Cool Zone Media.

Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff your Wednesday episode where you've already heard me introduce the guest and the episode topic.

I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy and my guest is Sarah Marshall.

Hello.

How are you.

I'm so good.

Thank you for having me again.

Yeah, I lost my train of thought.

I have a producer.

Her name is Sophie hy Sophie.

Last time I checked, Sophie catches the train of thought when it wanders away.

That's actually true and one of the nicest things about having a producer.

I also do this in all my friendships.

Oh interesting, that's true.

You are the institutional memory and the short term memory.

Uh huh, Sophie, did I tell you?

I was watching an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where they were like, I think, showing somebody around set and trying to introduce them to the producer, and the producer went, don't talk to me, I've got a big problem, and I was like, wow, that feels true.

You did because you were like and in that moment I thought of you.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't know what you do exactly day to day, but I know that every day thirty problems arise and you solve them, and then it is five o'clock.

Yeah.

I think that's a description of what Sophie does for a living.

Yeah, there you go.

And sometimes opportunity is just a duad stripper on your boat.

Or however that quote from thirty Ron.

Goes, Yeah, do not know the quote.

A lot of times people will be like, and you know, what's one of your greatest skills?

And I say problem solving, but like not in ironic way, like literally.

I mean it's like part of why I'm like kind of over doing everything DIY constantly as I'm like, whoa, what if other people working together makes a thing better and actually able to happen.

Kind of like indie media.

Oh that's true.

Oh shit, which is, by the way, this week's subject.

I know, I just producer the podcast.

You absolutely did.

The other person who's audio engineering, which is different than production but is related is Eva hi Eva hi Eva.

Our theme musical was written for us by an women.

This is part two about indie media, and it's a two parter, so it was the second half for people who are capable of doing that level of math, which is that the second part is the second half of the thing, so where we last left our heroes.

They had a lot of contexts, you know, like coming up with this big protest and they're like, you know, do we have to start from scratch and they said, no, we have context.

Margaret spent an hour explaining it to us, and then they said to themselves, well, then we should probably all work together.

Because indie media was from the beginning in international organization.

I was reading an interview with someone who is, you know, one of these journalists who had been a journalist since the sixties or whatever, who is At some of these first meetings, activist techies and journalists in Seattle were hanging out in the office space that had been rented by movement lawyers for the big upcoming protest, and they were talking to people from all over Latin America and Europe and Australia about how to launch indimedia dot org, which is more work of like launching a website than like, when I think of any website that I've launched, which is usually about fifteen years ago.

I was very prone to getting a bad idea and then going and registering a domain name and then like setting up three email addresses attached to it and then fifteen years later still be paying for those URLs.

I know that one.

Yeah, it's a truly universal problem, knowing everyone has.

Like two thousands experience.

Yeah, yeah, don't ask me about my steampunk erotica website.

And so first thing with the name Margaret Kiljoy on it that was published anyway lunderbus dot net.

Oh it was good.

Now as steamy punk dot net.

It's gone for really good.

That's good.

Yeah, shame, which means I missed gear rotica, but I like steamy punk better.

I like steamy punk better too.

So they set up indimedia dot org so that people could go and post to the news wire what was happening and break a sort of anticipated media blackout about it.

And realistically these protests ended up so big that it could not have been a true media blackout about it, but protesters in the US were pretty used to not getting coverage.

During the protests, one source says that they had two million hits on their website.

Another source says that they had two point five million hits every two hours, which is fundamentally a different order magnitude.

But I can understand people at the time not really knowing to ask or to understand the difference.

I know, and I actually find that the two point five million hits every two hours.

I would have thrown away the grandiose number as like I don't know how you do this, but like if I read multiple sources and one person like a thousand people came, and then the other one is like eighteen million people came and they destroyed everything, you know, and like you kind of go with the mean or like the mode on that one.

Yeah.

In this case, the two million hits was like a random pop article about it, just being like, oh, this is what it was doing.

The two point five million hits was like an academic paper that interviewed like seventeen participants and like had all of its shit.

So I trust that one in this case, So it's.

The opposite of one a man says he's six feet tall and he's actually five eight.

Yeah, But in this.

Case, the man says he's six feet tall and he's actually six foot five.

Yeah.

Great, wait, I'm going to tell you all something off mic anyway, now that you all have learned this wonderful, incriminating fact about me.

Yeah, it was great.

Yeah.

Indie media its updates were spread by mainstream media channels.

Basically, mainstream media channels are like, oh, this is actually a very useful source of information, thank you.

And the Independent Media Center as it was called, was physically located in a downtown office space that they shared with a bunch of other organizations, and every night the protest lasted about a week.

We did a two part about them recently.

They're very big and interesting, and every night they gathered updates from the previous night, and every morning they went to the local public radio station and broadcast out what they knew.

And part of the reason they were able to do that is because it's not really as much of a complete break from all other infrastructure as people might want to paint it.

Right, a lot of the IMC volunteers and organizers were journalists with real credentials who had been doing things for decades.

When you think about it, the idea kind of it gets into the sense of like not painting the protesters as human beings with like lives and jobs and experiences.

It's like part of sort of seeing them as an undifferentiated.

Mob totally, which is part of why it's always important for like, if you want to do a media narrative where you kind of talk trash on protest.

They're all unemployed, twenty three year old people, especially like white men.

You know, of course, like you make them us undifferentiated, but unemployed and young.

Yes, and there's you know that certainly exists because like young white guys do love drumming.

But there's so many old people at protests, and my very narrow experience.

It's true, there are a lot, and it's really heartening every single time.

Yeah.

So journalists went to the protests and they did shit that hadn't been done much before.

Like, for example, the first live stream video I've ever heard about was at this demonstration in nineteen ninety nine.

Someone took a heavy backpack.

I mean, I don't know the backpack was heavy before they did all this stuff to.

It, but you know, once the stuff was in there.

Yeah, they attached a camera to a laptop and then a nineties wireless modem that I had never heard of that I spent way too long reading about this afternoon called a ricochet.

Ooh riko, Yeah, he's irishcche.

Wow, exactly, that's what it was.

It wasn't spelled like the English word ricochet.

It was yeah, I'm so sorry.

In penance, you're gonna have to write more period romance heserratica under that now, yeah, I accept, all right, well that'll be the next closob Media book Club when you turn it in ahead.

But okay, but this sounds very heavy and incredible and like also very attractive.

Honestly, I'm attracted to whoever's wearing this.

Realize it's going out on a limb, but I'll say it.

No, that makes sense.

There's a specific vibe to radical hackers, you know, where like they have like some of the like hacker stereotypes, but they kind of judge it up a bit and like so tend to know how to like dress a little nicer, you know.

Well, and also I guess like figuring out like both being willing to figure out and to carry And I realized, you know, probably a lot of people worked on this and it was a team effort.

But like this.

Late nineties modem live stream is like just incredible honestly to think about.

It's like thinking about the Right Brothers.

Yeah, totally, totally the Right Brothers of showing people police violence basically.

Yeah, and they only streamed for sixteen seconds, but it changed everything.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, all of their backup batteries are forty five pounds, you know, live streaming from Kitty Hawk, Yeah, I mean a couple years later.

I used to go to demonstrations as a videographer.

Every single videographer had a runner attached to them where you would shoot onto video, onto tape, and then as soon as you were done, or if something real spicy happened, you give the video to the runner, who gets the fuck out of the protest man, so that if the police arrest you, because they would target people with cameras, they don't get the footage and the footage gets out.

Which is like the kind of thing that I feel like you as an American encounter in stories about other countries, you know, like that's the kind of thing that would be like an Oliver Stone's Salvador, and it's like, no, we do that, we do that too.

I know that story.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah.

I'm just excited.

I knew a pop culture reverence.

It is really not pop culture evidence.

It's an Oliver Stone movie from the eighties or nineties or whatever.

Oliver Stone is a pretty poppy.

Guy, you know, I'll take it.

I also love that it's like the most niche movie, you know, because like most people have not even heard of that one because it's a big downer.

But yeah, I loved that one.

And it's a movie about Robert Evans going to El Salvador exactly and smuggling out footage.

And also Jim Belushi is for some reason.

I love that it starts as like James Woods as this down and out we're a photographer and he's trying to get a job and he's like calling around trying to get sent to Al Salvador, and he's got just like a slug quarter that he's using in his like in the payphone in the lazy boarding house payphone.

Yeah, I just love that.

Yeah, Yeah, I'll watch any movie about a character who starts off using a slug and a payphone probably that's fair, right, And just like but that's the allure of this story too, right, where it's like the truth is out there, not in a paranormal X Files way, but just like, no, it's right there and people aren't talking about it and we could.

Yeah, And so they went out with this big old backpack and live streamed and.

Like one of the people secretly controlling an animatronic droid and Disney World.

Yeah.

Originally indie media was put together just for that protest, which is funny because it was a global coalition of people to put together the media for one protest.

But it spread like fire, with new cities and regions launching their own independent media centers all over the world.

Most of them centered around in indiemedia dot org site, so it's like an independent media center is like a form of a media collective.

But almost all of them, maybe all of them were affiliated with indiemedia dot org or it would be like Portland dot indiemedia dot org or Athens dot indiemedia dot org or whatever.

Yeah, and I feel like that was kind of like how websites worked in the nineties, where there would be like local iterations of like you know, different message groups and newsgroups and stuff, or like iterations of something by subject or you would get into these like subcategories.

Yeah, that's really interesting to me because it does show that this is like an iteration, not a like complete brand new thing, right m hmm, but it is this really important iteration in what the Internet could be.

And by the JENOA two thousand and one protests, that I'll likely be covering on the show at some point soon, and I'm going to talk about some horrible stuff that happened there later.

But indie media sites that covered the protest, we're getting five million hits every couple of hours, like people were looking.

And so there was this chant that I always hated.

The whole world is watching.

I hate most protest chants.

They just annoy me.

It's great people should chant I'm just a killjoy is literally how I got that name.

Just like you care, you have tasting chance?

Perhaps right?

Yeah, you wanna hear my favorite one?

Yes, I do.

This is at one point, this is the high point of my career as an activist.

At one point I got a black block of about thirty to forty people chanting, what do we want a free association of cooperative autonomous groups for the purpose mutual aid?

When do we want it now?

I like that.

That's the high points.

All downhill from there, except for me when I would carry around a boombox and play tango at demos because I was like bored of all the rage against the machine or whatever.

You know, well, yeah you do need to hear some like horny music.

Occasionally rather than angry music exactly.

So by two thousand and four, people say it peaked in like two thousand and four, two thousand and six with like one hundred and sixty five sites or whatever.

By two thousand and four, there's one hundred and forty of these around the world in thirty different languages.

Each one is maintained by a local collective.

They allowed people to coordinate with each other so that like people in Brazil could see what people in you know, some other place in the world.

Actually, the specific example I read about was like India and Brazil coordinating with each other by being able to look and follow each other's struggles, right, And it allowed people to coordinate with each other to see what was happening, and so they could compare notes and tactics and learn how to advance their causes.

And it really allowed people to be like, how do we organize protests?

But also how do we organize social movements?

And just like all of this shit, it was a I don't know, the big fucking deal.

Yeah, And also it feels like, you know, people in different countries being able to learn and from what was happening in places far away that they couldn't get information about using traditional forms of media previous to this.

Yeah.

Absolutely, And as much as we complain about the Internet, like that's pretty great.

I know, it's a real double edged sword.

The Internet and even the social media that indie media is going to create.

You know, when are we going.

To get some single edged swords?

That's what I would really like.

That's a good idea, like ones that only hurt the other person instead of you.

Yeah, once where you can just use it, you know, to like cut your meat.

Are you trying to say that the katana people who go to the gas station and buy katanas or the whatever mal Ninja SAIDs Are you trying to say that they have it right?

Because a katana is a single edged blade.

Maybe that is what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Or a machete as well, you know, very reasonable thing to have.

Yeah, that's true, I have one.

But is a machete a knife or a sword?

No, it's an agricultural tool.

Like a plow or a pitchfork.

Yeah, a site or all these other things that get used as weapons.

Anyway, before I decided to get pedantic incorrectly about machetes, most of these sites are long gone outside of the US, there are a bunch of sites that are still active and or ones that lasted for a lot longer.

A lot of those actually literally came down because of government repression and raids, but we'll talk about that later.

And any media collectives did all sorts of shit on top of just run these websites, although those websites are an incredible amount of both work and value.

Right the New York City Collective started the newspaper The Independent, which is still around as I understand.

In Portland, we had a video collective and we would film protests and make short documentaries and play them at video screenings around the city once a month, the main ones.

I remember at this pizza shop that I really liked that let us do them like kind of a hippieizza shop, and all of the different independent video journalists would come and we'd like get together and be like, Okay, this is what I have for the screen, this is what I have, and kind of did a YouTube before we could do it on the internet easily.

He goes do YouTube like one building at a time.

Yeah, that was totally to have to do.

Yeah, exactly.

You actually had to come out and it was nice because It was like a way to have you know, thirty forty people come and you talk about each of the videos afterwards, and it would be it would just be like some students took over their school for a day, or you know, the following strike is happening, or you know, whatever the thing is, and people would go out and make a five minute video and come and show it.

That is really cool.

Yeah, there is.

It feels like you were existing in this like middle ground between like you know, we have video and like camquorder technology and stuff, and we have this technology that makes it easier to produce this news media, but we still have to take it physically around and show it to people.

Right, totally, it would dumpster dive Blockbuster and get all the old VHS tapes and then dub over whatever it was with our videos and then like put them back in the cases and then like draw with sharpie on the cases and then give them away at the screenings and things.

It was fun.

Yeah, simpler times.

I say that as if like a bunch of people didn't get really badly hurt by police during this time, right, But you.

Know, but like it's uh that I mean, I don't know when I see like kind of adolescents today feeling nostalgic about sort of the Y two K era.

It's like, yeah, like some things are timeless or at least have been going on for longer than we like to think.

But there is just the you felt less overwhelmed back then, like people were bored.

I don't think anyone's bored anymore.

No one's been bored in like years.

We deserve to be bored.

I let my phone die on a regular basis these days.

This isn't so I'm very smart.

No, I don't recommend it.

I was like in a waiting room the other day and I was just like, my phone was dead.

The other person that was like hanging out with was like not there, And so I'm just like sitting in this waiting room being like I'm gonna read that magazine on them, Yeah, you know on the rack.

You know what I do sometimes is absolutely you know, just feel so out of step with this moment in time.

Is just like I'll take a walk and I won't be listening to anything.

I'll just be walking around looking at things, and it's just like, wow, when did we think that there wasn't enough entertainment in day to day life.

And at the same time, daily life gets boring.

And that's why you need podcasts.

Yeah, and there's a reason why we created this media and we had this longing to have strangers talk to us.

But also it's just like, don't listen to so many strangers that you can't ever hear what you're thinking.

Yeah, but you know what strangers people should listen to.

And you know what is timeless?

What advertising?

That's true, it's.

Actually not even particularly fundamentally different than it was twenty five years ago or on.

There even one hundred and twenty five.

Yeah, exactly, that's right by our snake oil.

We try to filter it out and we can't always.

We can use the box later, here's a bunch of ads.

You can do whatever you want, and we're back.

So the Independent Media Center in Chiapas, Mexico, which is the southernmost state in Mexico, the southern east southeast most state in Mexico, or the Zapatistas are based out of.

That's almost the word chips, But then there's two ways in there.

How my brain works, Yeah, totally.

They're working in an environment where most people didn't have computers.

So the indie media people there would take news from the international network and record it onto audio tapes and distribute it in person and play it on the radio.

In Brazil, folks would set up screens and public places, like with projectors out on the streets and they would play the news and have discussions about it, and they would pass around photocopy news sheets and like wheat paste them onto the walls, so you can like literally walk around and you're like, oh, there's the news.

It is wheat pasted onto the wall.

Do people still use wheat paste?

Is?

What's the status of wheat paste.

I haven't we pasted anything in a long time, but wheat paste is kind of interesting because it's I am not telling you to do or not do anything.

It's usually legal.

It's one it feels like crime, right, but it's usually legal to wheat paste.

Depending on what you're wheat pasting onto.

Do you buy it or can you make it out of?

Oh you make your flower?

Yeah, it's flower.

There's everyone has their own like recipes.

It's funny like one recipe that was distributed a lot included cinnamon.

I think that was added as like a troll move.

Yeah, but maybe you know it's just maybe it's nice when you're wheat pasting and you're like, m cinnamon.

I know, and it probably adds like this, like real slight brown patina to it.

Yeah.

See, it looks like when you would have to write like a fake historical document in the seventh grade and then dip it in coffee or something and.

We past it as basically paper mache.

For anyone who's curious, you can look it up.

It's real easy.

Don't whatever.

I'm not going to tell you to do or not do crime.

Yeah, who knows what you're going to do.

I don't know you.

Yeah, getting in trouble is a fake idea.

I've been thinking about that a bunch recently, where I'm thinking about how like when you're a kid, they're like, oh, that's like against the rules, and you slowly learned that against the rules is really different than against the law.

Yeah, you know.

And also that against the law is still you know, not really tied to any time lest fake idea, idea of justice or anything.

It's because sort of what's convenient for property owners at a given time.

Yep.

Totally another thing that an indie media did that I thought was pretty neat Indie media and Australia wanted to get news into prisons, so they would go and set up micro radio broadcast.

Oh oh gosh.

No, So they would set up little micro radio broadcast things right outside the prison walls and then play audio reports about what was going on in the world.

That's amazing.

I love that.

Yeah, that one.

I'm like, I really like that one.

There was always tension between the local collectives and the larger network because all of the local collectives are autonomous, right, and they're making their own decisions, including making their own like content moderation decisions for example, which means that there's a real different vibe between different indie medias, right.

They have mods essentially.

Yeah, and this is like kind of where mods come from.

I mean, like there's probably people moderating on like Slashdot and some other sites, but like.

But as a figure that's necessary to a social movement, yeah, maybe totally.

It's so interesting.

I would spend a decent chunk of my time sitting in front of a computer deleting shit and like getting a little mad with power, you know.

Yeah.

During the altar globalization movement, the like nineteen ninety nine to two thousand and three or so movement.

Most groups at the time, most activist groups would work on consensus decision making, where everyone had to agree for a decision to go through.

This is sometimes seen as one of the great weaknesses of this movement.

For example, in two thousand and two, there was an Illinois indie media that was a little bit more like They registered as a five oh one C three like nonprofit and they were a little bit more above board and a little less DIY and they managed to get a fifty thousand dollars grant from the Ford Foundation.

But the Indie Media Collective in Argentina and soon joined by others, blocked that from happening because of the Ford Foundation's ties to like capitalist and right wing politics.

And some folks thought, if we take that money, were just another nonprofit or whatever, like just an NGO.

Others were like, actually, if we had more money, this would help us stay true to our values, because then we would be a little bit less looking to kind of impress the right people.

You know.

Yeah, the eternal debate rage is on.

I know, I like literally don't know what they should have done.

I almost don't care.

That is the thing that happens the thing.

Yeah, it's like, well, you're gonna do one of these two things, so you might as well pick one.

Yeah, totally, And like, you know, I work, I work the job.

I work.

I am like, this would be a great adtivit time, but it's not time for ads, you know.

It's like, really blew it on that one.

Yeah, I know, I really, It's okay.

There's always a lot of good opportunities.

For the pivot, That's true.

It's ironically one of the most fun parts of the episodes.

It is fun.

Yeah, it's like you get to kind of like sneak up on the audience.

I feel like a gamble, but don't You're.

Like, you know, there was someone else who felt misunderstood, and that was the lord.

The footprints in the sand carrying you the whole time was the advertising dollars.

Yeah, exactly.

All along the way, indie media has faced repression, perhaps most famously and violently at the two thousand and one g eight like Group of Eight protests in Genoa, Italy.

The Group of Eight is eight like world leaders of the most powerful economies, plus Russia, because basically they were like, well Russia wasn't like the eighth biggest economy.

But they're like, but you got nukes, so like you're in you know, yeah.

We're afraid of you.

Come party.

Yeah.

Classic.

So the protest in Genoa, Italy where at a different time, and we talked about a different episode.

The cops shot and killed a young man named Carlo Giuliani for they were like in a truck and Carlo Giuliani was like chasing them with a fire extinguisher and so they shot and killed him, which is a totally normal thing for people to do anyway, whatever, I have strong feelings about this.

In two thousand and one G eight protests in Genoa, Italy, the police raid a school in the middle of the where the indie media volunteers and activist lawyers had been gathering and it was serving as like kind of a makeshift dormitory for a lot of people from out of town, especially indie media and lawyers.

And the police later were like, we got told that's where the black Bloc was, as if this would make it okay that they raided this school.

And it's funny because like no one died, but it's about as violent as you can get.

Without that.

There are photos of bleeding heads and blood stains on like the walls of the building.

There's like bloodstains on a radiator where someone had been bashed against it.

Jesus.

One man lost ten teeth after being used, like he says, as a football.

Sixty two people were injured.

More than one hundred and fifty cops stormed the place in the middle of the night.

Many of those who were arrested were forced to shout fascist slogans and sing fascist songs in jail by the police under threat of violence.

This cops love these surprise entrances.

You know, if you're so confident you should show up with an appointment.

Yeah, or like it was about eleven thirty at night.

I think this one.

In the US, it's like almost universally four thirty in the morning, huh, because it's like just the most vulnerable hour.

It's the most vulnerable hour.

It's the everyone's home and asleep and groggy.

See, this is why pilates girlies are gonna save us.

All.

They keep terrible hours because.

They're up at yeah, because they're up at four in the morning to get to their five thirty reformer class.

All right, all right, So so when the police comes serve a no knock Warren, the Pilates girlies war are gonna you know, they'll have hell to pay.

Yeah, at least wake everyone up.

Yeah, they'll be up shredding documents because they've been keeping pilates hours, assuming there's anything to shred, which there you know so often isn't.

But yeah, I feel like I have to make a joke about how eleven thirty PM is actually like, you know, since it's the Italian police, they like wanted to get to it first thing, and guess.

You know, after dinner the day got away.

Yeah, totally absolutely have espresso first.

No, this is fair.

I absolutely would go out to dinner when I was in Italy and then it would be like eleven thirty at night and be like can we go home now?

They're like, ah, we're still smoking and talking in a language you don't know tomorrow now, which is you know, not my fault that I don't speak Italian while I'm in Italy, but like not.

One of the ninety three arrested protesters in the raid was found guilty of anything.

There was two bottles by the front door, so they were accused of making Molotov cocktails and they just the state really wanted to get them and there was nothing.

The main way that you know, it didn't happen in the United States is that thirteen cops were convicted for their part in the violence.

Why that is the main way, isn't it?

Yeah?

Man, And it was the largest criminal investigation into police in the country's history.

And I think that implies that includes like fascist Well, of course during the fascist era didn't interrogate the police about anything, but like.

But any kind of post fascism attempts said, yeah, yeah.

Also, I imagine that a lot of people had you know, bottles by their door that night and were like, my god, it could have been me.

What's funny is every now and then, like cops will rate a place during an activist thing and be like one anytime there's a bottle, They're like, oh, they're planning to thromolotovs, despite the fact that especially in the States, like very very few people thromlotov cocktails here because of the way that our laws work and how the cost benefit analysis rarely works out on that one for people, and.

Because it's like assault with a deadly weapon technically or something like that.

Yeah, Like, uh, improvise munitions, and like there's just like all kinds of like mandatory minimum stuff.

As soon as you add fire or explosives to any crime in the United States, it's like kind of not worth it.

That's really good to know.

Yeah, yeah, so you have to change your evenings plans.

But the other thing that happens is that they always accuse people of like throwing piss.

This is this like ageless myth that protesters throw piss at police.

Okay, you know why I think they're saying this just off the top of my head, because the kinds of men who get into being like police or like I don't know, senators or whatever in the positions of power where you lie about this kind of thing, they all want to.

Have pissed throughout it them.

Yeah.

Probably that's why they have those jobs.

Yeah.

I have absolutely met anarchist professional doms who specifically have like high powered, like rich like CEO ish people.

Who are like who are like protest me, yeah, exactly, protest me so hard, tell me I'm a dirty capitalist.

Yeah oh yeah.

And I think one of the other reasons is that if you raid a makeshift dormitory in the middle of the night, there is urine and bottles in there.

That's true because there's guys in there.

Yeah, so you know, yeah, and there's maybe a limited number of bathrooms.

And even if there wasn't, there's guys in there and they drank beer.

Yeap, beer goes out, he goes in fair enough, honestly, So I don't think the bottles are full of piss.

I was just thinking about the myths that they constantly repeat.

Yeah, well, are this idea that like any normal thing that's done by a population you're trying to dehumanize to the public.

Is like you change it into like, yeah, they're doing it for like a scary, weaponized reason rather than a normal, everyday person reason.

Yeah.

Yeah, which I have to admit sometimes when they like raid a right wing person's house and they're like and check out this cache of arms and it's like five guns and a bunch of ammunition, and you're like, that's just gun owners in America, right, it doesn't mean anything, you know, Yeah, Like.

It's like, looks like this person's fixing to hunt quail.

Yeah, totally, they own an AR fifteen.

Like I think a hundred million people in this country, you know.

Like I mean, right, you kind of have to pick.

You can either have like rampant, fairly unchecked gun owner and a general you know, turning of a blind eye towards extreme gun violence and the whole thoughts and prayers template, or you can get upset about an activist owning five guns.

I don't think you get to have both.

Right, totally.

Yeah, and so one of the cops who was convicted of this raid said that they left the place looking like a quote butcher shop.

That's how Jesus Christ awful they were.

Yeah.

The worst is when they're I mean, I don't know in what spirit this was said, but the worst is when you have these accounts of police violence, and then, inevitably, in so many of these, you sort of hear the ways that they're sort of cheerfully celebrating it and feeling like really psyched about all the violence that they carried out.

I think this person was kind of trying to be like, ah, I'm good to lower my yeah you know, but yeah, but yeah, like very very in.

Other cases, Yeah, especially when you find like, you know, the secret Facebook that they're all in, which I feel like has happened in multiple of these.

By now, speaking of how the Internet has evolved that run decade anyway.

So another moment of police violence.

No Boy one of the more famous indie media journalists, both famous a little bit beforehand as a writer and an activist and then later because of his death, and so a man named brad Will, Bradley Will.

He was in some ways sort of the archtypical super activist anarchy guy from that era.

Like he just was, like you know, in his early thirties, mid thirties and traveled constantly, going everywhere and playing songs on acoustic guitar and like you can kind of imagine the man.

And he would spin fire and like go and try and live his best life and whatever, and he would produce independent journalism for indie media from everywhere he went.

And he filmed his own murder in Oha, Mexico in two thousand and six.

He went down there to report on the teachers uprising that'll one day be covering, and the federal police gunned him down while he was quite obviously armed with only a camera and with some other repression they faced.

European indie media sites lasted way longer than US ones.

There are a couple indie media sites around in the US still, I think.

But in twenty fourteen Bristol Indie Media in the UK was taken offline because the server was raided by cops who wanted logs.

Because indie media, like, if you have this open platform, right, people are going to post communicas on it.

So people are gonna be like, I smashed up the bank of the evil Man and here's my long poetic communica about why I am amazing or whatever.

I'm like, not even mad about it.

It's just that's the thing that happened.

Now.

It's just like if people have a lot of access to that, then different people will share different things and that'll be one of them totally.

And someone in Bristol burned on a police firearms range and then I believe wrote a communicate about it.

Kind of a victimless crime as long as nobody's in there, which is hard to doing sure, but still, yeah.

This is certainly fewer people will be well, you know they're already bad shots, but whatever.

And then in twenty seventeen, Germany like shut down linksuten dot indiemedia dot org, which was the main leftist organizing site in the country at the time.

Link Sutton translates to bottom left, which is a reference in this case to the lower part of Germany.

But it became all of Germany's indie media in a lot of ways.

And I think its name is probably also a play on being from the bottom in the left because of being like anti authoritarian left, and like the Zapatistas talk about being from the left and below a lot.

I also, and this is just I think important for everyone to know that if you type link sutin into Google Translate as link son and replace one of the t's, it means left wing horse.

And I was really impressed by the German left's audacity and that I double checked and it actually was bottom left, not left wing horse.

I like both of them.

I agree now they're both awesome.

I love left wing horn.

I just saying I still got no problem with the bottom left.

If I'm still making sexual references.

That's true.

It's a good quadrant.

So the cops shut down the site.

They rated three different places as relates to this, and they held all of its servers.

The site was banned, its logos were banned.

Germany has an understandable precedent for the ability to ban political logos, but I actually think This is an example of where that shit doesn't work, is that they're banning that.

And part of the reason they're banning it because the country was in a fight against left extremism, even though they have a specific Nazi problem and it was specific that.

The reason, as best as I can tell, the reason that the site was taken down that in twenty sixteen, someone released a DOS of everyone who went to the AfD convention the Nazi political party of Germany.

So if the docs is of three thousand people who went to that convention were released and AfD in case you're like, well, I don't understand where they sit politically, they are the political party in Germany that Elon Musk supports because he has fucking died.

Okay, yeah, he sure is.

Isn't it funny how Nazi used to be like an insult in the way that you would call someone a Nazi and they'd be like, hey, I'm not a Nazi.

Yeah, And now it's just a term's for people who are like, yeah, I'm a Nazi totally.

Although actually, when a bunch of Nazis docks me, I was like complaining about it on Twitter and one of them like replied on Twitter and was like, we're not Nazis, were Neo Confederates?

Oh brah, Like what wait, man, that might be worse.

I don't even know six of one honestly.

Yeah, you're like you're like great, still gross yeah off.

Yeah.

Also, if you're that upset about semantics and if you have beliefs that are the beliefs of Nazis, than like you might be a Nazi.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

No.

And it's like neo Confederate is like all right, look, you're gonna describe the two groups of people that are like the only time I can really clearly point to the American Army as the good guys in a conflict.

Yeah, you know, that's very true.

Both of those things were stopped by a river of blood.

As opposed to the Spanish American War.

Callback anyway, one of the main things that brought down the Link Sutton or Sutton, I don't know how to pronounce German either way, was that they were helping people coordinate protests, and that is like what indie media kind of started off doing, and so it was raided and shut down.

The FEDS of various countries, including the US, have been trying to raid and subpoena indie media since basically forever hoping to get IP addresses of posters and readers alike.

But the techies who run these sites are really smart, and so there's roadblock after roadblock when the FEDS try to get this kind of information.

Mostly, though indie media did not so much collapse, like it wasn't destroyed by the state, it became eclipsed by the things that it helped spawn.

And in order to talk about those things, I first want to talk about these goods and services that will just make everything okay.

If things are not okay in your life, you could consider listening to these ads and thinking, actually, my life seemed better before I listened to the ads.

I really was just like taking it for granted that I wasn't listening to ads, and then when they end, you'll feel so much better.

It's actually good for you to listen to these ads.

That's what I'm trying to say.

And we're back, all right.

The two things that indie media did change the world, besides the actual direct impact on protests, anyone can be a journalist, and that the Internet can be status updates instead of static pages.

It's so funny to me that this technical innovation is its like longest standing impact.

Yeah, it almost feels like the fossil that it left behind.

Yeah, totally.

But it also because you have the status update things, it means that the we we kind of talked about this earlier, a ragtag group of anarchists and radicals were some of the first people that have to sit around to be like, what the fuck do we do with all these trolls and Nazis and fake news and conspiracy theories and shit.

Makes perfect sense, honestly.

Yeah, And to deal with that question of like providing a sandbox for people and then having to get them to behave Yeah, totally, totally, and also to behave while breaking the rules.

Yeah, right, to like instituting rules on people who have come together for the sake of not having rules exactly.

Yeah, it's a tricky one.

Yeah.

And it does feel like, I mean, you're talking about being involved in this as like a young person, and it does feel like a frequently kind of like young person experience of like, oh, this is why societies are hard to run.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I feel like one of the things that's like aging with my politics is tempered about my politics is understanding that even some of the things that I'm against, I can see why some of those things were created.

Oh yeah, you know, like all these single use plastics.

Yeah, you know, or like I feel like we maybe have this in common where like when you're like a Mason jar millennial, or you save all your old spaghetti sauce jars and you repurpose them and it's great, but then one of them breaks.

I had like a week where I broke like two glass jars, and I was like, Oh, this is why we invented plastic, because this is like dangerous.

Actually I had this same experience.

There was like a week and a half where I broke glass at least six or eight times, and I was like.

It really breakable.

I was like, what in the world.

Sophie, Yeah, like celebrity deaths.

And then you're like, oh, plastic, if only I had a version of this that was softer and lighter and less likely to cut.

Meny and like, yeah, you get why certain things were done.

And sometimes things were done because it's like cheaper and they just want to exploit people.

And sometimes things are done for like more complicated or nuanced reasons and still might make things that are bad and need to be changed about society.

But it's like you see where they are, you know, and.

Right, some things are nice, yeah, you know, the tied hygienic clean laundry pods are nice.

Yeah.

And so people had to do their own content moderation and had to learn where limits are, and like have complicated conversations about free speech, right, And you know what is the difference between free speech and platforming?

Right?

Because you're like, well, I'm not saying that it should be illegal to have said what you said, and I'm not going to put you in jail, but I am the publisher of this website, and I don't want to publish it, you know, and.

We are no longer just like and I'm human, individual citizens, but like I am in a position of power, and I have to decide whether or not to share that power with you totally.

And what's awful is it's also kind of addictive even among anti authoritarian people once you give them a little bit of power.

Like the moderators we got kind of high on it.

You know, we're like, oh, well, we're the ones who decide what gets to go in you know, the ring of power is I am the law.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, And I'll be honest.

Overall, indie media websites were better at shutting down trolls and Nazis than they were at shutting down conspiracy theorists, because that is a problem that is without a political ideology.

That is a problem that you will find everywhere.

There was plenty of chemtrails content on Portland indie media, for example.

Yeah.

So yeah, there's some problems with conspiracy theorists within indie media and people being very certain that their position on a particular like global political thing is absolutely right and all of the other ones are wrong and impressive, which is sometimes true.

It's just hard to know.

It feels very human to want to find the one thing that unlocks everything else, and this idea of like it's this one conspiracy by this one group of scary guys, and you know, like sometimes there are conspiracies.

But the thing is that, you know, people who are conspiring tend to do so in a way that is, if not legal, then like you know, is enshrined within the protections that a corporation has or done by people who are you know, running a government because they were actually elected to it or at least to a lot of business with people who were rather than having a cabal inside of you know, some kind of architecturally specific impressive object.

It's like, we know who influences the political figures.

They're called lobbyists.

The industry's lobbyists, Yeah, constantly, and impact our politics constantly.

There's kind of a paper trail, but nobody wants to do anything about it.

You know, it's not like a secret.

Right, And then when like, oh, everyone's secretly a pedophile, we're like, yes, we all have seen about Epstein.

You know, like the conspiracies aren't what people think they are.

And it feels like people now of this spent are like everyone's secretly a pedophile except Epstein.

And it's like, wait, what, I can't totally except the pedophile.

It was fine, It's like you guys need to take pedophile recognizing classes, I would think, because this idea of you.

Know, yeah, okay, so indie media didn't collapse because of content moderation.

It didn't collapse because of government repression.

It was just rendered obsolete by itself.

Indie media now in place, you have all of these you know, early aughts, you have all these anarchisttackers trying to figure out all kinds of communication methods and changing the way the Internet works.

And the next development that comes along is called text Mob txt mob.

When the Democratic National Convention came to Boston in two thousand and four, people were like, all right, how do we get all these various groups of people streets to coordinate with one another, to outflank police and do all of this in a decentralized way.

And so the answer was this program, not an app because there's not smartphones, called text Mob.

It was developed by an MIT student and then someone from an anarchist think tank called the Institute for Applied Autonomy.

This is a group texting platform that worked on dumb phones and let people text groups and share information.

And they developed all kinds of technical shit behind it.

For example, at the time like text would be free if they were like converted to email, right, and.

God, I remember this, yeah yeah.

And so someone built a server where you could send an email to it and it would convert it to a text and send it out.

But it couldn't be just one computer because it would get flagged as spam by the mail carrier.

So Indie media stepped up to be willing to kind of like become a botnet for its own users, where basically, like if you logged into indie media, your computer would open it visible window, and your computer would be taking the emails and turning them into texts and sending them out.

I love that, and it decentralized itself to get around restriction.

During the Republican National Convention in two thousand and four in New York City, about four thousand protesters were using text mob.

I was there, but I sure didn't have a cell phone then, and so I did not use it.

Eventually, T Mobile shut down their entire phone system in New York rather than let protesters use their network to evade police.

Yeah, and text mob kept being refined.

In two thousand and five, there was this big immigrant strike on May Day and text mob provided communications.

And you can see how all of this is sort of going to lead to Twitter, right, Like this idea of people doing status.

Updates, right, I like trying to send a few sentences worth of information to a few hundred people.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can even see the character limits are in some ways coming from that.

Like early texts.

Yeah, because in.

Early text children there was a character limit, remember.

Yeah totally, yeah and yeah.

It would get split up into multiple texts and.

The worst was having to text.

This is what holds me back from getting a flip phone is the memory of having to text by like to get the letter CEO, had to press the number one three times to get to see you know, and then it would just take forever.

And it was like feeding Atamagashi.

Watching the people who were fast at it was like the first time I felt old when I was like, yeah, twenty four.

Well, it was like watching like a court stenographer or something.

Yeah, totally.

So they're not just conceptually linked in the media and text mob and Twitter.

It is more direct.

There was this new podcast startup, Odio, and it was trying to democratize access to media and it was inspired by indie media, and so they hired indie media text to work at odio.

Isn't that like the first person press of like Spanish for to hate.

I don't know it's odeo.

I think this one has an eye.

I don't know this is Spanish one o one come, but anyway, somebody knows.

Go on.

I'm sorry, no, it's all right.

And one of the people who got hired at Odio was the guy Rabble that I talked about earlier, and he's an indie media founder and soon enough he's looking to hire at Odio.

So first he tries to hire this anarchist moxy Marlin Spike, who later creates the app Signal, but he doesn't succeed at hiring Moxie.

So he hires a guy named Jack Dorsey who goes on to found Twitter, who wasn't an indie media person or anything.

And this is going to end up reversing.

Rabble is actually the first person hired by Twitter, so basically his old boss is hiring him.

Odio is going to do all this podcast stuff.

But then Apple added podcasts to iTunes in two thousand and five, and so they're like, all right, shit, we gotta do something different.

And so they're like, all right, well, what are we going to do?

They created Twitter in two thousand and six, with indi media people building a ton of the infrastructure like Blaine Cook, who is the lead technical architect of Twitter for a long time or of the beginning.

Originally Twitter was a bit more open source.

It would let other programs interact with it, with APIs and some of its anarchist employees who were like some of the architects of it, pitched a decentralized version of Twitter before its launch, which would have been a federated system instead of a centralized system.

This is kind of a little bit over my own head, but like I kind of understand it.

And according to that famous lefty rag Forbes quote, if launched on Groundhog Day two thousand and eight, when it was completed, that federation would have prevented Trump from obtaining such a powerful megaphone in the first place by giving users more control over their network, and it would have away some of the method by which powerful right wing or honestly just anyone saying weird fake shit would have been able to access this network.

It also goes on to say that it also would have removed the ability to ban Trump, or it would have made ways to get around it in other ways or whatever.

But someone else who worked at I believe worked at Twitter at this time, named Mark Attwood wrote quote, if this had taken off and it had worked, there would not have been a Zuckerberg.

There would not have been a Jack.

We would live in a fundamentally different world now.

It So it's this one moment where like three fucking I don't know how many people there where there's a picture and the picture of the like whiteboard with the like two programmers standing in front of a whiteboard describing the federated thing, and then the photographers credited.

So there's only three people I know about who are in that room.

And if it had gone differently, everything geopolitically would be This is just like a I mean, it's a butterfly moment, right, It's a butterfly flappiness wing moment, and I'm like fascinated by it.

There was a trend on tictok a few weeks ago about like the butterfly effect.

If I hadn't gone to this college, I wouldn't have met my boyfriend and we wouldn't be sitting in a rowboat right now.

And it's like, okay, but like that term means that, like, you know, a butterfly flaps its wings here and there's a monsoon in Sri Lanka or whatever.

Right, it's chaos theory.

It's the idea that like we can't imagine how much seemingly insignificant activities or how the outcome of something down the line is completely impossible to imagine, whereas if you're choosing a college to go to, you kind of know that a lot of how your life is going to go after that hinges on, right the choice you make, which I get, I realize, is me being maybe like unnecessarily school marmish.

I mean the strangers on the internet, but I.

Care about them.

I want them to have the pleasure of being correct.

That is the best Yeah, totally, Uh, the school arm that's working for you, you know, yeah, yeah, because like if you went to a different school and it caused or stopped a genocide, that.

Would be the same scale, right.

Or it's like, you know, imagine if I hadn't eaten that chocolate chip cookie that sent me to the er where I met my best friend in the waiting room.

Like that's a real butterfly effect thing where you're like, wow, you don't realize how big the seemingly little things can become, which I feel like is what you're talking about here, where it's like, well, it's just apps, like who cares?

And it's like, yeah, but these apps are going to shape how people communicate and therefore what gets communicated.

And we can point to specific things around it.

Right if there hadn't been a Zuckerbe in these moments in time.

Yeah, so Twitter ended up doing what Twitter ended up doing, and it was still pretty useful for a long time.

It was famous at first for its ability to allow protesters to out maneuver police.

Right.

The first person arrested for tweeting in the US was accused of using the service to announce the location of police to protesters in Pittsburgh at an anti G eight demonstration in two thousand and nine, and like basically, yeah, there was like people kind of go Pittsburgh, I know, I know, right, and the cops rated a hotel room and like grabbed computers, and we're going to accuse this person of like coordinating everything by using Twitter.

Thank god.

That protest is actually why I joined Twitter.

I wanted to look at a phone and learn where the cops were.

Oh shit, so cool.

Yeah, there you go, that's the future working for you.

I know.

I was really sad when I finally like actually deleted my Twitter because it's just not Twitter anymore.

It's just actually gone.

And it was like joined two thousand and nine a.

Place where cops can find you.

Yeah, exactly.

This use case of people using it to organize demonstrations is of course more famous with Arab spring.

To quote Harry Halpin and rabble again from a paper I quoted a while ago.

Quote the tools that have been pioneered by a relatively small amount of protesters as part of the anti globalization movement were now able to be used by everyone, including those in the global South that needed the most, having more important things to tweet about than even Twitter expected.

And then you know, in twenty twenty, Jack Dorsey band Trump from Twitter, so Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now it's a fucking nightmare, massive grifters and ai slop like the rest of social media, but in this case it's run by a literal cicale Nazi.

But newspapers dot com it's still fun, just for fun.

The way to go from indie media to podcasting is that podcasting is a combination of two things, the ability to upload an MP three file and the ability to have that get sent out over an RSS feed, a technology first explored by indie media.

Weha, thank you daddy.

Yeah, I know right, I'm like the weird smaller butterfly effect is like, and that's how I feed my dog every day.

Literally right, And also that if you're like a right wing podcast or the joke's on you because what you're doing only exists because of protest movements that drove the need for that technology in order for it to get developed.

Yeah, totally.

And that's how a bunch of rabble, including a guy named Rabble, reinvented the Internet, and then how capitalism and fascism have tried really hard to recuperate it, and everything's a mess.

And you can't say a technology in this case is inherently good or bad, but people sure used it for good and are using it for bad.

Yeah.

You know, what I was thinking the other day was that, like, people will just always shock you both ways, and that's kind of the constant, is that, like people will always shock you with how awful they can be, and they'll also always shock you with how amazing and resourceful and kind they can be, and you just have to prepare to be shocked all the time.

Yeah, totally, that's my story I got for you.

I loved it how our job is because of this.

Podcasts are it's such a funny journey of technology, right, because I remember when podcasts seemed like something for weird people.

To be weird on right, where like this kind of lineage felt more baked into the way people saw them.

And now over time they've become like, you know something where corporations and advertisers and people trying to you know, continue their careers see a lot of money and a lot of potential for all of the sort of sexy mainstream media accouterments that they originally had nothing to do with.

Basically, it's such a funny thing to see something that technically is just like a medium for information, like go through several phases of life and we'll just keep talking and keep seeing what happens.

No, totally, and it's like, I find it really interesting that both things still exist.

In podcasting, you.

Know, right, there's still so much counterculture and podcasting.

I work on this podcast and I work on a DIY podcast called Live Like the World Is Dying.

You know, both reach people, and they reach people in different ways, and it is kind of interesting because it's still I guess it's like when you democratize media, that doesn't kick out mainstream media, it just makes it accessible to other people as well, and then it becomes a question of like who can get ears, you know, and it's easier to get ears with an institutional power behind you, you.

Know, yeah, or with just kind of like the support that offers or the promise that it will, you know, be something that people can connect to something else that they like or something they already know.

But it's also just I don't know, is the fact that there is still space for people to just try stuff out, or that the barrier to entry remains.

So oh, I do love that because we really did lose Twitter, like that was a place where we used to get to exist and that place is gone now.

But there's still so much space in podcasts.

Yeah, is that all the past is a different country thing?

You know, it's just different.

That is not the world we live in anymore as the world of our Twitter or whatever.

Well, if people want to hear your podcast or hear anything else you do, how can they do that?

Yeah, you can listen to your wrong about and I mean I think you can find it anywhere you get podcasts.

Maybe there's a place where you get podcasts that doesn't have it, But then I don't know, I can't help you with that.

You can figure it out, but yeah, listen to it.

We talk about recent history and you know, a lot of what you and I are talking about today just people trying to do good in the world despite overwhelming odds, and people getting in trouble and people making bad choices.

But when you think about what they've been through, maybe it kind of makes sense that they thought that was a good idea at the time.

Yeah, and I'm just so happy to be here and thank you again for having me on.

What an amazing I don't know.

I love to meet the cool people with you.

Thanks you for letting me do it.

Yeah, You're welcome on anytime.

If I have anything to plug, I would say I want to plug that getting in trouble is a fake idea, and that everyone should take their own risk analysis into consideration, and that there's an entire gulf between what's the law and what's right and people should try and figure out what's right and then make their own risk assessments around that.

And Sophie, you got anything you want to plug?

Where sunscreen, pet a dog or if they want you to pet them cool onemedia dot com.

Corn we're sunscreen on your eyelids too.

Don't figure out your eyelids and the and your feet.

Don't forget your.

Feet and your ears.

Yeah, I don't put sunscreen any of those places.

I will have to address how I do this.

It probably goes on my eyelids because I wear moisturizers the way I do my soundstaf.

You know, my face.

No one ever gets at one hundred percent, but we keep trying.

Yeah.

And if you are like, well I wear sunscreen, that's in my makeup.

You're not wearing enough sunscreen.

Good to know.

Yeah, all right, Well, talk to you all next week.

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