War On Terrorism'. P.M., designer of the practical utopian masterpiece Bolo bolo wrote a fantastic essay entitled "Suburbia or Global Communities?". Bill Weinberg dedicated himself to being a sentry for truth chronicling of the post 9-11 fallout and the shadow-zones of the war on terror at World War 3 Report.
Kevin Coogan, author in 2001 of the superb 'Dreamer of the Day - Francis Parker Yockey and the Post-War Fascist international, executed a lethal take-down of the Act Now To Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.) coalition, exposing them as the Stlianist loopers that they are. He followed this up with another investigative essay on a key figure of Islamophile Europe, the Swissman Achmed Huber.
Geert Lovnik's new book "Dark Fiber"came out in October with MIT (read Bifo's review of it here or another by McKenzie Wark).
The long awaited Chicago Surrealist Group came out chronicling twenty five years of dissent, you can read reviews by Louis Proyect and Maurice Nadeau. A new collection of essays "Revolutionary Writing, Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics, a collection of essays on "Open Marxism: Subversion and Critique, The Insurrection of Labor and Global Capital, and The Critique of the Political" closed out the year's schedule for Autonomedia.
The humble hydrarchist knocked out a couple of translations. Ruptures Within Empire, Power of Exodus in collaboration with the great Thomas Seay, an interview with anarchist bank robber Horst Fantazzini (who died last tear in jail after being arrested yet again, now in his sixties) and an interview with an activist from the Hacklab movement in Italy; there were one or two other things as well, but that's the interesting stuff.
Deceased & "Retired"
French critic Pierre Bourdieu, author of "Distinction - a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" popped his clogs in January. Near the ides of March came the turn of Irish anarchist, storyteller and black-humorist Sean McGuffin to depart into the big blue, to be followed within weeks by english psycho-geographer and onetime situationist Ralph Rumney. No further deaths were noted on our pages until October when a collaborator of Autonomedia's John Moore dies of a heart attack whilst running for abus.December, when anti-war activist Philip Berrigan died. The only rock star to grace our columns this year was Joe Strummer, ex-front man with the Clash and political artist, he was just 50.
Two murders also attracted attention. First that of Italian labour ministry bureaucrat Biagi, apparently clipped by the "Red Brigades" although some allege it to be more likely part of a resurrected strategy of tension a la 1970s. Then in May a conscientious ecologist in the Netherlands judged the time opportune to give Pim Fortuyn, the xenophobe demagogue of Rotterdam, one in the neck.
Booby Prize
Several readers have nominated Luca Casarini's Letter to the EZLN as the most pompous and laughable article of the year. You can maker your own mind up on that, but I though the accolade should go to Laura Corraldini for her "Black Bloc - The Ultimate Logo ", if only for one of her opening paragraphs:
The first reason why I am undertaking this uncomfortable task -- as an intellectual and as an activist -- is that I believe Freedom Fighters should always seek the truth, by any mean, at any cost: it is an important pre-condition for anybody who want to be active part of real social change. Coherence is never sold for cheap".
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